I hate playing whack-a-mole
May. 22nd, 2010 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumObama is acting like Bush
The summary is this: The Administration just won a court case in which they argued that prisoners in Bagram, Afghanistan, had no right to make habeas corpus petitions, because they were in Afhganistan, and so outside our jurisdiction.
This is, to be blunt, a facile lie. Yes, they are in Afghanistan, but they are in our custody.
Lindsey Graham said, at the time of the second post, that we needed to restrict them because the claims were "clogging the courts." Which was as much nonsense as his comment on this case, "“There is a reason we have never allowed enemy prisoners detained overseas in an active war zone to sue in federal court for their release. It simply makes no sense and would be the ultimate act of turning the war into a crime.”
No, Senator, the reason we don't do that for enemy prisoners is that they are prisoners of war, and they aren't entitled to it. They also don't need it, because they have a slew of (important, and justifiable) rights.
But we didn't say these people were POWs, we said they were criminals. More to the point, these weren't captured on the battlefield. No, they were arrested in a completely different country and then shipped to Bagram. Why? Because this Administration chose to continue the policies of the previous one, we now have (barring a Supreme Court which reverses the Appeals court... iffy, even if Kagan isn't appointed, or recuses herself because she argued for this case, because one of the justices who made the decision affirming the habeas rights of prisoners at Gitmo was Stevens, and a 4-4 split would leave the lower court's ruling as is) a gov't with the ability to arrest anyone they like, and send them to Bagram, where they have no rights.
It's possible this might be absolute (the ruling is vague on how broad the class of people being stripped of their rights is), and the gov't could, in fact, apply this tactic to anyone, you, me, anyone.
Just grab them as a "terrorist" and ship them to Bagram, where all those pesky little guarantees of freedom, just evaporate. In short, we have no rights, just stirring platitudes which assure us that "America Stands for Freedom"™.
The summary is this: The Administration just won a court case in which they argued that prisoners in Bagram, Afghanistan, had no right to make habeas corpus petitions, because they were in Afhganistan, and so outside our jurisdiction.
This is, to be blunt, a facile lie. Yes, they are in Afghanistan, but they are in our custody.
Lindsey Graham said, at the time of the second post, that we needed to restrict them because the claims were "clogging the courts." Which was as much nonsense as his comment on this case, "“There is a reason we have never allowed enemy prisoners detained overseas in an active war zone to sue in federal court for their release. It simply makes no sense and would be the ultimate act of turning the war into a crime.”
No, Senator, the reason we don't do that for enemy prisoners is that they are prisoners of war, and they aren't entitled to it. They also don't need it, because they have a slew of (important, and justifiable) rights.
But we didn't say these people were POWs, we said they were criminals. More to the point, these weren't captured on the battlefield. No, they were arrested in a completely different country and then shipped to Bagram. Why? Because this Administration chose to continue the policies of the previous one, we now have (barring a Supreme Court which reverses the Appeals court... iffy, even if Kagan isn't appointed, or recuses herself because she argued for this case, because one of the justices who made the decision affirming the habeas rights of prisoners at Gitmo was Stevens, and a 4-4 split would leave the lower court's ruling as is) a gov't with the ability to arrest anyone they like, and send them to Bagram, where they have no rights.
It's possible this might be absolute (the ruling is vague on how broad the class of people being stripped of their rights is), and the gov't could, in fact, apply this tactic to anyone, you, me, anyone.
Just grab them as a "terrorist" and ship them to Bagram, where all those pesky little guarantees of freedom, just evaporate. In short, we have no rights, just stirring platitudes which assure us that "America Stands for Freedom"™.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-23 01:20 pm (UTC)It's not that we've always observed those Laws & Ideals, either in the Letter or the Spirit, but during most of my (81+ years) lifetime they've been held up as our Noble Ideal. It's difficult to accept the loss of something like that, and I think we've seriously (and unnecessarily) diminished ourselves.