Not Your Sweetie

L'Etat C'est Mois! Bush (not a moron) Can Detain/Punish his Enemies at Will

Those Designated 'Combatants' Lose Legal Protections

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 1, 2002; Page A01

The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects --
U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and
punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and
outside the government say.

Civil libertarians accuse the Bush administration of an executive-branch power grab that will
erode the rights and freedoms that terrorists are trying to destroy -- and that were
enhanced only recently in response to abuses during the civil rights era, Vietnam and
Watergate.




Probably the most hotly disputed element of the administration's approach is its contention
that the president alone can designate individuals, including U.S. citizens, as enemy
combatants, who can be detained with no access to lawyers or family members unless and
until the president determines, in effect, that hostilities between the United States and that
individual have ended.

It is unconstitutional to subject U.S. citizens
to indefinite confinement on little more than the president's declaration, especially given the
inherently open-ended nature of an unconventional war against terrorism.

"The notion that the executive branch can decide by itself that an American citizen can be put
in a military camp, incommunicado, is frightening," said Morton H. Halperin, director of the
Washington office of the Open Society Institute. "They're entitled to hold him on the grounds
that he is in fact at war with the U.S., but there has to be an opportunity for him to contest
those facts."