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K Williams

Good for him.

What is your source?

Rubbish. Most of the act is things the FBI had wanted desperately for a long time, but could not get. They used the post-attack hysteria to get them.

This isn't about grand jury investigations, it is about search warrants served on you, about which you are not allowed to talk, to anyone. Suppose the FBI knocks on your door and says, "We are the FBI and this is an ordinary search warrant. We lied to get the warrant, and the whole purpose of the search is to harbutt you, because we don't like you." You are allowed to complain loudly to anyone who will listen about it. If it is a Patriot Act warrant, though, you must remain silent, and have no realistic recourse.

Regarding grand juries, since you brought it up, their secrecy is not absolute and has been shrinking in recent years, not expanding. In most jurisdictions it does not apply to the witness himself, which is the analogous case to what we have been discussing. On the other hand, it does apply to the prosecution. The prosecutor is not allowed to hold a press conference and say that you are being investigated by the grand jury. As far as I know, nothing in the Patriot Act prevents the state from announcing, if they want to, that you are being searched as a person.

Evidently not, but many others, wiser than you, do have a problem with it.

But they are; that is a fact, whether you like it or not, and whether the administration admits it or not. Under existing law, they are prisoners of war.

Then they have to be charged with war crimes. Less than 1% of those held have been so charged, after 3 years of detention. The only conclusion is that they committed no crime.

I suggest you re-read Eisentrager; it is not nearly so broad as you suppose. Not to mention last year's decisions. Or are you seriously contending that the government could arrest you and whisk you off to some base on foreign soil, and keep you locked up there indefinitely, with you having no recourse at all? That is what the government claimed in Padilla (well, in Padilla they didn't even take him overseas, just kept moving him from judicial district to judicial district, in an age-old tactic to thwart habeas corpus).

The question certainly is POW or criminal, choose one. There is not other alternative, certainly no alternative that you have offered.

Is that the best you can do? How very persuasive.

Again, how can you know, if the government can keep everything it is doing secret?

Your child-like faith in the benevolence of government is quite touching (I feel justified in making such a personal remark because you do not seem to be able to restrain yourself from referring to my "paranoid little mind").

What *are* you talking about? Ambulance chasers are not paid by the government (disregarding claims against the government, which are relatively few), they are paid by the defendants' insurance carriers.

Exactly right: they haven't even robbed a 7-11, so why are they being held? You claim they are not POWs, so they should not be held on that account. No charges have been filed against all but a handful of them, so they should not be held on that account.

Then why have almost none been charged with war crimes?

But that is exactly what you are doing by claiming that they are not prisoners of war (at least the Taliban fighters among them, and possibly others, but we can't tell because it is all secret).

The brilliance of your rhetoric astounds me.

Wonderful. So you think that bin Laden has the right to kill us because not doing so would imperil his immortal soul, our religious ideas being sinful in the eyes of god because we do not follow Islam. Just wonderful.

Are you claiming that the approved Turkish version of Islam is no different from Wahhabism?

Once again I am overwhelmed by your persuasive powers.

Perhaps you haven't noticed, but they have power, too, and they are not unwilling to use it. That is the problem.

They are still there, and they are still the law, even though people like you, who have no respect for the law at all, or for liberty, would just as soon turn this country into a totalitarian police state.

Just to clarify my position, as I know you will distort it: I do not say that we should not defend ourselves. I do not say we should not defend ourselves agressively. I do say that we must adhere to the law while defending ourselves, and that we must give away our liberties while defending ourselves.

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