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6.3.04 Bill of Rights, Anyone?

There's something here I'm not getting. Okay, Juan Padilla may have been involved in some serious nastiness. A grand jury might have indicted him. A judge might have denied bail. I'm just not sure what degree of nastiness is reason to suspend constitutional rights and due process. Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Slobodan Milosevic, Sirhan Sirhan, Timothy McVeigh were all pretty awful but somehow a process got followed. I believe that Saddam Hussein is even being speeded toward a trial (just in time for some U.S. election theatrics, I assume).

I guess I'm not saying anything new when I wonder how dearly won rights get tossed aside by an administration who seems to simply know who's bad. (Not to mention certain talk show hosts who claim that people would not have been in prison at Abu Ghraib unless they were evil.)

I don't care which law book they use -- civil, criminal, military, or international -- as long as a book is used. Would someone please tell me where to look up the legal definition of "enemy combatant"? According to the Disinfopedia:

It is the President of the United States who designates people as Enemy Combatants on information passed to him via the military or intelligence agencies. There is no right to appeal such a decision and no one is allowed to see the evidence for the designation. In effect it gives the President the power to indefinitely detain any US citizen without trial, charge or an explanation.

The Padilla case is bothering me. It took two years of isolation to extract the "evidence" from him. Put the guy on trial already!

Dahlia Lithwick of "Slate" wrote a withering analysis. I liked this paragraph:

The U.S. Constitution didn't simply hatch out of an egg one morning. Like the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights was largely conceived to correct for failures of earlier systems. In 1603 Sir Walter Raleigh was tried for treason and not permitted to cross-examine his accuser. This, it turns out, engendered unreliable evidence. The Sixth Amendment's confrontation clause was the constitutional remedy for this problem. Unremitting and unwanted prosecutorial interrogation could lead to false confessions. This made for unreliable evidence. The Fifth Amendment was, in part, the constitutional remedy for this. Years of delay prior to trials degraded evidence. The Sixth Amendment's right to a speedy trial was the constitutional remedy for this. Indefinite government detention without charges led to innocent men languishing in prison without recourse. The right to habeas corpus is thus codified in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution to remedy this. We sometimes forget that the purpose of these and other constitutional protections is not only to let guilty guys roam free (attractive though that prospect may seem), the purpose is also to protect the quality of the evidence used in criminal trials. A conviction based on a tortured confession isn't justice. It's theater.

Somehow the fact that John Ashcroft is a good Christian doesn't give me much confidence in the accuracy of his witch hunts.

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