Is the President a "Dictator"?

...It is false...

...And we should therefore expect to find some evidence to that effect in the work of our designated opinionmakers, shouldn't we...

...But for the government's determination that he is a very dangerous man—were he an "ordinary" subject of American immigration law, that is—Al-Najjar would almost certainly have been expelled from our shores, without the slightest fuss, a very long time ago...

...Just this past June, the Supreme Court decided a case called Zadvydas v. Davis involving, among other things, the extent to which the Fifth Amendment limits the federal government's authority to incarcerate aliens it is attempting to deport...

...Interestingly enough, it is none other than Al-Arian's brother-in-law and full partner in the promotion of political violence, one Mazen Al-Najjar, whom critics of the Justice Department's "anti-Arab witchhunt" are quickest to cite as a sympathetic victim...

...They are thus presumptively deportable...

...Bush's most splenetic critics, in particular, apparently deem a mere recitation of recent Department of Justice initiatives sufficient to establish that those initiatives have emasculated the Bill of Rights...

...So in one sense, reaction is obviously mixed...

...And Mazen Al-Najjar's Fifth Amendment argument, though it appears to strike an emotional chord among constitutional naifs, is ridiculous, as well...

...Pete metropolitan area—to a number of notorious international terrorists and their equally notorious propagandists and sympathizers...

...Mazen Al-Najjar's asylum demand is transparently ridiculous...

...The Justice Department's conclusion that Al-Najjar is a fanatic is based on highly sensitive foreign intelligence information that it dare not reveal in open court, so he is unable effectively to defend himself against the charge—which he claims an inviolable Fifth Amendment right to do...

...All the detainees have enjoyed the right to counsel, as has Mazen Al-Najjar...

...There is bipartisan grumbling over executive branch unilateralism among legislators on Capitol Hill...

...Having entered the country with "refugee" status, he then secured permission from the INS to attend a graduate school program in North Carolina...

...All have been guaranteed habeas corpus review in the federal courts, as has Mazen Al-Najjar...

...Federal authorities have been keenly aware of Sami The notion that the Justice Department has subjected Mazen Al-Najjar to arbitrary and harsh treatment is preposterous...

...And most have already been released from detention, as has Mazen Al-Najjar...

...And yet never in his column has Richard Cohen so much as alluded to the existence of the ruling in Zadvydas...

...In February 1999, deciding a case called Reno v. Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, an 8-1 majority of the Court ruled that "when an alien's continuing presence in this country is in violation of the immigration laws, the government does not offend the Constitution by deporting [or detaining] him for the additional reason that it believes him to be a member of an organization that supports terrorist activity...

...Al-Arian is a piece of work: a man who in the past has played host or even employer—right there in the Tampa/St...

...They should be curtailed...

...Here the Court was sharply divided, and its narrow holding was logically problematic, to say the least: In certain limited circumstances, the majority appeared to rule, a criminal alien whose presence in the United States is otherwise and completely illegal still enjoys a constitutional right to be set free on our streets...

...Except, the judge adds, with respect to the private enjoyment of heroin and cocaine, which should be decriminalized posthaste (the better, perhaps, to subdue domestic dissent...

...in February 1995, ten days after two young Arab zombies had blown themselves up at an Israeli bus stop, killing 22 people and injuring 59 others, Al-Arian wrote a fund-raising letter exulting in the deed and requesting "support to the jihad effort in Palestine so that operations such as these can continue...

...But so habitually cautious about the law is our Justice Department that Al-Arian has never been charged with a crime...

...This was the law for more than two years before George W. Bush became president...

...Al-Najjar moved to Tampa in 1986, where he began a lengthy and intimate professional collaboration with Sami Al-Arian in the development of a hate-spewing "Islamic think tank" and affiliated "charity...

...Put simply, the people currently accusing the president of "dictatorship" do not know what they're talking about...

...Instead we find this, and it is altogether bizarre: George W. Bush is nowadays everywhere and constantly criticized for anti-terrorism "decrees" that allegedly disdain the standard procedural guarantees of American law—by people who themselves disdain to explain, or simply don't know, exactly what those guarantees might be...

...So we have come to depend on professional journalists and politicians to do the bulk of it for us...

...Practically everyone is weighing in on the question whether we should be alarmed or relieved that the president has suspended legal protections ordinarily taken for granted in the United States...

...But at the same time there is something strikingly consistent about most of the commentary so far: its near-total unconcern for substantive detail...

...Moreover, "[t]he Executive should not have to disclose its 'real' reasons" for reaching that conclusion, since "a court would be ill equipped to determine their authenticity and utterly unable to assess their adequacy...

...There is apocalyptic indignation about this development at the Times editorial page, which excoriates Bush for a "travesty of justice" and a "breathtaking departure" from legal tradition...

...Al-Arian since the mid 1990s...

...It stands to reason that our civil liberties will be curtailed" during national emergencies, Posner snorts in the December Atlantic...

...The notion that the Justice Department has subjected Mazen Al-Najjar to arbitrary, harsh, and constitutionally irregular treatment is preposterous...

...Circuit Court of Appeals, eager as ever to pee on the shoes of civics-class pietism...

...that they are prepared to entertain a dystopian fantasy about their democratic government...

...This is quite weird, really...

...that they are willing to "spell it with a K," as we used to say back in the 1960s . . . well, that is a question we would prefer to leave to the psychiatrists...

...Al-Arian appears ill-disposed towards Jewish people...

...And precisely because the federal government has adjudged him a terrorist, Al-Najjar's attorneys contend, it must now grant him political asylum here...

...Which he has been fighting ever since, though he has all along acknowledged that his presence within our borders is unlawful...

...And properly understood, the extensive litigation his case has spawned tends to rebut, rather than reinforce, the "civil libertarian" complaint routinely made on behalf of Arab and Muslim aliens detained by the INS in conjunction with past and current terrorism investigations...

...For a start toward the real answer, perhaps we should provide a little update on Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida computer engineering professor whom we have met before in these pages...

...But hardly a one of them bothers to demonstrate with any precision that the president has, in fact, done anything of the kind...

...It is now a virtually unquestioned assumption of American elite conversation that the law enforcement measures George W. Bush has adopted in the aftermath of September 11 make him, as the New York Times matter-of-factly reports, "only the latest of many presidents to restrict civil liberties in wartime...

...Quite the contrary...

...But by the spring of 1985, having failed to secure a green card by virtue of a quickie, abortive marriage to an American citizen and no longer carrying a valid student visa, Al-Najjar was "noted" by the INS for thus-obligatory deportation proceedings...

...few foreign countries would even consider accepting extradition of such a character, and any that might would very likely persecute him...

...His lawyers' arguments are a small masterpiece of Kafkaesque black comedy...

...Nor, the argument continues, can we keep him in detention...

...Al-Arian appears similarly ill-disposed toward Americans, even those who aren't Jewish...

...The program so characterized has been widely and bitterly condemned as unconstitutional...

...In other words, dear reader, your morning daily has proved a useless guide to precisely that awful question it has helped make current: Have the president and his attorney general violated their oaths of office by mounting a clear and powerful assault on our founding document...

...For instance...

...In fact, the entire parade of constitutional horribles alleged against the administration is a groundless slander, as we will no doubt have occasion to explain in exhaustive detail over the coming weeks...

...Yes, well...

...On the other hand, leading constitutional lawyers—Laurence Tribe on the "left" and Kenneth Starr on the "right," for example—have generally voiced approval of the administration's moves, citing certain real-world exigencies...

...By virtue of his participation in these apparent terrorist front groups, Al-Najjar was arrested in 1997 by FBI and INS agents who had collected what more than one reviewing court has since called "pertinent and reliable" evidence that he is an active associate of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad—and so represents an ongoing threat to the people, property, and national security of the United States...

...But a job like this takes more time and mental effort than most of us prefer to expend...

...Richard Cohen of the Washington Post informs us that the detentions are so outlandishly unconstitutional, in fact, as to constitute an "American gulag...

...We would like to think that any such conclusion was based on a more than passing familiarity with the relevant statutes and regulations and Supreme Court precedents, wouldn't we...

...Over the past two and a half months, since the World Trade Center and Pentagon atrocities, John Ashcroft's Justice Department has "subjected" more than 1,000 foreign nationals temporarily resident in the United States, most all of them of Arab descent or Muslim faith, to "summary," "secret," and "indefinite" detention— "beyond review" by the federal courts...

...And during the pendancy of deportation proceedings— back to Zadvydas again—the government may detain any illegal alien at its discretion...

...Al-Najjar, a Palestinian native of Gaza, arrived in the United States from the United Arab Emirates in 1981...

...It is not fair to say so...

...How, then, with respect to these detentions, is it fair to say that President Bush has restricted previously existing civil liberties...

...For the moment, at least, pending his latest appeal, Al-Najjar, too, like his brother-in-law, walks the streets of Tampa, Florida, a free man...

...Say, in the ordinary course of events, that the punditburo reports the president of the United States has lately "assumed . . . dictatorial powers" (syndicated columnist William Safire, November 15...

...Anyone with an average IQ and an Internet connection can perform the kind of legal research necessary to reach a minimally creditable judgment about the constitutional character of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism campaign...

...And the few hundred remaining detainees are being held for immigration or other criminal violations...

...The FBI and INS, in particular, seem soon thereafter to have concluded that he was the Palestinian Islamic Jihad's principal representative in North America...

...And then there is Judge Richard A. Posner of the Seventh U.S...

...We can't have that...

...That they are eager to talk anyway...

...How can he be so sure, one wonders...

...Nor can he have learned about Zadvydas's suddenly renewed relevance from the work of his colleagues, for not once since September 11 has the Washington Post—or any other major American newspaper, such is modern journalism's chronic, shocking ignorance of the law—mentioned a single word about that case...

...Nevertheless, despite the peculiarity of its bottom-line reasoning, much of the Zadvydas decision remains directly applicable to the current controversy over whether the Bush presidency has become a tyranny...

...There is Supreme Court precedent that is directly on point here...

...David Tell, for the Editors...

...Some "gulag...

...Nor—even now, while the government is said to be rounding up every Arab or Muslim fellow it can get its hands on—has Al-Arian even been detained...

...Nor has he ever been targeted for deportation...

...But we don't...

...And it is the same law, una-mended, that he is both enforcing and obeying in connection with the Justice Department's post-September 11 detentions of certain Arab and Muslim aliens holding non-immigrant student, tourist, or employment visas...

...District Court judge, as federal grand jury rules require...

...Sympathy for Al-Najjar seems less appropriate the more you know about him, however...

...As a jurisprudential matter, any respectable pronouncement on the constitutionality of the Bush/Ashcroft "gulag" must take extensive account of the Supreme Court's most recent refinement of the due process rights implicated by alien detentions, you would think...

...A small number are being held on material witness warrants, their case records sealed—by a U.S...

...he is currently free as a bird, and the subject of an incredibly stupid profile in the Los Angeles Times, which thinks we should know that Sami Al-Arian "wears Hush Puppies and resembles Mahatma Gandhi...

...Let us damn America" and its allies "until death" he has been heard to proclaim, at one of the many jihadist pep rallies he has sponsored since arriving in the states more than a decade ago...

...Which is fine—as long as they're actually doing it...