In his latest post, John Hinderaker of Power Line describes my positions as "ludicrous," "silly" and "ill-informed." Touche! Gratuitous insults always make a good case much better. Well done.

I used to be a Republican until George W. Bush, so I love all assumptions about my "liberal" nature. The straw man conservatives love to prop up is a peacenik, flower throwing and wearing, hippie who thinks the world's problems can be solved by loving their cat more.

It's a funny image, but I have never had anyone throw a flower at me (not even Iraqis when we invaded them) and in my five years of doing a "progressive" show, I have only heard from one socialist (and one anarchist). It's a nonsense caricature. Real liberals are perfectly mainstream Americans who think we should only invade countries that attack us, we should try to get everyone healthcare and increase the minimum wage a little. How radical!

I was a Republican who believed in Ronald Reagan's "Peace Through Strength." I believed a 70% tax bracket was out of control. I thought George H.W. Bush's New World Order was the best foreign policy initiative in nearly forty years. I even held pro-war rallies for the first Persian Gulf War.

But here's what separates me from what I call the "Remaining Republicans" – I believe in America. That might sound harsh, but let me explain.

The American justice system provides for constitutional rights, such as the right to an attorney, the right to face your accused, etc. These rights are thorough, expansive and brilliant.

In the past, I have even argued against some of these rights. As a former member of the Federalists Society, I argued that the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is too broad. As long as we have strictures against torture and abuse, defendants don't need the right to stay quiet throughout their whole trial. It winds up in absurd trials where we are supposed to decide if the accused is guilty or innocent without even hearing from him. I also believe the Miranda rights are court made law and are not necessary to protect constitutional rights.

That makes me substantially more conservative on legal issues than a great majority of Americans. But in all that time, I never argued that any of these changes should be made by fiat or supra-constitutional executive orders. There is a process. I believe in the process.

If you don't like a clause in the Fifth Amendment, you need to pass another amendment to the constitution to change it. If you don't believe in the Miranda rights, you have to convince the Supreme Court to overrule their earlier decisions. You can't just have a president go outside the law and the system.

Now, we come to case of Jose Padilla. He is a citizen who before the Bush administration would have had the benefit of all of his constitutional protections. With this government in charge, it didn't work out that way for him.

He was arrested on May 8, 2002 on a material witness warrant at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. The government did not -- or could not -- present any evidence to substantiate this charge. So, on June 9, 2002 it took the unprecedented step of labeling Padilla an "enemy combatant."

I say unprecedented because it has never been done before! The executive branch arbitrarily and at its sole discretion decided to label a United States citizen arrested in the United States an enemy combatant – and stripped him of all of his constitutional rights.

We didn't do this to Timothy McVeigh, or the Unabomber, or Charles Manson, or Jeffrey Dahmer or any American citizen we have ever arrested before. The reason we never did it before is because there is no law that allows for it. It is made up and completely unconstitutional.

How do I know? The Supreme Court has already decided the issue. The only other time we did something similar was to Yaser Hamdi – another American citizen the Bush administration designated an enemy combatant. Hamdi was at least caught in the battlefield in Afghanistan. There was evidence that he was a combatant, lawful or otherwise.

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Hamdi could not be denied due process because the administration decided to call him an enemy combatant. The defendant was a citizen and he could not be held indefinitely without his constitutional rights.

There have been "unlawful enemy combatants" before, but no one has labeled a citizen one before and argued that it stripped them of their rights. The Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch has the right to decide who is and is not a lawful combatant, but that they cannot use that as a reason to deny citizens their rights indefinitely.

Antonin Scalia went even further than the majority when he said that if habeas corpus is not suspended in accordance with the strictures of the constitution (which it has not been), then the government must charge the defendant – or let him go.

He added, "If civil rights are to be curtailed during wartime, it must be done openly and democratically, as the Constitution requires, rather than by silent erosion."

Justice John Paul Stevens joined Scalia's opinion. Arguably the most liberal and the most conservative justices on the court agreed – the administration must follow the constitution.

And in the end, the government did what Scalia demanded. They couldn't charge Hamdi because they didn't have enough evidence on him – so they let him go. They originally claimed he was so dangerous we couldn't even bring him to trial and eventually struck a deal to release him because they had so little evidence of how dangerous he was.

This ruling clearly would have applied to Jose Padilla, but his case was sent back to lower courts on a technicality. Then when it was about to come up again for review, the Justice Department at the last second changed strategy to avoid what would have been a clear defeat in the Supreme Court. At this point, the government said – eh, we didn't mean it; we're no longer keeping him as an enemy combatant. They proceeded to charge Padilla with a broad terrorist conspiracy outside of the United States that has nothing to do with Al Qaeda.

You didn't read that wrong. The indictment had nothing about a dirty bomb – the first administration lie about Padilla. Nothing about blowing up apartment buildings – the second administration lie (which Hinderaker comically references despite the fact that it has been completely discredited and not been charged). And nothing about Al Qaeda at all!

They charged him with trying to aid a terrorist network aimed at recruiting volunteers for Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia and Kosovo. We kept an American citizen locked up without rights for close to four years because he was planning to do something in Chechnya?

Michael Luttig was one of the most conservative judges in the country and was seriously considered by the Bush administration for a Supreme Court nomination. He wrote the original decision for the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowing the Bush administration to keep enemy combatants without rights (which was later overturned by the Supreme Court).

When the Justice Department changed its reasons for holding Padilla as they indicted him, Luttig was furious and said it led to the impression that the government had held him "by mistake."

Luttig commented:

"These impressions have been left, we fear, at what may ultimately prove to be a substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts, to whom it will one day need to argue again in support of a principle of assertedly like importance and necessity to the one that it seems to abandon today."

"While there could be an objective that could command such a price as all of this, it is difficult to imagine what that objective would be."

So, now that we see the government has almost nothing on Padilla, let's see what we did to him. In my last piece, I said that the government had denied Padilla access to legal counsel for over two years. I was wrong! It was a little under two years. Padilla was not allowed to see a lawyer between June 9, 2002 and March 3, 2004. That is about 21 months.

Hinderaker says that Padilla was represented by lawyers throughout the process. Yes, lawyers were filing petitions for him in the court system, but he was never allowed to see them or present his case on the merits of the charges -- in fact, there weren't even any charges until November 22, 2005.

Almost the entire time, the lawyers were simply filing petitions to get their client a day in court or even a simple meeting with him. No case in American history has ever considered this to be proper legal representation.

So, what were we doing to Padilla while we had him in this important secret detention? Here's what both sides agree to:

-- 1,037 days of solitary confinement.

-- Extended periods of sensory deprivation throughout that time.

-- Confinement in a 9-by-7 foot cell.

-- No natural light in the cell; manipulation of temperature to produce extreme cold or heat; the detainee was often forced to sleep on a steel frame with no mattress; and had no access to anyone other than his interrogators for extended periods.

The defense further charges that sensory deprivation lasted for almost the entire period of confinement. They say Padilla even had to wear heavy goggles and headsets when being transferred from his cell to interrogation rooms, so that he could not see or interact with anyone else. Then, when he was in interrogation, he would be subjected to loud noises and harsh lights in order to disorient him. Similar treatment in earlier CIA experiments produced "personality disintegration" in subjects.

Former Army Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, James Yee, said that so many detainees were subjected to this treatment at Guantanamo that they had a whole cell block built to house detainees who were reduced to a delusional state. Padilla was not held in Guantanamo Bay, but the description of his treatment matches former detainees released from that facility and the description of US officials from those facilities.

In other words, there is a case to be made that this was standard operating procedure. The government does not deny that there was sensory deprivation and an "alternative set of procedures" for treating these detainees. However, they claim that from time to time they would allow Padilla to see natural sunlight or to see an imam. They do not specify if this was done before, after or during Padilla's long stay in solitary confinement.

The government partly concedes the alternative treatments because they are on videotape and partly because they are under the impression that a presidential order makes all of this legal, even if it does not meet prior standards of lawful interrogation.

However, the video of the last interrogation of Jose Padilla has gone missing. There is a 72 hour gap where the video was either turned off or went missing afterward. The government claims that this was yet another honest mistake, in a long line of honest mistakes. Like the honest mistake that Padilla was going to detonate a dirty bomb inside the United States when in fact they had absolutely no evidence of that.

Is it possible that the government happened to lose the last interrogation tape and there was nothing on that tape that went beyond the abuses described here? Yes.

Is it possible that all of the detainees conspired ahead of time to make up very specific interrogation tactics that they would pretend the US used against them if they were ever captured, half of which the US never did before but would concede to if challenged? I suppose someone could think that's possible.

Is it possible that the government has a vast collection of real evidence that shows how incredibly guilty Jose Padilla is of all the crimes they claimed he was responsible for earlier but just decided not to charge him with any of that when they were finally forced to indict him? Again, I suppose someone could think that was possible.

Are any of these things likely if you are a reasonable, sentient human being? Not by a country mile. The far more likely answer is that the government in its exuberance to fight terrorism (and grab more executive power) went outside of our legal system in how they treated these detainees, in how they stripped them of their rights and how they exaggerated claims against them.

This is the point at which, some conservatives will start screaming – we had to!!! You can't fight these monstrous terrorists with our ordinary rules and regulations. While we treat them with kids' gloves, they are cutting people's heads off.

Fine. What you are saying there is that you don't believe in the American justice system and the American form of government. You think we need a strong executive, that the checks and balances of the constitution are too limiting, that our constitutional rights leave us vulnerable and that we need go outside of our established rule of law to get the job done.

First, let me remind everybody that we beat the Nazis, the Communists and every other foreign and domestic enemy with the laws and constitution we have now. The only times we went outside of the system, like the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, we wound up regretting our actions and had nothing to show for it.

Second, I believe in our constitution. I believe in the American justice system. I believe in the American form of government. I think it is strong enough to do the job. I don't believe we have to revert to a more authoritarian form of government to be able to effectively combat our enemies. I don't think we have to be more like them to fight them.

Ye, of little faith, do you really think that America is that weak?

The genius of our system is checks and balances. Our founding fathers realized that unchecked power almost always leads to abuse. And that is precisely the type of abuse we have seen over the last six years.

Some can credibly claim that we need more unchecked power in order to fight our enemies, but they are not arguing for the American system. They are arguing to change the system – and to do so by presidential fiat, not by amending the constitution or following the rule of law.

No one can credibly claim that this administration has followed past precedent and followed the Geneva conventions or constitutional strictures. The president admits they used an "alternative set of procedures" to treat detainees, the Attorney General said the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and outdated, and even Antonin Scalia has said the administration has acted unconstitutionally.

What I don't understand are Republicans who see all of this and still stand with these guys. Is it an instinctual deference to authority? Is it being a loyal comrade to your political party no matter what? Is it a belief that America is not up to the job of fighting a bunch of guys living in a cave when we have beat all other enemies that came before us?

I wasn't born a Republican. I chose to be one because I believed in the things the party stood for. But when the party changed from the New World Order to preemptive strikes against countries that did not attack us, and when it changed from being the party of law and order to the party of ignoring the rule of law, I was able to see that they weren't right for the country anymore.

This is not the Republican Party I grew up in. This is not a conservative philosophy that treasures our constitution and our form of government. This administration has become an embarrassment. They never believed in the greatness of this country and the strength of its principles.

In the past, we would have captured, questioned and charged Jose Padilla. If we had evidence on him, we would convict him and send him to a maximum security prison in Colorado (right next to Ramzi Yousef and Omar Abdel-Rahman – the two men convicted of planning and executing the first attack against the World Trade Center).

Now, we have the worst of all worlds. We detained Padilla without rights, we abused him with "alternative" treatments and now we might have to let him go because we either never had anything on him or can't share what we learned because we obtained it through coercion. No justice for Padilla, no justice for us and no justice for the American system.

These days I often find myself shaking my head at the remaining Republicans as they argue against our constitutional system. How could you let Osama bin Laden change this great country? How could you let him and his like scare us into changing the best form of government ever created by man? How could you have so little faith in this great country and what we stand for?

The Young Turks