The great difficulty with Guantanamo is it was perceived correctly as being a place where people were not being detained subject to rules. I don't think the world thinks that you can't detain suspected terrorists - the world thinks you can do that, but you have to do it pursuant to rules and to clear charges.
People were floored when they saw that the underwear bomber, after less than 50 minutes of interrogation, was given the rights, privileges, and immunities of an American citizen under the Constitution.
Americans need to understand the significance of having their civil liberties dismantled. It doesn't just affect terrorists and foreigners, it affects us all.
The new laws passed by Congress in the name of fighting terrorism pose a greater danger to the civil liberties of American citizens than to the operations of terrorists. Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die.
In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
No law to combat terrorism should undermine the basic freedoms which we are trying to defend.
I will also continue to strongly oppose any reauthorization of the Patriot Act that does not protect the rights and freedoms of law-abiding Americans with no connection to terrorism.
It is only reasonable that our laws do not force our country to provide safe harbor to those individuals that are being sought out by their governments due to their terrorist ties.
I'm not worried that tomorrow there will be a battalion outside your Greenwich Village apartment. I'm worried about things like the McCain Liberman bill that would define enemy belligerents so loosely it would include Americans, which is just like Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini.
Right now, American law bars the admission of aliens suspected of terrorist activity - but not of terrorist sympathies.
