President should not be sole determiner of who is a 'terrorist'

Upending our system of checks and balances, to turn loose the enormous power possessed by U.S. presidents without judicial or congressional oversight, is a bigger threat to our national security, in the long run, than any danger posed by al-Qaida or its allies.

Fallibility + unchecked power = trouble

PETER ERLINDER

Peter Erlinder is a professor of constitutional criminal law at William Mitchell College of Law. His e-mail address is peter.erlinder@wmitchell.edu.

At the same time the House and Senate are reconsidering the Bush administration's claim that it needs the power to tap all foreign phone calls without asking a court to issue a warrant, the American people got concrete evidence why limits on executive-branch power are built into the Constitution.

This month, the reality-based film "Rendition," in which an innocent person is seized in the U.S. and tortured by a friendly government on the order of a well-meaning intelligence expert played by Meryl Streep, was released just days before Congress publicly apologized for the real-life "rendition" and torture of a Canadian citizen of Middle-Eastern descent, based on bad information. Just like the movie.

And, on Monday, a Texas jury rejected "terrorism" charges against the Holy Land Foundation, which was formerly the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. until it was shut down by presidential decree not long after Sept. 11, 2001. The Texas jury's decision followed refusal to convict anyone by juries in Tampa and Chicago, in the two other major trials of supposed Palestinian "terrorism supporters" in the U.S. After hearing all the evidence, American jurors refused to convict on even ONE of the hundreds of individual charges brought against nearly a dozen defendants in these three major "terrorism" cases.

In these instances, the executive branch was certain it was right, but ordinary U.S. jurors - part of the system by which Americans check the power of their government found the evidence lacking.

(The rest is here.)