Question 8: Do you believe the government has the right to hold Jose
Padilla without charging him with a crime? Why or why not?

Well, I guess recent news has made this question moot. Padilla has
been charged.

However, the premise behind the question is an important one, and it
raises difficult questions for liberals and conservatives alike.

In this case, there are two competing interests. On the one hand,
nobody wants to live in a country where authorities routinely round
up citizens and hold them captive indefinitely without charges or
trial. I don't think that's a danger now, but I also do not want to
give the government the tools to do it in the future. On the other
hand, most Americans recognize the importance of not putting
artificial restrictions upon the people charged with protecting us
and fighting the war on terror.

In past wars, it was assumed that warring parties would capture and
hold enemy combatants until the war was over. The complication today
stems from the fact that we're fighting a war unlike any other in our
past. The historical precedents simply don't apply. There is no enemy
nation to surrender, and even if we fought radical Islam to the last
member, there is unlikely to ever be a formal end of hostilities.
There won't be specific "V" days as there were in World War II. We
won't know the moment that the war is really over; we will only
figure it out after a number of years without attack.

Because the scope of this war is harder to define, giving government
an unchecked ability to hold people until the end of hostilities
becomes more onerous. There will undoubtedly be people held who are
innocents, and that's an unfortunate side-effect of war: a different
form of collateral damage, if you will. Clearly, civil libertarians
who worry about the indefinite imprisonment of people have a
legitimate cause for concern. I will not dismiss them as some
conservatives unfortunately have.

On the other hand, there is a huge risk in believing that national
security should always take a back seat to civil liberties. After
all, if there's no America to defend, then it doesn't really matter
what civil liberties we have on paper. But the danger is more than
just the immediate risk to our security, the danger goes directly to
the point of whether we'll ever be able to win another war again.
There are a number of people who believe that this war should be
fought primarily as a police action, much in the same way that the
FBI fights the mafia.

The problem with that is, it's a purely defensive stance. It requires
a crime to be committed before any action is taken. Dormant terrorist
cells in the U.S. and elsewhere are often assembled because they are
comprised of "clean" people who will avoid detection. The very first
crime they commit may be setting off a nuclear device in a major
city. I think that after September 11th, a national consensus was
reached that we should not wait to be attacked in order to take
action. I'm sure the families of the 3,000 dead wish we had taken
action before that attack if we could have.

I will admit that I don't know how to strike the proper balance. It
is a very difficult question, and there are many people much smarter
than I who are stumped for an answer.

But I think we as a nation can come to some general agreements on
where to draw certain lines. For example, some people believe that
terror suspects who have been captured abroad should get access to
trials in American courts. I think this is absurd. Imagine what would
have happened if we fought World War II under the restrictions that
some people are trying to place on our current conflict.

Pretend you're an American soldier walking through a French town held
by the Nazis. There are ten German soldiers in the area, and one of
them shoots at you. You don't know who, so you can't fire back,
because if you hit the wrong person, you'd be denying them of their
rights. Instead, you have to capture all ten soldiers, bring them
back to the U.S., and somehow prove in a court of law which one of
them shot at you. Of course, you can't do that, because the only
witnesses are the other Nazis. Good luck winning a war with rules
like that.

Obviously, in World War II, we had less of a problem because our
enemies wore uniforms that were easily identifiable. We could assume
that if someone was wearing a Nazi uniform, we should fight them. But
our enemies now don't wear uniforms, and that alone gives them a
tremendous advantage.

It would be a shame to think that the U.S. would never be able to win
another war because our enemies have figured out how to use our own
rules and regulations to defeat us.

__________________
Bart Hook
Administrator
Email