Concentration camps on the way in the US

by Anita Ramasastry*

Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi are two American citizens and alleged "war on 
terrorism" suspects. Padilla is the alleged "dirty bomb" conspirator; Hamdi 
is an alleged Taliban member captured in Afghanistan.

Unlike the people kept at Guantanamo Bay, each man is being kept in a 
different naval brig because of his US citizenship. Both are being held 
without bail, criminal charges, access to attorneys or the right to remain 
silent.

If Padilla and Hamdi are feeling lonely, they may soon have company. 
Attorney General Ashcroft and the White House are considering creating 
military detention camps for all US citizens deemed by the administration 
to be enemy combatants.

Internees in these special camps will be treated just as Padilla and Hamdi 
have been so far — as if they did not possess the basic, traditional 
rights that can be invoked by US citizens suspected of crimes.

Why? Because internees will be deemed enemy combatants. By whom? By the 
military alone without any right to judicial review in a federal court or 
otherwise.

The Government's position is that its own decision as to who is an enemy 
combatant is binding upon federal courts, and that it need not even offer 
the courts facts to support particular detention decisions. The Government 
made this position crystal clear recently in the Hamdi case.

We are now faced with a scary prospect — indefinite detention of citizens 
because the government decides they are dangerous. The mere suggestion of 
camps or group detention facilities implies that the Executive is, in fact, 
considering using its newfound citizen-combatant detention program on a 
broader scale.

If this sounds frightening, that's because it is.

Americans don't seem to care, but they should care — and care deeply. 
These are potential detentions of American citizens that can go on forever, 
according to the Government, without judicial review, and without any 
charges being brought or trial conducted. The war on terrorism is a war 
without boundaries, belligerent nations and time limits.

Jose Padilla is currently being held in a Naval Brig at Goose Creek, South 
Carolina. The Goose Creek facility has plenty of vacancies. According to a 
Wall Street Journal report, it has a special wing that could be used to 
jail up to twenty US citizens deemed "enemy combatants" by the Government.

And Goose Creek may not be the only location. A Los Angeles Times editorial 
recently suggested that the proposal for detention camps is broader.

Under one proposal, citizens could be interned and subjected to military 
detention if a committee — of the Attorney General, the Secretary of 
Defence and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency — so decided. 
Again, no court would be involved at any stage of the process.

There is already another possible US citizen candidate for Goose Creek. 
James Ujaama is from Seattle. He was arrested last month as part of an 
investigation into alleged plans to set up an al-Qaeda-linked training camp 
in rural Oregon He is currently jailed in Alexandria, Virginia.

Will the US Supreme Court step in to curtail this expanding assertion of 
unilateral Executive power at the expense of the both the other two 
branches of our government, of checks and balances, and of American 
citizens' fundamental individual rights?

Why aren't Americans yet alarmed? Perhaps because they find it hard to 
believe that the Attorney General would propose such an idea. But he has.

And this is not the only sign that the Government has trespassed over 
important constitutional limits. In addition to eliciting an apparently 
false confession from a terrorism suspect, the government also recently 
sought to recruit mail carriers and others as citizen spies, regardless of 
the violation of rights that will inevitably result.

We need to stop and think before we allow the Government to go this far, 
and before we have our own Gulag, right here in the US.

* * *

*Anita Ramasastry is an assistant professor of law at the University of 
Washington School of Law in Seattle, and is the Associate Director of the 
Shidler Centre for Law, Commerce & Technology.