A. Barton Hinkle on the Right to Due Process

Too many conservatives feel complacent about soldiers arresting citizens without charges and holding them indefinitely on the mere suspicion of cooperating with al-Qaida. Perhaps they do not remember Madison's warning that "the means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home." But they ought to remember the early 1990s, writes A. Barton Hinkle, when militia groups sprang up in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco to defend the Constitution against what the NRA's Wayne LaPierre termed the "jack-booted thugs" of the federal government.