ShareThisAn editorial / By Dale McFeatters
Friday, November 17, 2006
The Bush administration is unrelenting in its push for the power to jail people indefinitely.
In a brief filed with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court in Richmond, the Justice Department argued that the controversial new detainee law empowers it to arrest and imprison indefinitely immigrants _ green card residents, students, tourists, illegals, basically any foreigner _ on suspicion of terrorism or designation as an "enemy combatant."
The Bush administration gets to decide on what grounds someone is a terrorist suspect or an enemy combatant. And the jailed foreigner is stuck there for as long as the Justice Department wants to keep him because the administration says he has no right to challenge his imprisonment in a civilian court.
The instant case involves Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Mari who has been locked away in Guantanamo since 2001. Al-Mari may indeed be an "enemy combatant," as the administration says, or merely, as he says, an innocent foreign student from Qatar studying in the United States. But we won't know because the administration says it doesn't have to explain itself.
His lawyer told the AP, "It's pretty stunning that any alien living in the United States can be denied this right. It means any non-citizen, and there are millions of them, can be whisked off at night and be put in detention."
The new Congress should reinstate habeas corpus as a basic right, not, as the administration is bent on making it, a sometime right. We would be enraged if another country subjected our citizens to arbitrary imprisonment.
It would be good to think that immigrants are attracted to our country by more than just jobs, that some part of our appeal might have to do with the rule of law and the guarantee of civil liberties.
