Fergie's Tech Blog

Opinion: Mukasey’s Homeland Security Kangaroo Court

Michael Hampton writes on Homeland Stupidity:

One of the requirements for a totalitarian police state is a system of kangaroo courts, star chambers which operate in secret and in parallel to the existing judicial system to convict political prisoners of pretended crimes against the state, which could never survive in the regular courts. And former judge Michael Mukasey, nominee for U.S. Attorney General to replace Alberto Gonzales, has proposed that the United States adopt such a system of courts.

In a little-noticed opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in August, Mukasey argued that terrorism trials in regular courts exposed too much information to the enemy, undermining national security. The existing legal system, he says, is “strained and mismatched” to the task of dealing out justice to those accused of terrorism.

Mukasey cites two proposals, one by former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger to authorize detention of suspects before they have committed any crime, and one by Andrew C. McCarthy and Alykhan Velshi of the Center for Law & Counterterrorism to create national security courts which would try suspects — foreigner and American alike — in secret. The McCarthy-Velshi proposal would apply to “international terrorism and other national security issues.”

posted by Fergie @ 11/07/2007 09:45:00 PM