Our Battered Constitution (by Bush Adm.)

[rodeodance]

Subtitle on front page: The Bush administration has left no doubt about its contempt for a number of our supposedly most cherished constitutional guarantees.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/opinion/4herbert.html?oref=login&th

February 4, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Our Battered Constitution
By BOB HERBERT

The Constitution? Forget about it.

Only about half of America's high school students think newspapers should be allowed to publish freely, without government approval of their stories. And a third say the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment go "too far."

This has thrown a lot of noses out of joint. Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which financed a two-year study of high school attitudes about First Amendment freedoms, said, "These results are not only disturbing - they are dangerous."

But maybe we shouldn't be so hard on the youngsters. After all, they've been set a terrible example by a presidential administration that has left no doubt about its contempt for a number of our supposedly most cherished constitutional guarantees.

In an important decision on Monday, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the Bush administration cannot be allowed to defy the Constitution and an order of the Supreme Court in its treatment of the hundreds of prisoners it is holding at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The judge, Joyce Hens Green, said the administration must permit the detainees it is holding as "enemy combatants" to challenge their detention in federal courts.