In the spring of 2002, the US military learned that one of the men it had flown to Guantanamo Bay was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Yaser Esam Hamdi had left the United States as a small child and grew up in Saudi Arabia. In late 2001, Northern Alliance forces captured him in Afghanistan and handed him to American troops. Once his birthplace was confirmed, the military moved him to a Navy brig in Norfolk, Virginia, and later to another in Charleston, South Carolina. He faced no charges, had no lawyer, and had no end date.
Veterans Day is mostly about the people who served, and rightly so. The holiday began as Armistice Day, marking the end of fighting in the First World War on November 11, 1918. It also raises a quieter question that every American war has forced: what happens to the rules at home while the country is fighting abroad? Draft laws, loyalty programs, internment camps and military detention have all tested how far the Constitution bends in wartime. Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) is one of the clearest modern answers.
The question in Hamdi was simple to state. Can the President hold an American citizen as an "enemy combatant" for as long as a war lasts, without giving him any real chance to argue that the government has the wrong man? On June 28, 2004, the Supreme Court said the President could detain him, but not on those terms.
A citizen in a Navy brig
Hamdi's father, Esam Fouad Hamdi, went to federal court in Virginia in 2002. He filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, the centuries-old procedure that lets a prisoner make the government explain to a judge why it is holding him. Because his son was held incommunicado and could not file himself, the father filed as his "next friend", a legal term for someone who brings a case on behalf of a person who cannot. The father said his son had gone to Afghanistan to do relief work, not to fight.
The government's answer was a short sworn statement from a Defense Department official, Michael Mobbs. It said Hamdi had been affiliated with a Taliban unit and had surrendered with a rifle. The government argued that this was enough. In its view, deciding who is an enemy combatant is a military judgment, and courts should accept it as long as there is some evidence behind it.
The district judge was not satisfied and wanted to see more. The federal appeals court for the Fourth Circuit reversed him. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Fourth Circuit held that because it was undisputed that Hamdi was captured in a zone of active combat in a foreign country, no further factual inquiry was needed. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
Eight justices said no, in three different ways
The Supreme Court Database records the result as 8-1. That number hides how divided the Court was. No single opinion won a majority, so the outcome came from three separate groups of justices who agreed on the result for different reasons.
The plurality. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for four justices: herself, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer. They addressed two questions.
The first was whether the President had legal authority to detain a citizen at all. A 1971 federal statute says no citizen may be detained by the United States except under an Act of Congress. The plurality found that Act of Congress in the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which Congress passed a week after the September 11 attacks. That resolution let the President use "necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible. The plurality reasoned that detaining enemy fighters for the length of a conflict, so they cannot return to the battlefield, is a basic part of waging war. It relied on Ex parte Quirin (1942), in which the Court had allowed the military trial of Nazi saboteurs, one of whom claimed American citizenship. Citizenship, the plurality said, does not stop the government from treating someone who took up arms against the country as an enemy combatant.
The plurality kept that authority narrow. It covered a person who was part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States in Afghanistan and who engaged in armed conflict against the United States there. It also lasted only as long as the relevant conflict. The plurality added that if the fighting turned into something unlike the wars that shaped the traditional law of war, that understanding might not hold.
The second question was whether Hamdi could challenge the facts. Here the plurality turned against the government, and O'Connor wrote the line the case is remembered for: "We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens." The "long since" pointed to Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), where the Court stopped President Truman from seizing the nation's steel mills during the Korean War.
Souter and Ginsburg. Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg went further than the plurality. They read the 2001 resolution as too general to authorize holding citizens, so they thought the 1971 statute forbade Hamdi's detention entirely. They would have ordered him released. Because that view did not have five votes, they joined the plurality's judgment so the Court could send the case back with at least some protection for Hamdi.
Scalia and Stevens. The sharpest objection to the government came from an unusual pair. Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice John Paul Stevens, dissented. In their view, the Constitution gave the government only two options for a citizen accused of making war on his own country. It could charge him with a crime such as treason and try him in court, or Congress could formally suspend habeas corpus. A judge-designed hearing was not one of the options. They drew on Ex parte Milligan (1866), the Civil War case that rejected military trials of civilians where the regular courts were open.
Thomas. Justice Clarence Thomas was the only justice who would have upheld the detention as it stood. He argued that the war powers belong to the political branches and that courts lack the information and expertise to second-guess the military's judgment about who is an enemy.
So eight justices rejected the government's claim that it could hold Hamdi on a short affidavit with no real way for him to respond. They disagreed about what should replace it.
What process a citizen is due
The Fifth Amendment says no person shall be deprived of liberty "without due process of law." Due process means fair procedures: the government has to give you a real chance to be heard before it takes something important from you. The question is always how much process is enough.
To answer it, the plurality used the balancing test from Mathews v. Eldridge (1976), a case about cutting off disability benefits. That test weighs three things: the private interest at stake, the risk of getting it wrong under current procedures, and the government's interest, including the burden of extra procedures. The plurality noted that the private interest here was about as weighty as it gets: freedom from physical detention by one's own government. The government's interest in not giving away military secrets or pulling soldiers off the battlefield to testify was also serious.
Balancing them, the plurality held that a citizen held as an enemy combatant must receive:
- notice of the factual basis for his classification;
- a fair opportunity to rebut the government's factual claims; and
- a hearing before a neutral decisionmaker.
The plurality also said what this did not require. The process did not have to look like a criminal trial. Hearsay evidence could be allowed. The government's evidence could even be presumed accurate, as long as the detainee had a fair chance to overcome that presumption. The plurality suggested that a properly run military tribunal might satisfy the Constitution. It added that Hamdi was entitled to a lawyer for the proceedings that followed.
Behind all of this was a practical point the plurality made plainly. A detention system with no checks can end up holding people who pose no threat at all. A hearing exists to catch the mistakes.
What changed after 2004
Hamdi never got his hearing. In October 2004, the government released him to Saudi Arabia. Under the terms of the deal, he gave up his US citizenship and accepted travel restrictions. The framework the Court designed for him was never tested in his own case.
The same day as Hamdi, the Court decided two related cases. In Rasul v. Bush (2004), it held that federal courts could hear habeas petitions from foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. In Rumsfeld v. Padilla (2004), it dismissed the case of Jose Padilla, a citizen arrested at a Chicago airport and held in military custody. The Court did not decide the merits. It ruled that the petition had been filed in the wrong court against the wrong official. The government later moved Padilla into the civilian criminal system, where he was tried and convicted.
Within weeks of Hamdi and Rasul, the Defense Department set up Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo to review whether each detainee was properly classified. Congress and the Court then went back and forth. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 limited detainees' access to the courts. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), the Court struck down the President's first military commissions because Congress had not authorized them. Congress answered with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. In Boumediene v. Bush (2008), the Court held that Guantanamo detainees have a constitutional right to habeas corpus and that the tribunal process Congress provided was not an adequate substitute.
In the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012, Congress wrote the detention authority recognized in Hamdi into statute. It added a clause saying the provision does not change existing law on detaining US citizens. That left the hardest questions where the courts had left them.
Where the law stands in 2026
Twenty-two years on, Hamdi is still the leading statement of what the Constitution requires when the government holds a citizen as an enemy combatant. Its core holding has not been overruled. The government may detain, under authority from Congress, but the citizen gets notice, a lawyer and a neutral decisionmaker who can tell the government it is wrong.
Much is still unsettled. The Court has never decided on the merits whether a citizen arrested inside the United States, rather than on a foreign battlefield, can be held in military custody. That was Padilla's question, and it went unanswered. The plurality's warning that detention lasts only for the "relevant conflict" invites a question nobody has fully answered: when does a war against a non-state group end? The 2001 resolution has never been repealed and remains in force, and the military prison at Guantanamo still held 15 detainees as of September 2026.
Wartime cases also carry a longer history. In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Court upheld the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. In Trump v. Hawaii (2018), Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided. Hamdi belongs to the other line of cases, the one that includes Milligan and Youngstown, where the Court insisted that war does not suspend the courts.
Why it matters this week
Veterans Day honors people who took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Hamdi is a reminder of what that oath protects. The Court did not say the President was powerless in wartime; it said the opposite. What it refused to accept was that the label "enemy combatant" settles the question by itself. A citizen locked in a brig can still make the government prove its case to someone with the power to say no. That safeguard matters most in a war with no clear end date.
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