Amber

It’s time for a new Declaration of Independence — a declaration of national-security independence from the U.S. court system. Without a new declaration of our determination to make democratically the life-and-death decisions that a self-governing body politic must make — a declaration of our refusal to be dictated to by unaccountable judges — catastrophe beckons.

On Saturday, the weekly Obama bad-news dump featured anonymous defense officials telling the New York Times that the administration will soon announce enhanced due-process rights for alien enemy combatants. The combatants at issue are not those held at Guantanamo Bay but those detained at the U.S. air base in Bagram, north of Kabul. Evidently, each of the 600 combatants will be assigned a U.S. military advocate — not a lawyer — to examine his case, locate sympathetic witnesses, and sift through classified files to hunt for exculpatory evidence.

The ostensible purpose is to provide a beefed-up opportunity for these prisoners of war to seek their release, despite the facts that (a) Afghanistan is a hot combat zone in which we face a resurgent enemy actively targeting — and killing — American personnel, and (b) the prisoners have already had extraordinary due process for such a war zone, which is why, though thousands of people have been detained for some length of time on suspicion of aiding al-Qaeda and the Taliban, only 600 prisoners remain in custody.