Patriot Act Author Has Concerns [LA Times}

[truthisfreedom]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-justice30nov30,1,5074199.story?coll=la-home-headlines


Patriot Act Author Has Concerns
Detaining citizens as 'enemy combatants' -- a policy not spelled out in the act -- is flawed, the legal scholar says.
By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department's war on terrorism has drawn intense scrutiny from the left and the right. Now, a chief architect of the USA Patriot Act and a former top assistant to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft are joining the fray, voicing concern about aspects of the administration's anti-terrorism policy.

At issue is the government's power to designate and detain "enemy combatants," in particular in the case of "dirty bomb" plot suspect Jose Padilla, the Brooklyn-born former gang member who was picked up at a Chicago airport 18 months ago by the FBI and locked in a military brig without access to a lawyer.
 
Civil liberties groups and others contend that Padilla — as an American citizen arrested in the U.S. — is being denied due process of law under the Constitution.

Viet Dinh, who until May headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, said in a series of recent speeches and in an interview with The Times that he thought the government's detention of Padilla was flawed and unlikely to survive court review.

The principal intellectual force behind the Patriot Act, the terror-fighting law enacted by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Dinh has steadfastly defended the Justice Department's anti-terrorism efforts against charges that they have led to civil-rights abuses of immigrants and others. While the Patriot Act does not speak to the issue of enemy combatants, his remarks still caught some observers by surprise.

In an interview, Dinh, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said the Padilla case was not within his line of authority when he was in the department, but that he began to think about the issue later, and came to the conclusion that the administration's case was "unsustainable."

<snip>

Dinh first flagged his concerns in a speech he gave in September at a human rights conference in The Hague sponsored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He reiterated them this month during a panel discussion with Chertoff and others on national security and civil liberties at the conference in Philadelphia.

"The person next to me said, 'My God. He is saying that the Padilla case is wrong!' " said Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor who also sat on the panel in Philadelphia and who agrees that the administration view in the case is wrongheaded.

"There has to be some form of judicial review and access to a lawyer," said Heymann, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. "That is what habeas corpus was all about. That is what the Magna Carta was all about. You are talking about overthrowing 800 years of democratic tradition."
<snip>

[Dudley_DUright]

1. Gee Viet, ya think?

For a guy that supposedly is a lawyer (and a law school professor no less), you would think he would have figured this out right away.

[IndianaGreen]

2. Asshole! Doesn't he know that democracy is dead in America?

The "best and the brightest" got us into Vietnam, and now we have another generation of them getting us into Fascism.

Dinh's death bed conversion is better than nothing!

[DeepModem Mom]

3. Whoa -- Viet Dinh? They rarely stray from the herd like this....

This article is a good find, and a good bit of reporting from LA Times.

[realFedUp]

4. Guess the Kool-Aid isn't as strong as it used to be

starting to wear off...

[Occulus]

5. Disturbing.

[VolcanoJen]

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VolcanoJen
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[RainDog]

7. Wonder if he was the one who leaked

Patriot Act 2 before the Iraq invasion in March to The Center for Public Integrity?

If he did, good for him.

Hopefully he will continue to speak up for real justice, not Ashcroft's police state.