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RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- A divided panel from a conservative federal appeals court delivered a harsh rebuke to the Bush administration's anti-terrorism strategy Monday, ruling that U.S. residents cannot be locked up indefinitely as "enemy combatants" without being charged.

The three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the government should charge Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident and the only suspected enemy combatant on American soil, or release him from military custody.

The federal Military Commissions Act doesn't strip al-Marri of his constitutional right to challenge his accusers in court, the judges found in Monday's 2-1 decision.

"Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them 'enemy combatants,"' the court said.

Such detention "would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution -- and the country," Judge Diana G. Motz wrote in the majority opinion.

I see some debatable middle ground in SOME of these issues.
But at the same time, there are extremist aspects of what the Bush administration is doing that I don't comprehend how anybody can justify.

For people captured ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE, I can agree that some of them are not eligible for U.S. trials. Some should have military trials. Some should not require trials at all, and be held simply as POWs.

But this story is about what I see as one of the extreme aspects of the Bush administration stance. The ideal that somebody legally on U.S. soil can be seized and held indefinitely without a right to hear the charges against him and to challenge them?
That's appalling, and I don't understand how anybody could possibly support that.

Would we tolerate ANOTHER COUNTRY doing that for a U.S. citizen abroad?