Philip is getting rocked Phil Shropshire, a sometime reader of this blog, gets a bit overheated over at Warbloggerwatch and catches some righteous wrath in the comments section. Here's a sample of Phil's comments:

[On the topic of enemy combatants] The government has yet to make a case that any of them are involved with terrorists. This isn't good police work to me. Call me naïve. You want to shoot them without trial, without evidence and without proof? And you have the fuckin' nerve to call us Nazis, jeez Louise [On root causes] The reason you discuss root causes, you frothy mouthed moron, is that you want them to stop attacking us in the future. And the reason you don't strike back, at least not without thinking through the consequences, is that you escalate the violence and everybody dies. I know you're a fascist and you're all prepared to blog away the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians but some of us aren't as deluded as you are… [On his position as the de Gaulle of the 2002 US] Look, you're the fucking idiots not us, always pointing a gun at your problems. Not only are we not the Nazis, but I personally think that we're in Nazi Germany and we're the dissenters.

Well! Seems like Mr. Shropshire got a bit worked up. I won't go to the trouble of rebutting him because he's automatically lost this argument by the application of Godwin's Law. However, I do want to mention that I actually agree with one of the points that Philip and Paul Orwin have referenced recently concerning Ashcroft. I think that the recent moves by Ashcroft in advocating camps that American citizens could be interned in speak volumes about Ashcroft's suitability for the post of Attorney General. The man is a fearmonger and a propagandist and should be removed from power immediately. He lied about Padilla's radioactive plans, and he implied that any who disagreed with him on the internment issue were simply not patriots (remember "ghosts of lost liberty?"). He is a reactionary involved in a power grab who needs to be stopped now. Here's an excerpt from the LA Times article:

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft's announced desire for camps for U.S. citizens he deems to be "enemy combatants" has moved him from merely being a political embarrassment to being a constitutional menace. Ashcroft's plan, disclosed last week but little publicized, would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatants. ... Ashcroft hopes to use his self-made "enemy combatant" stamp for any citizen whom he deems to be part of a wider terrorist conspiracy. 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.

If this is true - and I have not yet seen a press release to impugn its accuracy - Ashcroft has much to say for himself. I predict that he will call his critics "anti-American" and imply that they're unreasonable in condemning the imprisonment of American citizens without due process. In doing so he should lose his last supporters, as this situation is radically different from the one we found ourselves in 9 months ago. At that time, I couldn't really understand the emotion over the treatment of captured Al Qaeda/Taliban soldiers in Gitmo, as their guilt was apparent and it was only a matter of what punishment would be administered and when. I wasn't familiar with the vagaries of military law as applied to non-state actors, but I didn't think that we were anywhere close to a slippery slope. In this case, however, the lefties are right - the expansion of untrammeled police powers does not bode well for anyone. I simply don't trust Ashcroft - or anyone for that matter - with the ability to take an American citizen into custody without charging them. Unlike the case of guys fighting us in Afghanistan, guilt in such a situation is not cut and dried without proof. If proof does not exist, then there's no reason to take someone into custody. If proof exists, standard procedures should and can be followed unless the revelation of proof is itself a matter of national security. Is this "compromising national security" dilemma a big issue? It seems to be the only defensible rationale for imprisonment without trial. I'm not convinced that there would be many trials in which there was no evidence that could be revealed without damaging national security. After all, once a suspected terrorist was taken into custody, his fellow terrorists would notice that he was gone and that at least part of their operation had been compromised. The subsequent revelations could be fairly pedestrian things (e.g. that the fellow had dynamite in his apartment) that would be enough to put him in jail if information about the guy's place in the grand scheme of things could not be safely revealed.