Gulag Texas-style

Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects (washingtonpost.com):

The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts.

Note that when asked about this issue today on MTP, Powell said he knew nothing:

MR. RUSSERT: There's a front-page report in The Washington Post today that the administration is considering a prison to detain alleged terrorists where they do not have enough evidence to bring them to prosecution. What's your role in that and do you seem...

SEC'Y POWELL: I am not familiar with that and I can't talk to it.

MR. RUSSERT: The State Department is involved.

SEC'Y POWELL: I just don't have the facts on that one.

MR. RUSSERT: Why would the United States detain people for life without bringing them to trial?

SEC'Y POWELL: I have no information on this one, Tim.

Not surprising that he'd have little to say. I suspect that he is firmly against this strategy and given his lame-duck status, would rather distance himself from the ensuing mess.

The WaPo article continues:

The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow inmates more comfort and freedom than they have now, and would be designed for prisoners the government believes have no more intelligence to share, the officials said. It would be modeled on a U.S. prison and would allow socializing among inmates.

Give me a break... something tells me that they won't be as comfortable as Martha has been these last few months.

However, their comfort is really not the issue. The issue is what right have we to simply imprison, indefinitely, someone who is merely suspected of being a "terrorist". If we can't make a case stick in a court of law, we shouldn't be holding them. We can certainly watch the heck out of them, but imprisoning suspected terrorists, without due process, and without sufficient evidence to make a legal case is completely counter to American values.

This is simply a bad idea. The Supremes have already told the administration it couldn't hold the detainees in Gitmo without due process. I guess the Bushies simply don't hear too well. They probably think that they will get a better answer after they replace a few of the soon-to-be-retiring Justices (assuming that any of them do retire. I note that Rehnquist has yet to retire even though he has cancer!)

I'm all for ferreting out terrorists before they can act, but you need to have more to go on than "we think he's a terrorist... lock him up for life".

What's next? Round up all the muslims and intern them in concentration camps the way that we did with the Japanese Americans in WWII? It was wrong then, and it is still wrong now.