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Article: America's 'disappeared'.(Op-Ed)
- Article from:
- Free Inquiry
- Article date:
- December 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Of all the ways the Bush administration has undermined the Constitution--while continually vowing to protect our individual liberties from the terrorists who would destroy them and us--the most radical has been its claim that the president, solely on his say-so, has the power to indefinitely imprison American citizens in a military brig on this soil without charges or access to a lawyer or anyone else but their guards.
There are already two American citizens labeled "enemy combatants" who have thus disappeared, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe--whose constitutional-law casebook, it is said, has been quoted by the Supreme ...