As the case of Joseph Padilla has shown us, you, I, or anyone can be arrested and held in detention as long as the federal government wants to, without any charges. They won't come out and say, "We don't need to charge him, and we'll keep him as long as we want," but they consistently trying to deny any overt checks on their power to do so. This is a slam-dunk, already-passed, fait accompli type of thing.
The precedent has already been set with Padilla and a few others, and once the feds discovered that there is no formidable public outrage, it's only a matter of slowly, ever so slowly, increasing the frequency with which it could be done by this or any subsequent administration.
If you arrest 10,000 people tomorrow without charge, the public would never stand for it, but if you get them used to it gradually, they'll not only support it but heap scorn and contempt on anyone who would criticize something so critical to our safety.
By gradually acclimatizing the population to detention without charge, they could slowly make it normal and acceptable, and eventually the practice can expand beyond supposedly one-off "emergency" cases like Padilla, or the terrorist of the week.
The same goes for torture. Today, if you object to torture, you have to justify your position, because Gitmo and Abu Ghraib have inoculated people against the idea that torture is, by definition, wrong. I'm beginning to understand how the abolitionists felt at the very beginning, when they were the only ones saying, "Slavery is wrong."
When I tell people, "Torture is wrong," and I have to argue the point, that leaves a very surreal, bizarre, and uneasy feeling in the back of my mind.
We shouldn't note our concerns until we have a full-fledged police state? We shouldn't say, "If we're not careful, we'll end up with a police state," until we do, in fact, have a police state?
You can be arrested and held without charge as long as the government wants to hold you. If they want you to be tortured, they can have you secreted away to a prison where there is no oversight, and no accountability if you're beaten to death. Now, I know many here would like to rephrase this as "Oh my god, they're killing all the babies, everywhere, without exception!" so I seem like a lunatic, instead of addressing what I'm actually saying.
The problem is that what I'm saying has already come to pass. You're not reading a lunatic describing hypothetical doomesday scenarios, but a concerned person who is worried about individual occurrences that can easily become a trend if we don't oppose them on principle.
You see, I care about the principle, and if you care about the principle, you don't wait for x or x+500 cases, because it's wrong the very first time you see it. If that first time is met with swift correction, and the person is freed (or charged, so due process is honored), the people responsible fired or demoted, and a public commitment made to due process, then no, you don't take to the streets decrying a headlong slide into tyranny.
But, when the President and Attorney General of the United States firmly stand by their decision, and repudiate any possible oversight over, or check on this authority, then, well, yes, I'm going to be concerned.
At what point would you consider it a legitimate concern? 10 people? 100? 10,000?
