Indefinite Detention, No Trial

The corporatist Wall Street Journal often is given the scoop on police state expansions of power because they will report on such expansions uncritically. The trend continued recently when the Journal reported on rumblings that the Obama administration is considering indefinitely holding detainees (i.e. accused terrorists) without trial. This state of affairs is reported as if it is normal without quoting a civil liberties proponent who would frame such an action as lunacy (the ever-present, usually quoted "administration critic" that is quoted whenever such stories are reported in equally corporatist but more centrist publications like the New York Times or the Washington Post). No corporatist paper, of course, would print an alternative view pointing out prior successful federal court prosecutions of accused terrorists who actually committed violent acts on U.S. soil, such as Timothy McVeigh or the original World Trade Center bombers. If the FBI, federal law enforcement, and U.S. attorneys were able to build successful cases against those perpetrators, why has no one in the corporate press questioned why neither the Bush nor the Obama administration is capable of trying cases against the current crop of alleged terrorists?

Is it possible that the cases against the current crop of detainees is paper-thin and/or based on information gathered through torture (such information being inherently unreliable as people might say *anything* to get the torture to stop)? Since our military-intelligence infrastructure is an extension of global corporatist interest (the ultimate bargaining chip, if you will, to enforce multinational corporate will in any arena, globally), corporatist media is wary of presenting criticism of any utilization of force by the military/intelligence system that has intertwined closer than ever since the start of the Global War on Anyone Opposed to U.S. Expansionism (the new way to demonize anyone who opposes corporate interests anywhere, as past revelations of wiretapping of peace activists and other radicals seems to imply).

Since so many detainees committed no acts of violence against U.S. citizens (or anyone), how far are we away from the "thought crime" scenario in "1984"?