IP: General Ashcroft's Detention Camps Time to Call for His Resignation

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

 From the Village Voice NYC
By     
Nat Hentoff
     
Jonathan Turley is a professor of constitutional and public-interest law at
George Washington University Law School in D.C. He is also a defense
attorney in national security cases and other matters, writes for a number
of publications, and is often on television. He and I occasionally exchange
leads on civil liberties stories, but I learn much more from him than he
does from me. 

For example, a Jonathan Turley column in the national edition of the August
14 Los Angeles Times ("Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision")
begins: 

"Attorney General John Ashcroft's announced desire for camps for U.S.
citizens he deems to be 'enemy combatants' has moved him from merely being a
political embarrassment to being a constitutional menace." Actually, ever
since General Ashcroft pushed the U.S. Patriot Act through an overwhelmingly
supine Congress soon after September 11, he has subverted more elements of
the Bill of Rights than any attorney general in American history.

Under the Justice Department's new definition of "enemy combatant"‹which won
the enthusiastic approval of the president and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld‹anyone defined as an "enemy combatant," very much including
American citizens, can be held indefinitely by the government, without
charges, a hearing, or a lawyer. In short, incommunicado.

Two American citizens‹Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla‹are currently locked
up in military brigs as "enemy combatants." (Hamdi is in solitary in a
windowless room.) As Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe said on ABC's
Nightline (August 12):

"It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that
just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not
just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in
this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because
the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way. . . . And no
court can even figure out whether we've got the wrong guy.

<snip>

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