Noah Feldman, Columnist

U.S. Legal Dilemma Exposed by Somali Terror Case: Noah Feldman

July 11, 2011 at 4:00 AM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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What do you do with a captured terrorist? Throw him in the brig. That’s what was done with Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, the Somali who in April was plucked from a fishing boat off the East African coast between Yemen and Somalia.

Once you’ve got him, though, the legal troubles begin. Because the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s vague plan of indefinitely detaining “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo without any hearing, the U.S. government was left with three lawful choices for what to do with Warsame: