Shredding the Magna Carta.

• Position: Comment

The Bush Administration wants to rip up not just the Bill of Rights. Its going after the Magna Carta, too. It wants to do away with habeas corpus, the essential, 800-year-old right that allows the accused to appear before a judge and plead.

But the Bush Administration can't be bothered with that.

The foreign enemy combatants it is holding in Guantanamo have no due process rights at all, according to the Justice Department.

And enemy combatants who are U.S. citizens, such as Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, barely have any, either. They are not entitled to counsel, they are not entitled to appear in court in person, and they are not entitled to a speedy trial. In fact, they can be held indefinitely without charge.

What is stunning is how brazen and weak are the arguments the Bush Administration has put forward in these cases.

Some of the arguments are downright laughable. In the Hamdi case, the government asserts in its brief that it is acting in a "humane" way, even though Hamdi has been in solitary confinement for two years. The President, the brief says, has "the authority to engage in the time-honored and humanitarian practice of detaining enemy combatants captured in connection with the conflict, as opposed to subjecting such combatants to the more harmful consequences of war." (Italics in original throughout.)

What would those be? Torture and dismemberment? According to the Justice Department, Hamdi should be grateful for his little cell.

Then there is the claim that the President and only the President can determine whether someone is a prisoner of war, who has certain rights, or an enemy combatant, who has none. "The President has conclusively determined that Al Qaeda and the Taliban detainees are not entitled to [Geneva Convention] privileges," the government writes in its Hamdi brief. "Neither the [Geneva Convention] nor the military's own regulations provide for any review of the military's determination that an individual is an enemy combatant in the first place." Or, as the Administration put it in the Padilla brief, "There is no warrant for second-guessing the President's judgment" in these designations.

As to why the enemy combatant may not have the benefit of counsel, the Administration is quite clear: it wants to be able to extract information from the detainee under interrogation, and granting counsel would interfere with that. "The military has learned that creating a relationship of trust and dependency between a questioner and a detainee is of 'paramount importance' to successful intelligence gathering," the Administration writes in its Hamdi brief. "This critical source of information would be gravely threatened" by access to counsel.

Justice John Paul Stevens tore this...