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Talk Left points me to this article about the effect of Bush's "enemy combatants" end run around the Constitution can have:
These knuckleheads betrayed our trust, and we're disgusted with their attendance at the camps in Afghanistan," Mohammed Albanna, 52, a leader in the Yemeni community here, said of the six men who have admitted to attending an al Qaeda training camp two years ago. "But the punishment doesn't fit the crime, or the government's rhetoric. It's ridiculous."But defense attorneys say the answer is straightforward: The federal government implicitly threatened to toss the defendants into a secret military prison without trial, where they could languish indefinitely without access to courts or lawyers.
That prospect terrified the men. They accepted prison terms of 61/2 to 9 years.
"We had to worry about the defendants being whisked out of the courtroom and declared enemy combatants if the case started going well for us," said attorney Patrick J. Brown, who defended one of the accused. "So we just ran up the white flag and folded. Most of us wish we'd never been associated with this case."
I could go on an on about how this is just another example of how Bush is making your liberty a gift from the government instead of an inherent right. But I have already done that. I will just say this:
If they can take you away and lock you away from your friends, your family, and your attorneys; if they can try you in a court that does not allow you to see all the evidence against you; if they can do all this without review, constraint, or oversight then you are not free. You may not be in jail yet, but that is simply because the government has not yet decided to put you there. If the courts do not put a stop to these actions, then you will live at the government's sufferance, not as a free person. Your freedom will be tolerated, not protected. You will not be free, in any meaningful sense of the word.
