Just watched the Attorney General’s
Just watched the Attorney General’s news conference. As expected, the sheikh’s attorney was among the indicted.
I have to admit I’m a bit conflicted on our Attorney General. I like what he’s trying to do. Stopping terrorism is a good thing, but I’m beginning to think though that his lack of faith in the Constitution is showing through. I also think that when the pendulum swings back the other way history will consign him to the radical fringe with other closed-minded paranoids like Senator McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. Court-ordered monitoring of the shiekh’s communications apparantly led to this indictment, but Ashcroft almost seemed to smile when he announced that new (post-9/11) regulations would allow the Justice Department to do the same thing without judicial oversight from now on. The separation of powers has worked for over 200 years, apparantly it has worked in this case, and I see no reason to abandon it now.
I just flipped through the little copy of the Constitution I keep in my briefcase and can’t find much about different rights for different people based on the crimes charged. The Fourth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments seem to apply to everyone, regardless of the crime charged. The first part of the Fifth only applies to people charged with capital or “otherwise infamous” crimes and has an exception for military cases in times of war or public danger, but the balance seems to apply to everyone equally. I have to admit (unfortunately) that it’s not the application of these new rules to terrorists that bothers me as much as the fact that sooner or later, if the courts let them stand, they’ll be used in other cases.
It’s similar to my philosophy from the wars on drugs and tobacco – I can see the harms caused by those products and can do without those products, but if the do-gooders win, what chance do I have to keep my alcohol, my beef, and my gas-guzzling truck ten or twenty years from now?
As originally written by Martin Niemoeller, and described here by Franklin H. Littell:
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me–
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
