foreign policy,international relations

The Bush administration, with its insistence on absolute power for the executive branch, has managed to blow this opportunity to win hearts and minds abroad. Administration lawyers will argue Tuesday that Hamdan has almost no rights. Worse, the government contends that the Supreme Court has no right to be hearing his case.

A former taxi driver with a fourth-grade education in his native Yemen, he is one of just 10 detainees who have actually been charged with terrorism and war crimes.Whether he's a terrorist collaborator or a flunky who was swept off the battlefield in Afghanistan is hard to determine. The details of his supposed offenses are unknown.

The message from the Supreme Court Tuesday could have been a shining slice of the democratic ideal: the rule of law by an independent judiciary, a concept sacred to the Founding Fathers and a model for the world. Instead, Tuesday's hearing projects the image of an administration that has botched the handling of prisoner issues and given the USA a black eye internationally in the process.

Hamdan, thought to be in his mid-30s, has become a high-profile pawn in the administration's stubborn contention that it doesn't have to answer to anyone — not Congress, not the courts and not international treaties and organizations — in its pursuit of the war on terror.

The administration asserts the right to unilaterally designate individuals as "enemy combatants" and hold them prisoner indefinitely, possibly forever.