The Pentagon's Power To Jail Americans Indefinitely

Gee, I wonder if the judge’s reasoning applies to the rest of the Bill of Rights as well. Maybe the First Amendment doesn’t apply if it’s the Pentagon that is suppressing speech and assembly as part of its perpetual "war on terror." Or maybe the Second Amendment prohibits only the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), not the Pentagon, from seizing guns from the American people, as it is doing as part of the "war on terror" in Iraq.

Our 18th-century American ancestors would have found Judge Cooke’s ruling to be ludicrous. The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to protect the American people from the federal government, not a particular department of the federal government.

What Judge Cooke obviously fails to recognize is the deep antipathy to militarism and to an enormous standing military force that characterized our American ancestors. Unlike Judge Cooke, they understood the tremendous threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people that militarism and a standing army would pose.

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This week, Judge Cooke is scheduled to rule on Padilla’s motion to dismiss on the basis of the government’s torture and abuse of Padilla while he was in pretrial military confinement. It will be interesting to see if Judge Cook rules that the military is also exempt from that part of the Bill of Rights that prohibits the federal government from inflicting cruel and unusual punishments on Americans and others suspected of terrorism.

Don’t forget: Jose Padilla is an American citizen. Thus, this case continues to hold ominous implications for the American people, especially when Judge Cooke’s ruling is considered in conjunction with the ruling of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the government’s "enemy-combatant" designation for Americans as part of its "war on terrorism." That means that whatever the government has done — and continues doing to Padilla and, for that matter, every other "enemy combatant" in its "war on terror," — it has the authority to do to all Americans.

Judge Cooke’s ruling is just one more confirmation of how civil liberties have soared to the top of importance in terms of federal infringements on our freedom. Perhaps this is a good time to revisit the warning issued to the American people by President Dwight Eisenhower:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted."