Slate's Justice correspondent Dahlia Lithwick's piece on the Supreme Court hearing of the Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi case concerning whether US citizens can be declared enemy combatants and lose all of their Constitutional rights, is worth reading. She captures why this case is so utterly terrifying:

How you feel about the indefinite military detentions of Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla will turn largely on what you think life will look like when it starts. By "it," I mean the moment at which fundamental liberties are curtailed by well-meaning governments and the legal system becomes unable to offer relief. Never having seen "it" happen in my lifetime, I'm hardly an expert. German Jews who survived the Holocaust will tell you that it's hard to know at exactly which instant you've crossed the line into "it." Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American detained during World War II, knows what "it" looks like, and he says it looks a bit like this. Professor Jennifer Martinez, Padilla's oral advocate at the Supreme Court this morning, says we are at the line separating "it" from "not it" right now, today—as the court stands poised to decide whether "the government can take citizens off the street and lock them up in jail forever."

I am not as exercised as some people I know with concerns about things like no-fly lists (as flawed as they are) as the government tries to increase its information gathering on US citizens and foreigners to prevent terrorism; but this case concerning the detention, potentially forever, with almost no legal representation and due process of Hamdi and Padilla, and no real definition or criteria for what "enemy combatant" means, is truly beyond the pale. In particular because it is hard to escape the suspicion that the reason the government moved Padilla from the Justice system to a military enemy combatant status with no rights is because it just didn't have the evidence to prosecute the case. And if that is the case, it is even more horrifying to think of him locked in a windowless room with no contact with anyone, for the past two years, and potentially for the rest of his life.

Posted by Laura at April 29, 2004 11:01 PM