SCOTUS ruling on habeas corpus for Gitmo detainees outlines Bush administration failing
Today the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration with a ruling 5-4 that asserted that detainees at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba have habeas corpus rights and can thus challenge the lawfulness of their detention.
“Cernig” at Newshoggers.com represents my thoughts well:
Some very bad people are likely to walk free along with the innocent because the Bush administration tried to walk around domestic and international principles of law, creating an entirely spurious new designation of “unlawful combatant” so that they could either hide detainees from due process indefinitely or, failing that, conduct kangaroo courts.
If they’d just stuck with the existing definitions, all the Gitmo detainees against whom they could build a real case under the actual rules of law, without torture and without rigging the courts, would have been tried as POW’s already. If found guilty, the death penalty would have been warranted in some cases. I would personally have had no problem with that. That it hasn’t happened is a failure of the Bush administration, no-one else. They have proven themselves incompetent to shepherd America’s national security.
The only thing worse than setting suspected terrorists free is the idea that the government can imprison anybody for as long as they like, for any reason, without giving that person legal recourse. That isn’t just a leap towards tyranny – that is tyranny. Justice Scalia’s dissent states that “[the decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” So be it. That’s the price we pay for upholding human rights in a dangerous world.
Had the Bush administration kept those human rights in mind and pursued a legal path towards fairly convicting the detainees that could be convicted, and freeing the ones for whom there was insufficient evidence (or who weren’t captured as combatants on a battlefield), we could have avoided this situation. Now, even the ones we have evidence on could be set free by challenging the legality of their detention. Blame Bush for that.
My answer to: ‘Justice Scalia’s dissent states that “[the decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”’
Hey, Tony! “Freedom isn’t free.” Ain’t that what youse neocons are saying all the time? Freedom entails some degree of risk, right? Want a risk-free, totally secure life? Move into a prison. But then, that’s Justice Scalia’s goal, isn’t it?
If we define “freedom” the way folks like Scalia define “freedom”, then the slogan is literally correct: “Freedom isn’t free”– in exactly the way Orwell meant “Freedom is slavery” or “War is peace” or “Ignorance is strength”.
“Freedom isn’t free” and “Support the troops” are examples of “brilliant” (ironic ‘air quotes’ here) propaganda slogans that can mean whatever the sender needs them to mean while still manipulating the receiver into either actively supporting the sender’s goals or at least self-neutering the dissenting receiver every time the receiver repeats the essentially empty slogan. Thus we had “anti-war” movement people (the confused liberal sort, anyway) neutering their own message each time they repeated the empty slogan “of course we support the troops” or the equally empty “Peace is patriotic, too” slogan or “We have to recapture the US flag”– when patriotism/nationalism/empire is a large part of the problem they’re facing and attempting to resist yet don’t understand or won’t admit.
(Please excuse the screed above. I happened upon your site after viewing your very useful “My First Wordpress Plugin” video. Very nice. Thanks.)
No excuse necessary. I always notice the “Freedom isn’t free” stickers. I agree, but not in the way that they mean. I agree in the way that you mean — that the price of freedom is living in a world where crime isn’t impossible. In a world where the government fights crime with one hand tied behind its back — the hand that if untethered would allow it to better strangle its law-abiding citizens.
The sticker usually means that they think soldiers dying in Iraq are paying the price for our freedom. They aren’t. Few are paying the price of freedom right now. Currently, freedom IS the price, and we’re buying a little bit of security, a lot of security theater, and a whole lot of unnecessary government expansion. It is for that that our soldiers are tragically dying. So I support our troops in that I empathize with people who are following orders that, while they don’t rise to the level that requires peaceful resistance, are hardly orders that are going to secure their place in history as great defenders of freedom. But if by “support our troops” it is meant that I support keeping them unnecessarily in harm’s way, then no, I don’t support that.