Reply #3: "They have left the impression [View All]

They have left the impression
that the government may even have come to the belief that the
principle in reliance upon which it has detained Padilla for this
time, that the President possesses the authority to detain enemy
combatants who enter into this country for the purpose of
attacking America and its citizens from within, can, in the end,
yield to expediency with little or no cost to its conduct of the
war against terror –- an impression we would have thought the
government likewise could ill afford to leave extant. And these
impressions have been left, we fear, at what may ultimately prove
to be substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the
courts, to whom it will one day need to argue again in support of
a principle of assertedly like importance and necessity to the
one that it seems to abandon today.