We are now a nation who openly assert that the government has the right to arrest and detain without charge any person, citizen or not, interesting to the President with no counsel, no recourse, and with no protections from inhumane treatment.

The Bush administration’s May, 2002 lawless detention of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla — on U.S. soil — was, as I recounted in my book, the first incident which really prompted me to begin concluding that things were going terribly awry in our country. The administration declared Padilla an “enemy combatant,” put him in a military prison, and refused to charge him with any crime or even allow him access to a lawyer or anyone else. He stayed in a black hole, kept by his own government, for the next three-a-half-years with no charges of any kind ever asserted against him and with the administration insisting on the right to detain him (and any other American citizen) indefinitely — all based solely on the secret, unchallengeable say-so of the President that he was an “enemy combatant.”