Your Last Chance to Save Liberty

Buried in complex new Military Commissions Act of 2006 is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects.  This new law authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if you have never left the United States. And once you are thrown into military prison, you cannot expect a trial by your peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.  You can be designated as an enemy combatant if you have just contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and you can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

Read literally, this means that if the President or the Pentagon says you’re an unlawful enemy combatant — using whatever criteria they wish — then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to “hostilities” at all.  This definition is not limited to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.  It’s not limited to aliens — it covers U.S. citizens as well.  It’s not limited to persons captured or detained overseas.  And it is not even limited to the armed conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, authorized by Congress on September 18, 2001. Indeed, on the face of it, it’s not even limited to a time of war or armed conflict; it could apply in peacetime.

It is easy to look away and hope for the best, to dismiss critics as the fringe left who think the worse about the United States or opponents of the President looking for partisan advantage.

Thomas Jefferson, in his letter to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269, said: “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”  And Patrick Henry warned us about Government officials who would seek to claim the right to imprison people without a trial:

• “Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings–give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else! …Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.”

We are not dealing with hypothetical abuses.  The President has already subjected a citizen to military confinement. 

Do you think you are safe from this because you are a good person or because you trust the judgment of President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld?  Will you trust every president and secretary of defense forever?  We already have kept a three-year old boy off a flight because someone with the same name was on a no-fly list.  The path to hell is paved with good intentions.

Let’s suppose that in the future, some Preseident decides to take revenge someone named John Smith.  The President then designates John Smith as an unlawful enemy combatant, and if your name is John Smith, well, nice knowing you.  There’s nothing you can do about it then.

So you better do something about it between now and November 7th.

Regards,

Jim