http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/07/16/al_marri/index.html"Of all the constitutionally threatening and extremist powers the Bush administration has asserted over the last seven years, the most radical -- and the most dangerous -- has been its claim that the President has the power to arrest U.S. citizens and legal residents inside the U.S., and imprison them indefinitely in a military prison, without charging them with any crime, based on his assertion that the imprisoned individual is an "enemy combatant." .......At least with regard to individuals detained on U.S. soil, the Bush administration has exercised these definitively tyrannical powers in only a handful of cases -- two U.S. citizens (Hamdi and Padilla) and one non-citizen in the U.S. legally (al-Marri). But what the administration has done is asserted those powers generally, and embarked upon a strategy to ensure that they are institutionalized. Yesterday's ruling -- likely (though not certain) to be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court -- is but another step down the path of un-American radicalism we've been traversing.
The dangers of empowering the President to order the U.S. military to arrest U.S. citizens inside the U.S. and indefinitely imprison them as "enemy combatants" -- and thereby deny them core Constitutional protections -- is manifest. It's literally hard to imagine a more un-American power than that. Even Justice Scalia, dissenting in Hamdi, warned that allowing the President to hold U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants" is to vest the President with the ultimate power of tyranny, exactly what the Founders most wanted to prevent:
The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.George Bush will likely leave office with this particular tyrannical power infrequently exercised but nonetheless vigorously asserted, defended, and close to established. This is yet another step in the creeping extremism of the last seven years -- like torture and warrantless eavesdropping, this power (allowing the President to imprison U.S. citizens in military brigs with no charges) is one that was until quite recently inconceivable, but is now a defining part of how our Government operates."
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