DATE=4/11/02

TYPE=INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=MULLER-HAMDI

NUMBER=3-128

BYLINE=TOM CROSBY

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

INTERNET=

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INTRO: The Justice Department says it will not charge an American prisoner captured in Afghanistan five-months ago. It is not clear if Yaser Esam Hamdi was fighting for Afghanistan's deposed Taleban government or for the al-Qaeda terrorist organization...but it is clear he was born in the southern U-S state of Louisiana. Although born in this country...Yaser Esam Hamdi has spent most of his 22-years living in Saudi Arabia.

Legal analyst Eric Muller tells V-O-A News Now's Tom Crosby this leaves government lawyers with something of a dilemma as they try to figure out if they can now charge this detainee under U-S military law:

MR. MULLER: They have a big dilemma on their hands. They have somebody who they seem now to be conceding is an American citizen in custody, not being held on the basis of any charge. And American law requires that a person be brought before a magistrate and informed of charges within 48-hours of their arrest. So the clock is ticking, if it has not run out long ago, and it is really not clear what they can do with this fellow.

MR. CROSBY: In fact, if they go the military route, many of the same things apply there, too, about how he can be charged and when he can be charged?

MR. MULLER: Yes. It is generally true that the American military justice system corresponds quite closely to the civilian justice system. There are some differences in the structure of the trial, but the general rules, the timing rules and so on, the rules of notice, all of that is very much overlapping with the system that we use in our civilian courts.

MR. CROSBY: Does it surprise you at all that the government finds itself in this situation right now, that they were not better prepared for it?

MR. MULLER: What surprises me is that it reached the point that they actually had to disclose it publicly. I imagine, and from what I have managed to read, this young man quite clearly spoke English very well from the outset and maintained for a long time that he was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I think it was. And apparently it just took the government a long time to actually track down a birth certificate on this guy and confirm that his story was accurate.

It seems to me that it would have been much easier for the government simply to let this guy go months ago, as they have done with a number, many of the people, that they initially held at Guantanamo, rather than to hold onto him and hold onto him and hold onto him. Now they have held onto him this long, to discover that he is actually an American citizen, that had consequences. They then needed to bring him to the United States. They needed to treat him really in a way corresponding to the way they are treating John Walker Lindh, also an American citizen captured in similar circumstances.

So, it seems to me that if they had some serious concern about this, it would have been a lot smarter for them just to let the guy go months ago.

MR. CROSBY: There is another option, that being they could return him to Saudi Arabia, where he has lived most of his life.

MR. MULLER: That is correct. And from what I have read, advocates for him are not crazy about that idea, because they fear that he will be mistreated in Saudi Arabia now that his affinity for the Taliban and/or al-Qaida has been publicly revealed. Some people believe the Saudis have been quite tough, maybe illegally tough, on terrorism suspects in Saudi Arabia. So, it is not clear that that is what he wants, but that is another possibility that is being floated.

HOST: That is legal analyst Eric Muller, a law professor at the University of North Carolina. He was talking with V-O-A News Now's Tom Crosby.

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