The Back Door Way to Ignore the Bill of Rights ~ By Jacob G. Hornberger

By Jacob G. Hornberger (The Future of Freedom Foundation) Among the most shocking aspects of Barack Obama’s presidency so far has been his embrace of the power that George W. Bush assumed to incarcerate people suspected of terrorism for the rest of their lives, without a jury trial to determine whether they are in fact guilty of the offense. There is absolutely no reason why Obama and any future president cannot expand that power to other federal criminal offenses, including drug crimes and gun crimes. Let’s keep in mind, after all, that terrorism is a federal criminal offense. It was a federal criminal offense before 9/11 and it continued to be one after 9/11. Under America’s system of justice, people suspected of having committed a criminal offense are indicted by federal grand juries and tried in federal district court. Examples of criminal defendants who have been indicted and convicted of terrorism in federal court include Ramzi Yousef, Zacharias Moussaoui, and Jose Padilla. One of the fundamental principles of a criminal trial is the presumption of innocence. In order to get a conviction, the government must overcome that presumption with sufficient competent evidence that convinces a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is, in fact, guilty of the offense. What was so revolutionary about what George W. Bush did was that he took a federal criminal offense and simply converted it into an illegal act of war, which he said gave the government the power, at its option, to incarcerate a suspected violator of the terrorism statutes for life, without the benefit of trial by jury to determine whether he really committed the offense. Now, consider the war on drugs. Since the president has been permitted the power to declare terrorism an illegal act of war, thereby enabling him to treat suspected terrorists as illegal enemy combatants (or criminal defendants, at his option), there is absolutely no reason why he cannot do the same in the war on drugs or the war on guns (or any other federal criminal offense), especially given that many of the terrorists are using the drug trade to finance their terrorist operations and given that drug lords are using guns to commit their murders. Each year, the drug lords kill far more people than the number of people that the terrorists are killing in the United States. The many thousands of people being killed every year in Mexico include Mexican law-enforcement agents, judges, and other government officials. [CONTINUE READING]