http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/700861/posts
As I said, this guy wasn't detained to for singing too loudly in the choir.
As many have pointed out, if we apply your standards, then we will have to provide a lawyer to every terrorist who will promptly advise his client to divulge nothing. Quite frankly, this makes as much sense as those who emasculated our intelligence capabilities in the past by insisting we only recruit spies who could meet the standards for sainthood.
What about U.S. citizens? If a citizen is determined to be in the company of known terrorists who otherwise would qualify for ruthless military attack due to their plotting our destruction, then detaining him seems prudent ("the Constitution is not a suicide pact," etc.)
But we should not kid ourselves -- this is what dictators always claim as well. THE difference is precisely the American culture of vigorous, democratic debate. In other words, this is being done correctly -- the Bush administration did not detain this guy in secret. The political process and public opinion counts in this country. A president rounding up political enemies and claiming they are terrorists would not work here. If that ever changes, hopefully there would be a backlash and the courts, Congress, and people would intervene in time. American dictatorship is less a threat than American suicide by political correctness, at least today.
With regard to the timeline cited by Duke, while it does reinforce the picture of Padilla as a lowlife no decent person would associate with, the only thing there pertinent to his current detention is the allegation that he associated with al-Qaeda. But war is an armed confrontation between states. As al-Qaeda is not a state but an underworld organization, and the United States is not at war by Congressional declaration, it is not clear to me, nor to many others, that this sort of guilt-by-association is sufficient to warrant a classification of Padilla as an "enemy combatant."
The business about "providing a lawyer to every terrorist" is a straw man, and a cheap straw man at that. An "enemy combatant" is a man taken prisoner under combat conditions or immediately after, who is either in enemy uniform or has been seen fighting against one's own forces. The Geneva Convention and the traditions of warfare sanction this sort of detention, at a battlefield officer's discretion.
Padilla, a lone individual at the time of his capture, was arrested, not taken prisoner on the battlefield. He was in no uniform. Unless I've missed something, he was in possession of no contraband. The knock against him, never made as a formal charge, was that he'd associated with members of al-Qaeda. It sounds very bad -- always assuming that the government was accurate in its identification of these other al-Qaeda members and is being honest about the claim -- but it's still not illegal. Unless the treason clause applies -- "giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States" -- we lack an appropriate standard by which to defend this detention. (And if it does, then charge the bastard! Don't grant him the dignity of a captured soldier!)
A man isn't a terrorist just because someone in the government calls him one. He's a terrorist because he's demonstrably committed, or conspired to commit, acts of indiscriminate violence against a civilian population. An individual held by the government under the rules of warfare should have demonstrated something more ominous about himself than just traveling abroad and consorting with scum -- or we'd have to incarcerate Dan Rather and most of his colleagues in broadcast journalism! Not that that's necessarily a bad idea, mind you.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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