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Thursday, January 09, 2003
posted by gbarto at 1:55 AM:
U.S. Can Hold Citizens as CombatantsAppeals Court: Constitutional rights don't always apply in wartime
WASHINGTON — U.S. citizens overseas who take up arms against their country can be held as enemy combatants without the constitutional rights afforded other Americans, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.While we agree that it is going over the line for a US citizen to fire on American troops and then demand his Constitutional protections as guaranteed by the country he was fighting, there's a problem here: The person in question is said to have fought against the US - by the US government. But that has not been determined by a jury of his peers and he is being denied the right to see the evidence against him in order to defend himself before such a jury. This is wrong, for it allows the government's presumption that a person is guilty to take precedence over what our legal system prescribes for making such determinations. Now, the TurkeyBlog's libertarian instincts are not so strong that he thinks that the country should embark on a suicidal course lest an i be left undotted or a t left uncrossed in the protection of civil liberties. But if there's a concern that this citizen is disloyal, could he not be sequestered such that he couldn't leak potentially dangerous information in the evidence against him? Making sure that someone who is potentially a traitor can't continue to conspire is one thing. Letting the government create a situation where the innocent may not be able to defend themselves is another. The appeals court is wrong.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., affirms the government's authority to detain indefinitely American citizens captured in foreign battles or those who participate in terrorist attacks against U.S. interests.
But the ruling stopped short of approving those same powers over Americans arrested on U.S. soil, which legal experts said leaves a major question for courts to settle in the future.
The big problem here is that this ruling doesn't pass the Clinton/Nixon test. Here in this moment many will see the ruling as helping us in the war on terror. But appeals court rulings aren't just about how this president and this administration will use power at this time; they set standards on which the government and the law operate. Which means that liberals must ask themselves if they would have wanted the Nixon administration to have this discretion while conservatives must ask themselves if they would have wanted Janet Reno empowered to make decisions in this venue. In those terms, I think anybody with any passion for politics or governance at all ought be wary.
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