SUICIDE PACT :

Time in Advance : Preventive detention for "enemy combatants" (Jacob Sullum, June 14, 2002, Reason)

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz calls Jose Padilla, a.k.a. Abdullah al Muhajir, "a very dangerous man," and perhaps he is. But by locking him up indefinitely without bringing charges, the government is setting a precedent for preventive detention of any U.S. citizen whom the president decides to put on the country's enemy list. [...]

[T]he Justice Department never charged Padilla with a crime. After detaining him for a month as a "material witness," the government decided he was actually an "enemy combatant," so he was turned over to the Defense Department, which is now holding him at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C.

According to The Washington Post, the transfer was necessary because prosecutors did not have enough evidence to indict Padilla. Now "investigators can continue seeking information from him with relatively little interference from a defense attorney."

Let us grant for the moment both that there is not enough evidence to charge Mr. Padilla and that holding him violates the Constitution. Does it follow that he should necessarily be freed? Does our concern for procedural niceties extend to the point where we will require ourselves to allow terrorists to continue their plotting until the point where we feel we have enough legal evidence to meet the high standards of proof of our criminal justice system? After all, even if we'd known everything we know now on the morning of September 11th, there still would not have been enough evidence to charge the hijackers with a crime (other than a few visa violations) until they began to take control of the planes.

It's hard not to see Mr. Sullum's kind of absolutist position as fanatical to the point of absurdity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 16, 2002 6:18 AM