Please inform this 'middle american'.....
Why are non-citizen, enemy combatants being granted the same civil rights I enjoy? POW's they should be for sure. Tried for crimes agains humanity some of them should be. But, civil rights?
I don't get it. I'm certain though, some one here will enlighten me.
It's pretty simple:
ALL men are entitled to certain inalienable rights. Not 'Just American Men'.
ALL men. It's a pretty basic concept.
One of these inalienable is the right to know why you've been thrown in prison.
Is habeas corpus even a 'civil right'? I thought habeas was even more basic and fundamental than that. Civil rights were sort of an afterthought, unspoken in early drafts--there was the grand inconsistency associated with that sticky negro problem, after all-- whereas you can think of habeas as the universal joint of the constitution. Without habeas, there is no real counterbalance of executive and legislative powers and the whole grand idea this nation was built upon becomes a formless mirage, to be shaped by the will of whomever is in charge at any given moment.
PB, I understand this sounds completely outrageous, but according to Bush's enemy non-combatant theories, he has the right to summarily determine that YOU are a threat to the republic, instruct his police to enter your middle american home and to detain your middle american ass at GITMO or some grand waterboard palace in Ufghanistan until and for as long as he deems fit. And there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.
Doesn't something about this scenario strike you as fundamentally un-American and unconstitutional? Are you really proud to be an American when you know your representatives are doing that to people from elsewhere in the world? Is your faith in our system of justice so poor that you fear that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and other 9/11 masterminds should not be tried for his crimes against humanity less we risk his ultimate freedom?
I mean, what part of the film
Rendition didn't you understand?
I'm no constitutional scholar, but it seems to me that all the Supremes are saying to Bush in this decision--for the third time--is, "[waving their tattered Constitution] Um, hello! Your name is
President George, not
King George."
Where Dubya completely and utterly *fudge*ed up was at the very outset, by not declaring these prisoners as POW's. He couldn't really do that given that he wanted to waterboard each and every one of the whole 1.5 billion of them for what they did on 9/11. He lost his mind and his soul, drunk with power and blood thirsty for revenge.
So with this decision, I don't worry at all that the Supremes have seemed to give away civil rights to yet another group of brown people.
All that they've really done is simply apply another beotch-slap to an executive possessed by his own unbridled arrogance.
This tragically flawed man Dubya reminds me more and more and more of
Macbeth, with Condi playing the role of the ambitiously manipulative and duplicitous Lady Macbeth. Laura is just so innocent in all of this (me hopes).
