[That's 2 in less than 6 months. I don't know what's gotten into them.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/opinion/07sun1.html
The New York Times
January 7, 2007
Editorial
The Imperial Presidency 2.0
<snip>
Deborah Sontag wrote in The Times last week about the sorry excuse for
a criminal case that the administration whipped up against Jose
Padilla, who was once but no longer is accused of plotting to explode
a radioactive dirty bomb in the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/washington/04padilla.html
Mr. Padilla was held
for two years without charges or access to a lawyer. Then, to avoid
having the Supreme Court review Mr. Bush's power grab, the
administration dropped those accusations and charged Mr. Padilla in a
criminal court on hazy counts of lending financial support to
terrorists.
But just as the government abandoned the dirty bomb case against Mr.
Padilla, it quietly charged an Ethiopian-born man, Binyam Mohamed,
with conspiring with Mr. Padilla to commit that very crime. Unlike Mr.
Padilla, Mr. Mohamed is not a United States citizen, so the
administration threw him into Guantánamo. Now 28, he is still being
held there as an illegal enemy combatant under the anti-constitutional
military tribunals act that was rushed through the
Republican-controlled Congress just before last Novembers elections.
Mr. Mohamed was a target of another favorite Bush administration
practice: extraordinary rendition, in which foreign citizens are
snatched off the streets of their hometowns and secretly shipped to
countries where they can be abused and tortured on behalf of the
American government. Mr. Mohamed -- whose name appears nowhere in either
of the cases against Mr. Padilla -- has said he was tortured in Morocco
until he signed a confession that he conspired with Mr. Padilla. The
Bush administration clearly has no intention of answering that claim,
and plans to keep Mr. Mohamed in extralegal detention indefinitely.
The Democratic majority in Congress has a moral responsibility to
address all these issues: fixing the profound flaws in the military
tribunals act, restoring the rule of law over Mr. Bushs rogue
intelligence operations and restoring the balance of powers between
Congress and the executive branch. So far, key Democrats, including
Mr. Leahy and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, chairman of a new
subcommittee on human rights, have said these issues are high
priorities for them.
We would lend such efforts our enthusiastic backing and hope Mr.
Leahy, Mr. Durbin and other Democratic leaders are not swayed by the
absurd notion circulating in Washington that the Democrats should now
look ahead rather than use their new majority to right the dangerous
wrongs of the last six years of Mr. Bush's one-party rule.
This is a false choice. Dealing with these issues is not about the
past. The administration's assault on some of the nations founding
principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their
responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the
Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place.
<end editorial>