Bill would set dangerous precedent

On March 4, Sen. John McCain introduced a despotic bill that would give the president unprecedented and unacceptable powers over American citizens.

The bill, which was co-sponsored by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, is called the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act and would grant the commander-in-chief authority to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely. It mandates that any suspected terrorists be transferred to military custody upon their apprehension, where they would be denied access to an attorney and their rights against self-incrimination.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, a national debate has raged over how much power the government should have to fight the war on terror, but never before has it claimed such broad powers over American citizens.

To make matters worse, the criteria in the proposed bill for designating suspects as high-value detainees are amazingly broad and theoretically could be used to detain just about anyone.

One criterion is the potential threat a suspect poses “for an attack on civilians or civilian facilities within the United States.”

There is nothing in the language drawing any distinction between terrorist attacks and other attacks on people such as simple assault. This kind of broad language is ripe for abuse.

Another criterion for designating a person as a high-value detainee is “the potential intelligence value of the individual.”

A similar justification was used to detain people for years at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp even when it was known they were innocent. This justification was known as the “mosaic theory” of intelligence.

The idea is that a person who isn’t a terrorist and doesn’t have any knowledge of terrorist activities may still be able to provide helpful intelligence if they come from a village where an attack once took place, or is third cousin to a guy who met with a suspected terrorist once, or has any other of an innumerable tangential connections to terrorism.

The theory is that innocuous bits of information from multiple detainees could be pieced together to create a mosaic used to help intelligence officials.

In theory, if this bill were passed, people from Joe Stack’s neighborhood in Austin might qualify as high-value detainees thanks to their potential intelligence value.

But those aren’t even the most odious of the criteria. The final criterion for designating high-value detainees is simply “such other matters as the president deems appropriate.” In other words, this bill would give the president the power to indefinitely detain absolutely anyone he wants for any reason he sees fit.

One would think Americans would have learned the dangers of giving the executive branch sole discretion over whom to detain by now.

“Fifteen months after the U.S.  Supreme Court rebuked the Bush administration by ruling that Guantanamo captives can sue for their freedom, civilian judges have ordered the release of 29 detainees and sided with the Defense Department only seven times,” Carol Rosenberg said in the Sept. 7 edition of the Miami Herald.

That means in more than 80 percent of the cases reviewed by courts up until September, the government failed to meet the relatively low standard of evidence required to detain a suspect.

Those numbers are not very inspiring. Even ignoring the bill’s potential for abuse, the government’s recent track record demonstrates that Americans shouldn’t be so willing to surrender their rights in the name of security.

If people give the government greater powers to employ in the war on terror, there is always the danger that they’ll end up being misused.

David Brooks is a communication senior and may be reached at [email protected]