We're All Enemy Combatants Now

All dissent and protest could be considered conspiring with the enemy, whoever that may be from day to day.

Who the hell knows anymore?

TomPaine.com - We're All Enemy Combatants Now:

Most American residents would be shocked to hear that the military has power to lock them up without an opportunity to prove their innocence before an independent judge. Indeed, a 1971 law, pushed by a former federal judge and survivors of the Japanese internment, actually bars executive detention without any statutory authorization. Yet drafts of the government's proposed military-commission legislation slyly concede precisely this unchecked lock-up power to the executive branch despite the caution embodied in the 1971 law.

The leaked draft, admittedly, one that is likely to reflect the final version only imperfectly, does state that only 'enemy combatants' can be hauled before a military commission, which offers less due process than the regular criminal courts or the military's courts-martial. In other litigation, however, the administration has taken the position that an 'enemy combatant' can also be detained until the end of the conflict, even if they are found to be innocent in a military commission.

That conflict, moreover, is defined as a war 'between the United States and international terrorist organizations,' to use the language of the leaked draft. For all practical purposes, this entails detention without end.

The power to label individuals as 'enemy combatants,' and detain them indefinitely, presents one of the most basic threats not only to elemental human liberties, but also to the democratic order. Why? Because a government that can simply banish its foes, and those it erroneously seizes, from public sight simply by labeling them as beyond the pale is not a government that labors under the rule of law.