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| Needing
Protection From the Protectors
On
that fateful day, hijacked jetliners hit the The
first response of most Americans was shock, followed by disbelief
and fear of additional attacks. Those
emotions were replaced by anger, and a reflexive inclination to retaliate. The impulse was to bomb them back to the Stone
Age, but whom would we attack? Suspects
included “the evil empire,” “the axis of evil” and just plain “evildoers.”
In striving to define the enemy, American policy makers blurred
the line between who had attacked our country and who might do so.
Saddam Hussein, who had previously without provocation invaded
Preemptive
warfare became the new policy and millions of tons of munitions were
dropped in a campaign of “shock and awe.”
The number of Iraqis killed has been estimated to be in the
hundreds of thousands. Granted,
there were some missteps in analyzing intelligence about weapons of
mass destruction (WMD), but our country did rid the world of a tyrant
whose policies also resulted in the death of a lot of Iraqi citizens. It
is a short slide on a slippery slope to go from preemptive invasion
of a sovereign nation to depriving American citizens of their liberty,
if the justification for both is to prevent attacks on our homeland.
This brings us to the case of Jose Padilla, who has been imprisoned
for nearly three years without being charged. This
natural-born The
government argues that under the 6th Amendment, the right
to counsel does not apply until charges are filed; granted,
the government has not charged Padilla. Ordinarily, By
way of a circuitous route through the courts, the case came before
Henry F. Floyd, a federal judge in Padilla
may be guilty of treason or other crimes, but that is not the point. He has been incarcerated for about 35 months
with no charges, no indictment, no trial, no
due process of law and, for the most part, no right to counsel. That’s the way things were done in One
must step back and ask what we are fighting for.
The
principle advanced by the administration amounts to an assertion that
the executive branch can serve as judge, jury, and jailer in cases
involving terrorist suspects. However,
that power cannot be found in the Constitution.
The Bill of Rights does not come with an asterisk reading “Unenforceable
during a war on terrorism.” Granted,
Congress can suspend the writ of habeas
corpus under very narrow circumstances, but that has not happened. Instead, the president has unilaterally stripped
Padilla of his rights, holding him without even the semblance of due
process. The
threat of terrorism represents a danger, but unchecked presidential
power also represents a great danger to the rights of American people. If the power to arrest Americans for terrorism
and punish them without federal court interference is upheld by the
courts, the lives of our citizens will be changed forever in ways
unimaginable. No one will be
safe from arrest, including government critics, lawyers, dissidents,
and those found to be unpatriotic or thought to be evil. Any person deemed to be an “enemy combatant”
and taken into military custody will have no recourse but to depend
on the “good faith” of the administration. Americans
need protection from the protectors.
An impartial judge, not the president, should make the ultimate
decision as to whether the arrest and imprisonment comport with the
Constitution. James Madison, in Federalist No. 47, put it succinctly: “The
accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary,
in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of
tyranny.” |
