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The Justice Department's announcement that it may soon free Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen captured in Afghanistan and held as an enemy combatant for nearly three years, signals an end to one of the longest and most important legal struggles to result from the Bush administration's war on terrorism, administration officials acknowledged Thursday. A lawyer for Mr. Hamdi, Frank W. Dunham Jr., said in an interview that he was convinced that the administration was "committed to this man's release rather than litigation" in lower courts, and that Mr. Hamdi might return shortly to Saudi Arabia, where he was raised. Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the continuing negotiations, said that a decision to release him would show only that the government had reached the end of a process of interrogations that determined that Mr. Hamdi had no additional intelligence information to provide to the United States and that he posed no threat. [more

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