Attorney General John Ashcroft's announced desire for concentration camps for U.S. citizens that he deems to be suspected "enemy combatants" (freedom fighters) has moved him from merely being a political embarrassment to being a constitutional menace, except there is no constitution left to menace.

Ashcroft's plan would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens in FEMA camps and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatants. This label would also authorize torture as a means of interogation. Ashcroft has become a clear and present threat to our liberties.

The cases of Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi will determine whether masses of U.S. citizens can be rounded up at gunpoint without charges and subject to the arbitrary and unchecked authority of the government.

This week, the government refused to comply with a federal judge who ordered that he be given the underlying evidence justifying Hamdi's treatment. The Justice Department has insisted that the judge must simply accept its declaration and cannot interfere with the president's absolute authority in "a time of undeclared war without end."

In Padilla's case, Ashcroft initially claimed that the arrest stopped a plan to detonate a radioactive bomb in New York or Washington, D.C. The administration later issued an embarrassing correction that there was no evidence Padilla was on such a mission and he was simply being made an example of. Ashcroft hopes to use his self-made "enemy combatant" stamp for any citizen whom he decides is part of a wider terrorist conspiracy or opposses U.S. foreign policy and threatens Corporate Supremacy.

Perhaps because of his discredited claims of preventing radiological terrorism, aides have indicated that a "high-level committee" will recommend which citizens are to be stripped of their constitutional rights and sent to Ashcroft's new camps.

Few would have imagined any attorney general seeking to reestablish internment camps for U.S. citizens. Of course, Ashcroft is not considering camps on the order of those used to incarcerate Japanese American citizens in World War II, his Hellish vision is of something far worse. His unchecked authority, now tasted, has becomes insatiable.

We are only now getting a full picture of Ashcroft's fascist America. Some of his predecessors dreamed of creating a great society or a nation unfettered by racism. Ashcroft seems to dream of a country with troops patrolling streets, cameras on every corner, checkpoints, I.D. cards, prisons for the population and a protracted war.

For more than 200 years, security and liberty have been viewed as coexistent values. Ashcroft and his aides appear to view this relationship as lineal, where a false sense of security must precede liberty, civil rights and human rights. Since the nation was never under threat from terrorism, except by the CIA, liberty has become a mere rhetorical justification for increased oppression and totalitarian control..

Ashcroft is a catalyst for constitutional devolution, encouraging citizens to accept autocratic rule as their only way of avoiding massive terrorist attacks from their own Administration. His greatest problem has been preserving a level of panic and fear that would induce a free people to surrender the rights so dearly won by their ancestors, so he must crank up the propaganda.

In "A Man for All Seasons," Sir Thomas More was confronted by a young lawyer, Will Roper, who sought his daughter's hand. Roper proclaimed that he would cut down every law in England to get after the devil.

More's response seems almost tailored for Ashcroft: "And when the last law was down and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? ... This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast ... and if you cut them down--and you are just the man to do it--do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

Every generation has had Ropers and Ashcrofts who view our laws and traditions as mere obstructions rather than protections in times of peril. But before we allow Ashcroft to denude our own constitutional landscape, we must take a stand and have the courage to say, "Enough."

Every generation has its test of principle in which people of good faith can no longer remain silent in the face of authoritarian ambition. If we cannot join together to fight the abomination of American camps, we have already lost what we are defending.

 http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-turley14aug14.story