In case y'all had forgotten, Molly Ivins has been nice enough to remind us that the US (you remember- land of the free, home of the brave?) is still holding 1,200 people hostage. At this point, they have long since ceased being "detainees". "Hostage" is certainly now a much more accurate label.
Of course the government must account for those it has in custody. Even if one had been inclined after Sept. 11 to give the government a few weeks to separate the sheep from the goats after its round-up, you cannot hold someone in jail for a year without showing he or she did something wrong. Fish or cut bait.
Of the 1,200 detained, 752 were charged with immigration violations and are now stuck in the notorious black hole of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's clumsy system. Accounts vary as to how many are still being held. But by no possible stretch of the Constitution can the government's action be justified. Secret arrests are the stuff of old novels like The Count of Monte Cristo. Not since pre-revolutionary France has it been legal to imprison someone without explaining by whom and of what they are accused.
Judge Gladys Kessler made an exception where the government can show that a material witness in a terrorism investigation is involved and ruled that the government need not provide details of the arrests. But as she noted, the government did not claim or even hint that any of the detainees has connections to terrorism. Kessler seems to have considerably more respect for the Constitution than Attorney General Ashcroft.
Some of the super-patriots running around need to get a grip. We can't make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free.
It seems that, in the name of the "war against terrorism", normal legal rights- habeas corpus, due process, speedy trial, et. al., have all gone by the wayside. The government has now reached the point where it is holding American citizens and denying them Constitutional guaranteed rights- like talking to an attorney, for example.
It may seem a stretch to begin projecting in this manner, but it doesn't take much imagination to conceive of a time when the government may come looking for you and me. Once you start down the slippery slope of denying an American citizen rights guaranteed them under the Constitution, where does it stop? Can it be stopped? If the Constitution is reduced to little more than pieces of paper full of good ideas, what is there to stop us from becoming Yugoslavia or Zimbabwe?
Think about it....
