After three long years in confinement as an alleged enemy combatant, Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen at the time of his capture in Afghanistan, has arrived home to Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. citizen was kept in solitary confinement and had no access to the legal system until the Supreme Court ruling in June, which was one of a series this year that limited President Bush's war on terrorism. Instead of Hamdi having his day in court, the U.S. government negotiated a deal in which he also gave up American citizenship and agreed not to travel to the United States for 10 years and to tell the U.S. embassy of plans to travel outside Saudi Arabia for 15 years.

The State Department spent two weeks seeking to assure Saudi Arabia it was not responsible for enforcing the deal. Still, the length of the delay may indicate Saudi Arabia wanted to signal its irritation over being excluded from negotiations.