The editorial from Scripps Howard News Service, "Closing Guantanamo" (Nov. 13) makes the case for redeeming the reputation of our country by closing our shameful gulag and ending its kangaroo courts. However, the devil is in the details.

Pressure is building to create a National Security Court to deal with the trial (or preventive detention without trial) of anyone accused of being a terrorist. For a chilling look at the concept, read "The Terrorists' Court" by Jack Goldsmith and Neal Katyal in The New York Times (July 11, 2007).

When you read phrases like "a congressionally sanctioned system of preventive detention," "the standards of proof for evidence ... might not meet every jot and tittle of American criminal law," or "detainees need not be given the full panoply of criminal protections," you may be tempted to say, "So what? After all, we're talking about foreign terrorists."

Not so, according to Goldsmith and Katyal, "Congress should insist that the same rules apply to citizen and non-citizen terrorist detainees" to be "consistent with the values enshrined in the Constitution's equal protection clause." George Orwell couldn't have said it better.

All Americans, whether Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, who value our hard-won Constitutional rights should be outraged at any attempt to deny those rights to any American.

I, for one, have no intention of submitting to a police state, whether imposed by the left or the right.

A National Security Court for Americans? No way!

John R. Merrill

Augusta