Printable page
E-mail this
Terrorism and civil liberties
Heading in the wrong direction
Mar 6th 2003 From The Economist print edition
The Bush administration is making a dangerous hash of its terrorism 'war'
IN 1962 the apartheid regime in South Africa, no respecter of civil liberties, picked up a suspected terrorist leader who had just returned from training in bomb-making and guerrilla warfare in Ethiopia. It marked the start of 27 years in jail, but Nelson Mandela was given access to lawyers and his prosecutors had to follow rules of due process. Last year, the world's foremost democracy, the United States, detained one of its own citizens, Jose Padilla, at Chicago airport as a witness to a grand-jury probe and then categorised the so-called dirty bomber as an �enemy combatant��which, according to the government, gives it the right to hold him indefinitely, with no access to a lawyer and minimal judicial review.
MORE ON...
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1622138
