You should have the body - The on-going legal debate over the rights of terrorists took a dramatic twist yesterday when the Justice Department filed a brief outlining the reasons why an American citizen deemed an "enemy combatant" by the President should not have access to the judicial system for review of that determination. As you can imagine, the liberal press doesn't like the idea. I don't either. I'm no screeching alarmist on this issue, but it seems to me that some kind of process should be available to American citizens, and available on a reasonably prompt basis.

So far the government's treatment of similarly situated detainees has been all over the map. John Walker Lindh and Zacharias Moussaui (a French citizen) have legal counsel and are being tried according to normal Federal criminal procedure. Hamdi is being held incommunicado at the Navy brig in Norfolk, while Jose Padilla is being held in military custody in Charleston. Then there are the inmates of Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. Lindh, Hamdi and the Gitmo gang were caught on the battlefield in Afghanistan, but Padilla and Moussaui were apprehended in the United States. If nothing else, the government urgently needs to bring some coherence to its approach to these people.

Apparently, one of the chief reasons for denying counsel to American detainees is the belief that they may know something that could help prevent future attacks. As I understand it, interrogation isn't technically a right under the Geneva conventions applicable to prisoners of war. There's a right to refuse it under the United States Constitution. However, the government desperately fears that any access to counsel will cut off this investigatory technique. I've got mixed feelings on the subject. Of course, I want see appropriate steps taken to prevent further attacks. On the other hand, it's chilling to see American citizens having absolutely no recourse to the law. Think of the Japanese-Americans interned during WW2. Or imagine if the source of terrorism had been domestic, the Army of God instead of Al Qaeda. Would any of us put up with these tactics in those situations if they occurred today?

One of the more sensible approaches I have heard discussed is to create a new system of due process for American citizens held as enemy combatants. It would relax many of the rules normally associated with criminal procedings to permit, for example, the introduction of inadmissable evidence which might be reviewed only by the judge and counsel, not the detainee. Perhaps the hearing would be closed to the public. But it should happen, and happen rapidly, not whenever the military finds it convenient. Various precautions are acceptable given the nature of the threat, but let the citizens have access to counsel, and let their cases be heard. At least we would be seeing some kind of safeguard that the President isn't merely locking people up on a whim.

It was written a long time ago that "No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned,...or in any other way destroyed...except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land." This founding principal of freedon was later enshrined in law and ultimately became a basic American right. For an executive to deny such a thing to our citizens is what revolutions are made of.