One Little Man

I've noted on more than one occasion the importance of the Padilla case that is currently awaiting ruling by the Supreme Court. Michael Froomkin is watching that case and 6 others which he characterizes as having "major consequences." Decisions in these cases have the potential erode of Civil Rights and Constitutional safeguards to an alarming degree.

Of the Padilla case in particular Froomkin writes:

The basic question in Padilla is very simple: can the federal government grab a citizen off the street and hold them in a military prison without charging them with a crime, without giving them a hearing or a trial, without access to lawyers, family, friends. And, can it do it indefinitely. If the answer is yes it can, then our citizenship is devalued to nothing better than that of the citizens of Argentina during their military dictatorship, a period in which thousands disappeared into military jails, many never to emerge.

...If we set the precedent that people can be grabbed off the street, next time Ashcroft, or some future Ashcroft, or some horrible cross between Nixon, John Adams and Burr, won’t bother going through the civilian justice system at all (which is how Padilla’s case got attention — he was first held as an ordinary criminal, and it was only when the government realized it didn’t have the evidence to try him that they decided to reclassify him as an enemy of the state illegal combatant, and put him in the brig). Next time, whenever that is, the victim will just vanish.

That’s bad enough. But I don’t think I understood how much was a stake until I read the Torture Memos. Those memos claim the right to legally inflict hideous intentional pain — what I and most people would call torture — on enemy combatants. That’s right—on people whom this administration considers equivalent to Padilla. So the US government is not only asserting the right to Disappear people, but to torture them in secret as well.

It is important to keep in mind that the Padilla case concerns an American citizen. American!

The low character of the Bush administration is already abundantly clear. His soaring rhetoric -- "freedom is not America's gift; it is God's gift to the world" -- contrasts sharply with his actual practice. Although the Constitution animates "God's gift to the world" the positions argued by George W. Bush in these cases (Rasul, Al Odah demonstrate that Bush does not wish to extend this gift to non-citizens. The Padilla case takes this insidious view one step further by asserting that "God's gift" ought not even apply to American citizens.

Bush sycophants quibble by claiming that Bush only wishes to deny the benefits of Constitutional rights to those who seek to harm America. To this I say that harming America need not come only from the barrel of a gun or even a terrorist guided 747.

Nine people in black robes can do harm enough.

Or even one little man in a white house.