Dan Gillmor: We Don't Need No Stinking Constitution
First the Bush administration jails a man solely on its say-so, allowing no access to a lawyer or a chance to defend himself. It extracts, apparently, a "confession" of some sort. (Did it use the same tactics as in Iraq and Afghanistan lockups?)Dahlia Lithwick (Slate): Proof, Negative: The Justice Department's triumphant victory over the Constitution. The evidence in this document was collected during a two-year detention, in which Padilla was in solitary confinement, never charged with a crime, and only given access to his attorney this spring. Certainly his confessions might still be reliable, along with the confessions of Abu Zubaydah and other confederates being interrogated in secret. Or they might not. Without a trial we can never know, and as Phil Carter recently observed, there can now be no trial on the strength of this evidence since it was obtained unconstitutionally. Jonathan Turley (LA Times): You Have Rights -- if Bush Says You Do. In a moment of extraordinary and chilling honesty, (Dep. Attorney General) Comey explained that Padilla had to be stripped of his civil liberties because, if he used them (including his right to remain silent or his right to a lawyer), he might have been able to win his freedom. Thus, the government had to keep him away from lawyers and judges at all costs. Gone was the pretense of legality or principle. The Justice Department had finally found its natural moral resting point: Civil liberties are tolerated only to the extent that they will not interfere with the government's actions. Meanwhile, Zacarias Moussaoui, a foreign citizen accused of terrorism, was presumably given his rights in federal court because, given the case against him, the government thought those rights would do him little good. Then, just as the Supreme Court gets ready to rule on whether the president can overrule the Bill of Rights on his whim, this information is suddenly made public. As Turley notes, this is a press release aimed at the justices as much as the American people.
Padilla may indeed be the scum of the earth. But if they can do this to him, they can do this to innocent people. People like you. Think about it.
What can I say about this. Makes a kid who came of age in the 60s (well, OK, the 70s... but the 60s didn't get to North Dakota until the 70s) want to ... break something? cry? sigh deeply?
