I am not in favor of making this guy an enemy combatant, but this slippery slope stuff is as nonsensical here as it is in the gun control debate. This is NO historical example of liberty being lost incrementally, over time, through well meaning action or laws. It doesn't work that way, ever.
First they came for the
habeas corpus writs of suspected terrorists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a suspected terrorist.
This poem is cited all the time, but it was originated in a society that was
already a dictatorship when the first "first they came" occurred. In a free society, it doesn't work that way. Case in point: Abraham Lincoln took away
habeas corpus, but at the end of the Civil War, it returned. During World War II, FDR unjustly imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese Americans, but that did not turn this country into a dictatorship.
We make mistakes, and our government does bad things, all the time. But we catch them and reverse ourselves. It would IMO be a terrible mistake to make this guy an enemy combatant. But it won't lead us to a dictatorship, because THERE IS NO SLIPPERY SLOPE.
This will likely end up as a mistake, but:
The term "slippery slope" as it is being applied to the possible use of enemy combatant discussion does not necessarily mean that people think that we're going to end up with a dictatorship. The prospect of the continued erosion of the 4th Amendment is worrisome enough. First, Bush started slapping enemeny combatant tags on anyone they thought was probably a terrorist, and captured/killed them with impunity. Then, they started naming US citizens located in combat areas as enemy combatants and killed them without any kind of "due process" at all. Now, at least two big name senators are calling for a US citizen
inside the US as enemy combatants because he did something terrorist-like.
If that were to happen (and it very likely will not, but it's a worthy discussion since it's even being proposed by people in our government), the
next step might be expanded use of the enemeny combatant to US citizens on US soil for doing other things, some terrorist-like, but also maybe not, thereby circumventing the 4th Amendment pretty much altogether whenever the government feels like it. You may think that is alarmism, and that's fine, until #3 happens, I agree that it is.
But try to imagine those 4 events, and think of a graph with TIME on the X-axis and 4TH AMENDMENT RIGHTS on the Y-axis. Now, plot those 4 points, what do you get? A downward ####### slope, Tim. Amazingly, without anyone saying that we're going to have A Hitler-like dictatorship.
This is putting aside the flawed logic that just because you don't think it's ever happened before that it can never happen like this, ever, anywhere, but we don't even need to go to that because the only one that has said "dictatorship" has been you.