The article looks at the laws regarding the treatment of "enemy combatants" who are detained by the United States as of July 2004. After al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States President George W. Bush administration moved to claim extraordinary executive powers in the war against terror. As part of its claimed powers, the administration argued that captives from the Afghanistan conflict in 2001 were neither prisoners of war subject to the Geneva Conventions nor ordinary criminals subject to U.S. courts. "Enemy combatants", the administration said, could be held indefinitely, with either no or little judicial review. Foreigners were put in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. On the strength of a two-page affidavit, the United States has held Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Saudi citizen born in Louisiana, in isolation for almost three years. In June 2004, the Supreme Court said that treatment was unconstitutional because it did not give Hamdi due process of law. In the cases both of Hamdi and of another U.S. detainee, José Padilla, the so-called "dirty bomber", whose suit the justices refused to hear on a technicality, the lower courts had ruled that they could be held on "some evidence". The original district court had wanted more evidence than the government's affidavit, but was overruled by a circuit court. Now the circuit court has been overruled, says Neal Sonnett, the head of the American Bar Association's task force on the treatment of enemy combatants, the government's lawyers will have to come up with more evidence to justify Hamdi's continued detention--or go to trial. The day after the court's rulings, the justices held, by six to three, that victims of human-rights abuses anywhere in the world could sue their abusers in U.S. courts.