Ashcroft’s Gulags

Bizarre yet confirmed story here: the Bush Gang is setting up a “high-level committee” to decide which American citizens it can declare as “enemy combatants” and intern permanently without trial in detention camps. Apparently they are getting jittery now that the American Bar Association has condemnded the US government’s detentions as “illegal” and a Federal District Court Judge has ordered them to reveal the detainee’s names. Apparently even the Feds are leery of refusing to cooperate with a Federal Court and so one solution is to declare several thousand Americans as “enemy combatants”. In this case they can be held under military jurisdiction in detention camps safe from interfering do-gooder constitutional advocates and fans of legal justice. I note further that even Time and Newsweek are saying that there seems to be no substance to the radiological bomb rumours around Jose Padilla and that this story was concocted by Ascroft to get a little fear going on and justify denying Padilla access to legal representation. Apparently, they’ve decided to imprison Padilla without trial for decades in order to “scare him” into talking. Are these the actions of people interested in defending freedom, or merely in defending their own freedom to rule?