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 
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