Proving that "they" can be serious as well as hilarious, The Editors marshal an argument which annihilates the moral degenerates at redstate.org.
Ted Barlow does the same thing to the hacks at The New Republic.
Meanwhile, Juan Cole comes right out and says the obvious:
The main reason is that the Bush Administration established the prison at Guantanamo in hopes of gutting the Bill of Rights. They wanted the prisoners there to be beyond the law, outside the framework of judiciality. They would have no lawyers. They would be tried only if the administration wanted to try them. They would be held indefinitely. They would be outside the framework of US law and also of the Geneval Conventions-- though Rumsfeld keeps slipping and calling them prisoners of war.
Terrorists are dirty criminals who should be tried, and if found guilty, put away for life. Terrorists are criminals. They are not non-human, and any attempt to create a category of human beings to whom the protections of the law do not apply is an attempt to undermine the Republic. It is a return of the Bill of Attainder, a feature of absolute monarchy that the Founding Fathers stood against. It is something to which even Rehnquist is opposed.
[...]
Guantanamo Prison should be closed because it was conceived as the beginning of the end of the American Republic.
That is exactly right. Look, there's a reason why the supporters of this administration, and the enablers in it, admire, for instance, Israel's assassination policies: they envy the heavy hand and deeply wish that America would adopt the techniques of authoritarianism. This with the Cult of Dear Leader mindset that inevitably invokes the divine right of kings makes for a noxious if obvious (to normal people) agenda for a repeal of the Bill of Rights.
In Bush's Amuhrika, the Star Chamber is already a fact of life; why shouldn't they endorse Bills of Attainder, too? It's a natural progression.
We were worried about Bush rolling back America to the 1880s. We were wrong. He wants to roll it back to 1775. Divine right of kings, with a democratic veneer for now, borrowing a bit from the nastiest democracies of recent times.
(RE: Israel's assassination policies, which are a flagrant example of Bills of Attainder, why do people keep saying that it is an enlightened democracy when it currently employs, to wingnuts' glee, something explicitly forbidden by our Founders over 200 years ago? In other words, we knew even then that democracies shouldn't do such things. What's their excuse? Oh, yeah, same as ours under Bush and same as every degraded democracy's throughout history: "security". The reality, of course, is that Israel, though superior to neighbouring dictatorships, is still nasty considering democratic standards, ranking somewhere between 1980s South Africa and 1980s Turkey on the unsavory chart. The American rightwing found things to admire in those democracies, too.)
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 9:31 PM
<< Home