Birds Coming Home to Roost

Here's a NY Times article by John Schwartz about the Bush administration crimes against US citizens and how the courts are slowly closing in on the miscreants:

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft may face personal liability for the decisions that led to the detention of an American citizen as a material witness after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal appeals court panel ruled on Friday.

...

The lawsuit was brought in 2005 by Abdullah al-Kidd, who was born Lavoni T. Kidd in Kansas and converted to Islam in college. He was arrested in 2003 at Dulles Airport as he prepared to fly to Saudi Arabia for graduate work in Islamic studies, and was held for weeks under a law that allows the indefinite detention of material witnesses to a crime. After his detention, he was ordered to stay with his in-laws in Las Vegas; his travel was restricted over the next year.

Mr. Kidd, who was not called as a witness in the case in which he was detained and was never charged with a crime, sued Mr. Ashcroft and other officials in 2005, challenging his detention as unconstitutional and saying it cost him his marriage and his job. His lawyers argued that he was held as part of a secret Bush administration policy to use the material witness statute as a tool to detain and interrogate people when there was insufficient evidence to charge them with a crime.

Wow! The government "decides" you might be a witness, so they yank you off a plane, throw you into jail, hold you for weeks, then let you live with relatives for a year while they restrict your freedom of movement. All for a supposed "case" they have but they never call you.

Even if they need you for a case, where does the Constitution say it is OK to grab a guy off the street and jail him at the pleasure of the government until they "use" him for their case. Nutty!

Oh right, the Bush admin guys were the "Constitutional experts", the ones who kept yammering on about "strict construction" of the Constitution, and the ones who invented non-Constitution "new power" for Bush under their Unitary Presidency theory. You know, the theory that says that the division of power among three branches of government is hogwash because what the Constitution really "meant" was that the President, as head of government, was pre-eminent and could do as he please. That's why Bush would sign laws passed by Congress then sneer "but I'm not going to enforce this law" because he was the President and he got to choose which laws "really applied".