On the recordNovember 29, 2012
That is my opinion, and that is the fundamental core ruling in the Hamdi case. Now, we have to be accurate. Hamdi applied circumstances to citizens that were captured in Afghanistan, but the reason they use led them to conclude there was an explicit--explicit-- authorization to detain those citizens even though they are American citizens. Their argument was that capture and detention was inherent, in their words--so fundamental--to capture and detain as such is an accepted incident to war as to be an exercise of the necessary and appropriate force which Congress authorized the President to use. So in my analogy, if a boatload full of al-Qaida, including an American citizen, comes to a Navy base and attacks that base and is captured by those sailors, that is surely an incident of war, and I believe the capture and detention of those al-Qaida terrorists would be the exercise of necessary and appropriate force which we authorized the President to use in the authorization for military force.
