[AppyPappy]

The tin foil has come full circle.

[trebb]

I'd much rather trust my freedom to Ashcroft, Bush, Cheney and company than to the sort of folks who decry that some people must be inconvenienced for the good of the many instead of the other way around. They don't seem to understand that THEY are a large part of the problem...

[ladtx]

Since when does a confirmed lefty (hard-line socialist, perhaps even commie) suddenly become so concerned about the subversion of the Bill of Rights? Where is his outrage about the attacks on the 2d amendment that have been occurring over the past few years. Where was he when the Weavers were attacked in Idaho and babies were burned in Waco. Methinks this smacks a little of political opportunism more than a true regard for the Bill of Rights. Your words ring hollow comrade.

[joyful1]

You're right! It's wrong the way Secretary Ashcroft is treating these terrorist prisoners!

It's time American treats these goons the same way Japan treated our captured boys during WWII. Why are we being so nice to these terrorists!!

[Hugin]

Actually, ever since General Ashcroft pushed the U.S. Patriot Act through an overwhelmingly supine Congress soon...

I love the way Hentoff makes the Congress (inlcuding the Democrat controlled Senate) who are soley responisible for passing legislation mere pawns, and Ashcroft, who is only responsible for enforcing it gets the "blame" for a law Hentoff disagrees with. Since when did Daschle, Joe Biden, et. al. start taking orders from Ashcroft? If he doesn't like the Patriot Act, complain about the authors, don't use it to demonize John Ashcroft.

[Moby Grape]

Is anyone else troubled by the fact that some of the same people who think Castro ain't such a bad fellow are the same ones accusing Ashcroft of civil rights violations?

[dark_lord]

Regardless of whether the original author is a "commie" or not, the fundamental problem is that we don't have a clear definitions of "enemy combatant". While many folks on this forum tend to think highly of Ashcroft, remember that what is accepted today becomes policy and in the future exists as precedent.
Would most folks on this forum like to see another AJ in a DemocRAT administration making decisions on who is and who is not an "enemy combatant" in a "war on terrorism"?
Gee, here are some hypothetical decisions:
Anyone protesting an abortion clinic is a "terrorist" and thus clearly an enemy combatant.
Anyone with more than X rounds of ammunition in their possession is a "terrorist" and clearly an enemy combatant..
Anyone who has posted anti-government verbage (and they define what is anti-government) is "aiding and abetting" terrorists and thus can be defined as an enemy combatant.
The fact is Ashcroft is bending our civil liberties. Don't think you will get them back when you have an AJ you don't like. Imagine Janet Reno with the additional powers of the Patriot Act and the new Homeland Security Agency.

[William McKinley]

The left is getting particularly looney of late. It's kinda fun reading their hysterics.

[Cold Heat]

Turley is a turd whose face on my TV initiates a immediate shut down and re-boot procedure!(commonly known as channel changing)

He is a whiny liberal blowhard who pretends to be a historian.

[marron]

It is fitting that we consider the subject of "enemy combatants" who are residents, or even citizens, of the US and are thereby protected by the US Constitution.

The potential problem of enemy-fellow-citizens must be faced, and considered. In wartime, must every civil protection normally provided to someone suspected of a crime be accorded an enemy? Must activities that indicated loyalty to our military enemies be ignored, in the absense of a concrete criminal or paramilitary action?


If it is clear that someone has sided with the enemy, are we prevented from moving against him pre-emptively?

For that matter, by what law or dispensation do we move against anyone, anywhere, who has not been found guilty in a court of law?

Why was it not necessary to file charges against the Government of Japan, on December 8, 1941? By what right did we attack and kill German soldiers, who had not attacked us? By what right did we kill German and Japanese civilians, by the hundreds of thousands, who were most assuredly not proven guilty of any crime against the US at all?

Simple.

War, by definition, exists when the state of affairs, when the threat to the country, is beyond the ability of civil or criminal law to contain it.

When the threat is larger than the criminal justice system, and beyond the jurisdiction of normal courts, and normal police methods, we declare that we are in a state of war.

With a congressional finding that we are in a state of war, the need to subpoena witnesses and hold hearings and serve warrants, all falls away.

If the military command believes you to be an enemy combatant, whether you are a citizen of this or any other country, brother you are done for. You will be killed, if possible. Anyone standing near you when the attack comes, whether man, woman, or child, civilian or otherwise, innocent or otherwise, will almost certainly be killed as well.

The only way to avoid this fate is to surrender most energetically, and promptly, in which case you will be held until the end of hostilities. And then, and only then, will someone outside the military take an interest in your fate.

This is how it works, and this is also why a "finding", or "declaration", that we are at war, is legally necessary.

We already have an "authorization" from Congress to conduct military operations, which to my mind is recognition that we are at war. Ergo, a declaration of war. It does not need to be a declaration of war upon a specific enemy, simply a congressional finding that we are, in fact, at war.

Which we are, and which Congress has already done. If they feel like reiterating it prior to any further military action, then fine, but it doesn't change the "fact" that we are at war, or that they have already recognized that fact.

[OldFriend]

I'm calling for MORE secret detentions. WE ARE AT WAR

[Destructor]

The above scene of ragheads behind the wire of a "camp" doesn't bother me one bit!

[ArGee]

While I think the author is being a little extreme, I do believe that there should be some separation of powers before an individual is considered to be an enemy combatant. Would it be so terrible to have a court created for this purpose? It should not be a military court because that is under the Executive Branch. It should be a part of the Judicial Branch and it should review the evidence that the individual is an enemy combatant. If it finds the evidence compelling, the guy gets locked up. If it finds the evidence questionable, then the Justice Department can make its case in an open court.

This is a new situation, we should make reasonable new rules to deal with it.

Putting all the power to determine who is and who is not an EC in the hands o fone branch of government is not reasonable, IMHO, no matter whose administration it is.

Shalom.

[Steve_Seattle]

This story ignores the fact that Hamdi IS an enemy combatant, captured in Afghanistan with his Taliban unit. The article is also factually wrong in claiming that Hamdi is under the jurisdiction of John Ashcroft; as an enemy combatant, he is under the jurisdiction of Donald Rumsfeld. And legal precedent for this type of detention goes back to World War II and is lawful under the Geneva Convention. There is an excellent article on this topic by Kate O'Bierne in the current National Review Online.

[aSkeptic]

When hillery gets elected you will all be singing a different tune. We now have a climate where it is possible to be simply discarded from society if those in power don't like what you say, what you think, or that smirk on your face. It will eventually have nothing to do about terriorism as anyone complaining about their taxes will be erased and if you ask where they went, you will be erased too.

with friends like these who needs terrorists!

[marron]

Some of us like to mention the Japanese internment camps in these discussions.

There are two separate issues involved; one has to do with the reality of war, and the other has to do with simple corruption.

Many of the Japanese Americans lost their property during their internment. These properties were never returned to them after the war. This smells like corruption, and there will never be any justification for it.

But the simple issue of internment was justifiable. There was a fear, which seemed legitimate at the time, that the Japanese would form a fifth column within the country, mainly along the Pacific Coast.

That this fear was unfounded, even preposterous, was proven by the fact that young Japanese Americans volunteered for combat, and were among our most decorated soldiers, and suffered the highest rate of casualties of any group of Americans.

It is their war record that shamed us for doubting their loyalty. Their loyalty has been proven, by fire, such that no one could ever again doubt it.

But Radical Muslim Americans have not yet lined up at the recruiters, or thrown themselves into battle on our behalf, to demostrate their loyalty to flag or country. And reasonable Americans could be forgiven for wondering if they were a potential fifth column. And if there are any further mass attacks on US soil, a general roundup will be almost a certainty. Mass deportations likewise.

Some of it will be misplaced, and will likely cause trauma in the lives of innocent Muslims, who never deserved to be doubted. But in a declared war, such things happen. And it is legal.

[Dawgs of War]

Simple solution for all those soooo concerned: Don't get classified as an enemy combatant. No on I know has anything to worry about.

[efnwriter]

Left Screeching at Ashcroft Again:
Detaining Enemy Combatants

Jonathan Rhodes
efreedomnews.com
September 4, 2002

General Ashcroft's Detention Camps: Time to Call for His Resignation
"The new Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, shows the government, some years hence, imprisoning "pre-criminals" before they engage in, or even think of, terrorism. That may not be just fiction, folks." Nat Hentoff  September 4 - September 10, 2002 Village Voice

"The Bush administration seems to believe, on no good legal authority, that if it calls citizens combatants in the war on terrorism, it can imprison them indefinitely and deprive them of lawyers. This defiance of the courts repudiates two centuries of constitutional law and undermines the very freedoms that President Bush says he is defending in the struggle against terrorism."  August 8, 2002 New York Times editorial

This is garbage - a one dimensional liberal attack on the Bush Administration. Hyperbole - attack - that is the liberal playbook. It is destructive and unnecessary. Casting the US Justice Department in these screeching terms only weakens the argument for protecting Civil Liberties in these dangerous times. I wish they would grow up.

Let's look at the facts:

This is an old - and necessary - argument about the balance between the rights of one to justice and the rights of many to security.

"No civilized nation confronting serious danger has ever relied exclusively on criminal convictions for past offenses. Every country has introduced, by one means or another, a system of preventive or administrative detention for persons who are thought to be dangerous but who might not be convictable under the conventional criminal law." So writes Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School.

Mr. Ashcroft said there was legal authority "under the laws of war and clear Supreme Court precedent, which establishes that the military may detain a United States citizen who has joined the enemy and has entered our country to carry out hostile acts".

The Supreme Court precedent he refers to dates from the Quirin case in 1942. Quirin (an American Citizen) and seven other German saboteurs were landed on beaches on Long Island and in Florida by submarine. All were arrested and handed over to the military. The court held that they were "unlawful combatants" who had entered the country secretly like spies.

The Supreme court stated: "All citizens of nations at war with the United States or who give obedience to or act under the direction of any such nation shall be subject to the law of war and to the jurisdiction of military tribunals."

In 1946, the federal appeals court in San Francisco arrived at a similar conclusion in the case of an Italian-American captured while fighting with Mussolini's troops in Sicily. He was transferred to the United States and held indefinitely until the war ended.

So Ashcroft's Justice Department has good legal precedence for his position arguing for more security. There are good and necessary arguments and actions that civil rights attorneys are taking to balance the administrations proposition. This is normal American jurisprudence. The courts are speaking and reviewing this issue.

Two American citizen prisoners, Yaser Hamdi (captured as an armed combatant in Afghanistan) and Jose Padilla (seized after disembarking from an airplane in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport after arriving on orders from al-Qaida who trained him to work on a "dirty" nuclear bomb), are the only ones being held in these "camps" - to denigrate the use of that term is obvious.

US District Judge Robert G. Doumar granted a legal petition by Hamdi’s father compelling the government to allow Hamdi to consult with a court-appointed lawyer.

The Bush administration appealed this finding to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals which vacated the US district court’s ruling and sent the case back for reconsideration “because the district court appointed counsel and ordered access to the detainee without adequately considering the implications of its actions”. (regarding precedence of military rules in wartime)

The cases of Yasser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, two U.S. citizens whose detentions are being challenged in court, will likely determine whether the Justice Department can indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without trials and without lawyers.


"I am not ashamed to say we have used every legal weapon available in order to prevent and disrupt future terrorism acts," Larry Thompson, the deputy U.S. attorney general, told a recent meeting of the National Association of Black Prosecutors in Los Angeles. "We have been especially aggressive with respect to detention and surveillance."


Michael Chertoff, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, also offered a strong defense.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft "is very, very conscious of civil liberties issues," Chertoff told the American Bar Association's annual meeting last month in Washington. "In our discussions, he told us he wanted people to think outside the box, but never outside the Constitution. . . . You shouldn't think you are dealing with a bunch of barbarians."

Chertoff added, "The basic issue is this: We are in a time of war. The consequences of missing another effort of conducting mass killing in the United States are horrendous."
 

Why does the left have to make this issue a screaming, name calling match? To quote former litigator with the Center For Individual Rights in Washington, DC, Ann Coulter:

This is how six-year olds argue: They call everything "stupid." The left's primary argument is the angry reaction of a helpless child deprived of the ability to mount logical counterarguments. Someday we will turn to the New York Times editorial page and find the Newspaper of Record denouncing President Bush for being a "penis-head." The "you’re stupid" riposte is part of the larger liberal tactic of refusing to engage ideas. Sometimes they evaporate in the middle of an argument and your left standing alone, arguing with yourself. More often, liberals withdraw figuratively by responding with ludicrous and irrelevant personal attacks. Especially popular are non-sequiturs that are savagely cruel. A vicious personal smear, they believe, constitutes a clever counterargument. Your refusal to submit to name-calling means you are overwhelmed by the force of their argument that you are a penis-head."

 "Liberals conceive of news reporting as political propaganda and assume, therefore, that everyone else does too."

 "The law imposes rules precisely so that liberals cannot endlessly jawbone hypothetical possibilities until they have their way."
 

Slander : Liberal Lies About the American Right

 

 

 

[TheRedSoxWinThePennant]

where is the barf alert the village voice was mighty silent when women and children were burned in a waco compound a few years back

[desertcry]

Could it be that the Atty General's detaintion camp is the reason why we have not yet been hit with another 9.11? How else could our law enforcement agengcies prevent the terrorists from hitting us again, if we don't detain suspects, and give Ashcroft a chance to verify, if these suspects are dangerous or not?