The Bush administration got a jolting reminder last week of what every seventh-grader knows: In America, everyone is entitled to his day in court.

And to lock folks up and throw away the key takes more than a hearsay-filled memo from a faceless drone at the Pentagon.

This weekend, many of us will re-read that great testament to mistrust of unchecked government power known as the Declaration of Independence. So it was appropriate that, a few days before the Fourth of July, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi.

A Louisiana-born — that means he’s a U.S. citizen — man of Saudi descent, Hamdi has spent the past 2 1/2 years living an episode lifted straight from the mind of George Orwell.

Picked up by Northern Alliance fighters in Afghanistan and accused of being a Taliban member, Hamdi was handed to U.S. authorities who promptly shipped him to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. When military officials got wind of his American citizenship, Hamdi was forwarded to the Norfolk Naval Brig, then routed to another military prison in South Carolina.

In his two years in the solitary slammer, Hamdi has never been charged with a crime. He has never been allowed to dispute — or even see — the government’s evidence against him. That “evidence,” by the way, turns out to be a flimsy two-page statement of hearsay from a low-level Pentagon political appointee not present at Hamdi’s capture.

Hamdi was denied access to a lawyer until December. But even as his case wound its way to the Supreme Court, Hamdi’s public defender remained unable to dispute even the government’s facts; they remained classified.

Americans could be forgiven for thinking this sounds more like a Kafkaesque gulag than the Land of the Free.

On Monday, the high court yanked the reins of President Bush’s assertion that he possessed the unbridled power to throw terror suspects into a legal black hole indefinitely without charges. The court said Congress had indeed given Bush the power to detain enemy combatants. But he can’t do so without affording them a hearing of some kind.

Bush can’t saddle his latest bete noire, liberal “activist judges,” with this decision. One of the court’s most conservative justices, Antonin Scalia, joined perhaps its most liberal, John Paul Stevens, in saying Hamdi should either be charged with treason or released.

Score? Due process: 1. Unchecked presidential power: 0.

U.S. citizen Hamdi was seized roughly the same time as another American, John Walker Lindh, who was found in the after-battle flotsam at Mazar-e-Sharif. Hamdi, on the other hand, was turned over by Northern Alliance fighters who were paid a bounty for every “Taliban” they handed to Americans. Their assertion deserves scrutiny.

Our own government shouldn’t fear our own criminal justice system. After all, Lindh was tried and now sits in prison, and our national security is still intact. Or did Lindh get his day in court because he’s a fresh-faced, normal-named kid from California whose father is an attorney?

Supposedly Hamdi was nabbed toting a rifle. Was he actually bearing arms against America? Or was he armed as a matter of course, as most men are in rural Afghanistan?

Look, for all I know — for all anyone knows — Hamdi could have been an aid worker, as his father claims. Or he could have been the brains behind Osama bin Laden’s terror empire. We simply don’t know.

But even sicko serial killer Ted Bundy had his day in court.

John Ashcroft’s justice jockeys have tried to spin the Hamdi verdict as, incredibly, a win for the Bush administration.

Yet anything less than the Supreme Court’s decision preserving the right of the accused to be heard — yes, even in the midst of a war on terror — would have been a sweeping loss for Americans’ individual liberties in the name of collective security.

Bronwyn Lance Chester is a columnist for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. Her e-mail address is bronwyn.chesterpilotonline.com.