Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
You want the truth? I really don't care that much about the war in Iraq. At least as compared to my concern about police state tactics here.
November 30, 2003
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."
Posted by P6 at November 30, 2003 12:36 PM | Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2383it seems to me somewhat unlikely that viet dinh had absolutely no suspicion whatever that this administration might take patriot and run with it like an atomic football. kind of like giving a loaded gun to a toddler.
He knew. I'm just hoping this is the first signs that we're comingto the end of the oppression/regret pattern the USofA always goes thru as part of its war effort.
'i was only doing my job'
3rd reich / 4th reich its all the same these days
I wish I could get into the whole schadenfreude thing, but I can't. I keep seeing more and more people saying, "how could I know that my law would be pushed to its limit?" All laws get pushed to the limit eventually. Write limited laws, dummy. The only silver lining to the PATRIOT Act is the sunset clause. Let's hope whoever is in Congress then has the balls to let it run out.