Constitution, liberty under siege

A 1998 movie, “The Siege,” told a cautionary tale that may turn out to be closer to future reality than most of us would want to believe.

In the flick, government officials, scared out of their small minds by terrorism on U.S. soil, call in the military to root out the bad guys.

What ends up happening, of course, is that the Constitution gets dragged through the bloody mud and American troops, draped in the flag, become the enemy — all in the name of fighting terrorism.

It appears that a defense bill now making its way through Congress is plausibly setting up the possibility of just such a scenario. Of course, at this point, we have no idea what, if any, roles Bruce Willis, Denzel Washington and Annette Bening would play.

The legislation would allow the Department of Defense to arrest suspected terrorists or sympathizers on U.S. soil. It would apparently not extend arrest powers to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. U.S. citizens outside the country, however, appear to be at risk of arrest.

And continuing our shameful decade-long practice of arresting suspected terrorists (or just anybody who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time), these “detainees” would get one shot in front of a judge before they find themselves behind bars indefinitely with no legal recourse.

Enter Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

This measure easily passed the Senate, with U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., voting with the majority. In an e-mail exchange, the senator contended that the legislation would not allow the military to actually perform police actions on our soil but would allow for military intelligence-gathering activities.

Chalk up a vote for fear and shaky faith in our legal system.

There is a good reason our lawmakers decided long ago to prevent the military from having any sort of police authority on the homeland. If police forces are the scalpels that deal precisely with individual crimes and criminals, the military is the chainsaw that hacks away at anything in its path. Police forces work under the principle of innocent until proven guilty; military troops see and eliminate enemy targets.

Those two don’t and can’t mix.

The other tip of this antiterror spear is the notion that suspected terrorists have no constitutional rights to due process.

A suspect picked up for an alleged serious crime anywhere in Arkansas goes before a judge to determine bond. Then there will be hearing after hearing, during which the suspect will have the right to challenge the government’s positions. Ultimately, speedily in fact, there will be a trial.

For suspected terrorists, those protections don’t apply. These (mostly) men don’t get to argue their case or know what “evidence” there is against them.

They sit in a prison for years. And make no mistake — a decade lost to an overzealous nation bent on revenge can make a terrorist out of even the meekest camel herder.

Pryor contended that detainees have all the rights they need.

“Detainees held in the United States or Guantanamo may seek federal court review of the legality of their detention in habeas corpus proceedings. The government will then bear the burden of proving the legality of the detention by the preponderance of the evidence,” he wrote.

It’s doubtful that many of the hundreds of detainees who have spent years behind the concertina wire at Camp America at Guantanamo would agree that they have had their day in court.

If art truly does imitate life, we would be wise to recall that the character in “The Siege” who most vehemently opposed military intervention on the homeland was the Army colonel.

Any chance Bruce Willis can get a vote in Congress?

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