Geodog

More American citizens to be held without charges

Newsweek is reporting that US citizen Jose Padilla has been in an "isolation cell with a lamp burning 24 hours a day and a phalanx of guards around the clock" since the beginning of June, and he still isn't charged with any crime and the government has no plans to charge him with a crime. In what Newsweek called "a hastily signed finding" by Bush, he has been declared an enemy combatants, even though there were high-level doubts inside the U.S. intelligence community about Ashcroft’s dramatic announcement of an ongoing plot from the very beginning. Newsweek reports that much of the evidence against Padilla comes from a single, less-than-reliable informant: Abu Zubaydah, a former chief of Qaeda training camps who was picked up in Pakistan last fall.

I can't believe that a US citizen has now been in prison without charges for almost three months on one losing politician's and one informer's say-so, and that Bush is denying that the courts have any right to inquire into the circumstances of his detention. 600 years civil liberties progress out the window. It is going to be a little hard for us to criticize another country's human rights after this, even assuming that we come to our senses before too much more damage is done.

And now Newsweek reports that last week administration officials confirmed they were talking about creating a panel to review whether others should join the list [of confined US citizen detainees].