How can you trust them with this when they have done that?

I was reading this New York Times article this morning. It covers the case the administration makes for its policy of making people enemy combatants, and thus to keep them locked up, outside of the court system for as long as they want to, and without any recourse. I'm definitely not the first one to think that this is really un-american, exactly opposite of the freedoms we were raised to believe in and that we stand for as a nation. This debate has gone on for years now, and it seems our laws are not so clear on the issue as we would like to believe. How anybody can't see how simple it would be to use their policy to imprison political prisoners is beyond me. But it seems like it's dragged on long enough now that people are just forgetting about it. No doubt some of the people imprisoned are really bad people, so why try to help them, eh? The key comes down to the administration having the authority to do what it wants to based only on its understanding of the facts.  Hmmm, this administration and understanding of the facts....

Though I have said for years now that I think the administration simply propagandized the facts it was interested in to make the case for the Iraq war, I can't prove that nor has anybody else definitively. I can say this though. Whether they made up facts, were fed bad facts, or took the intelligence they had and came to the completely wrong conclusion (remember Hans Blick anybody?), their grasp of the situation was very suspect. Some would make the argument they are following a neocon goal of having a force in place in the middle east as a permanent situation, but god help us if that was their plan.  Barring a misguided plan such as that, it seems to me that other reasons for going forward must have been part of the decision making process. Careful analysis of the facts will not go down in the plus column of this administration in the history books. Blaming the intelligence community is even more evidence of the problem really. Would you commit thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, billions of dollars you didn't have without real confidence in the facts? Forget the arguments inside the intelligence agencies. Many of our allies were saying similar things, and the UN people on the ground in Iraq were marginalized for disagreeing with the administration line. OK, I hope you see my point by now, it wasn't objective facts that set the direction we took because they were not clear.

Getting back to the enemy combatant issue then. If the administration was not thorough in it's fact gathering and analysis for an effort of the magnitude of the Iraq war, how can we trust them to be thorough in fact gathering and analysis for one person at a time? I know I can't and won't.  Fortunately the American system of government is supposed to take care of this problem. No branch of government is supposed to operate unchecked and the judiciary is supposed to be a watchdog of the administration. As a people, we must now insist that our government does just that. Allowing exceptions in the case of war, particularly when the war isn't a war on a state at all, but a war on a tactic of war, namely terrorism (from speaker Carlos Rizowy) the definition of a combatant gets much more slippery because there are no natural boundaries defining who could be a combatant or not. The Times article is saying that the administration doesn't even want to reveal how it makes the determination. Not good.

Write your representatives. This is not what we stand for.