This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 16, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Alis Sala Kalah al-Mari sat for years in a military brig in South Carolina

the only domestically detained enemy combatant.

The Bush administration used al-Mari to test a legal theory aimed at keeping suspected terrorists

in military prisons indefinitely.

The Obama administration has reversed that policy and has moved Al-Mari into civilian courts.

But what will stop future presidents from reversing the policy again.

Nothing, says David Ritker, a legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

Cato co-authored an amicus brief at the Supreme Court supporting Al-Mari's challenge to his military detention.

Al-Mari is a foreign national.

He was an exchange student at Bradley University,

and he was picked up by the FBI right after 9-11.

The FBI investigated him and discovered significant evidence that he was involved with

Al-Qaeda and was ready to prosecute him on that evidence.

The Bush administration then decided to dismiss or ask for the charges to be dismissed with

prejudice,

meaning that they could not be refiled in the future

and moved him into military detention

at a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina.

To take the most cynical possible view of why the Bush administration did what it did,

we want to take this person out of civilian hands into a military system and make it virtually

...