Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, American citizens by birth, are being denied their basic constitutional rights of due process as a result of the administration's policies on "unlawful combatants."
First, a bit of background. Padilla was the "dirty bomb" suspect arrested by the FBI at O'Hare International Airport on May 8. After his arrest, he was labeled by the federal government as an unlawful combatant rather than a standard criminal. Padilla was imprisoned in the Charleston, S.C., Navy brig in solitary confinement. He has never seen a lawyer, never been charged with a crime and never will as long as the war on terror continues.
Yaser Hamdi was the other main Taliban soldier captured in the prison uprising in Afghanistan that killed a CIA operative. The primary captive in that uprising was John Walker Lindh, whose case in federal court made headlines across the country. Hamdi, who had the same citizenship status as Lindh, was never charged with a crime and was actually pulled out of the federal district court process by the government. He is being held in the Navy brig in Norfolk, Va., under much the same circumstances as Padilla.
The interesting thing about the Hamdi case is that his treatment by the government, under which he had essentially the same legal rights as John Walker Lindh, was completely contrary to the parallel case happening at the exact same time.
In effect, our nation now is arresting and imprisoning U.S. citizens, capturing some of them on U.S. soil, without respecting the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Does anyone else find this disturbing?
As these cases were breaking across the news and as they've continued to develop, I'm amazed by the lack of concern from those outside the American Civil Liberties Union.
Simply because the government places the arrests of these men under the guise of terrorism, its conduct has been condoned by the general populace. We, as a populace, are letting the government run roughshod over the rights we've enjoyed for more than 200 years.
Don't get me wrong -- I strongly and firmly believe terrorists are the lowest form of people on this planet.
They have, or the government believes they were going to, commit heinous crimes in an attempt to topple our government. Instead of proving their case in a public forum, however, the government has decided to shut them away, circumventing the Constitution and hoping that we'll all forget about them one day.
