In a piece entitled, The Rumsfeld-Bush Legal Black Hole: Powers Formerly Reserved Only for Kings, Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff reports on a Feb. 6 report from The Association of the Bar of the City of New York condemning the Bush administration’s indefinite detentions of alleged enemy combatants.

Hentoff cites this quote from the bar’s report: “It should take far more than the monstrous brutality of a handful of terrorists to drive us to abandon our core constitutional values. We can effectively combat terrorism in the United States without jettisoning the core due process principles that form the essence of the rule of law underlying our system of government. Insistence on the rule of law will not undermine our national security. Abandoning the rule of law will threaten our national identity.”

The full report, “The Indefinite Detention of ‘Enemy Combatants’: Balancing Due Process and National Security in the Context of the War on Terror,” is available here.

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Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.