Via Atrios, the Washingon Post Sunday has an article on enemy combatants and the lesser treatment accorded them by the Bush Administration:

"The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say."

"The elements of this new system are already familiar from President Bush's orders and his aides' policy statements and legal briefs: indefinite military detention for those designated "enemy combatants," liberal use of "material witness" warrants, counterintelligence-style wiretaps and searches led by law enforcement officials and, for noncitizens, trial by military commissions or deportation after strictly closed hearings. Only now, however, is it becoming clear how these elements could ultimately interact."

How so? Take this example:

"The administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it."

Here's two problems with Bush's system: When the Government gets a secret FISA warrant, the subject of the search or wiretap doesn't get a chance to have a federal court review the application for the warrant. And when the Government declares someone an enemy combatant, the Bush plan doesn't allow judicial review of the decision.

We think this is a deplorable stretch of the powers of the Executive branch of Government. In electing Bush as the chief executive, we seem to also have voted to change our name. Why not just reprint the stationary now: The United States of George W. Bush. Our motto has changed as well: By the President, For the President and Against the People.

Who elected this man? Oh, we forgot, no one.

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