BOUMEDIENE VS UNITED STATES

THE DISSENTS ARE REALLY THE NEWS AS FOUR JUSTICES WOULD TRIM LIBERTY

FOR FEAR OF CAVE DWELLING, GOAT HERDING BUMS . . . . .

People can't be serious!  Our military is capable of kicking their butts!  Check with the Taliban, who are getting toasted whenever we decide to do them in.  Do we really need to give up our rights?  And our Courts,  they lock up about 97% of the people who show up for "trial"!!  Not satisfied with current casualties, the Right Wing would be happy to trash the Bill of Rights as another "cost of war"!  Now THAT IS TERRIFYING!!!!  Apparently the colonial reprise "LIBERTY OR DEATH" is something that the wealthy right wingers would like to apply in a "safe" manner.

The reassurance that the Constitution takes from winning at the United States Supreme Court is surely tempered by the Dissents and the vitriolic fear mongering of the neocons.  SLATE features a sharp rebuke for Justice Scalia's approach to the issue,  noting that his claim that some Gitmo Detainees left to attack in Iraq has nothing to do with Habeas: they were released by the military:  "so even the innocent are guilty".  Its a kind of rationle that simply does not invest any trust in the Criminal Justice System!   The mantra of making this a military effort and not a criminal effort seems to have some attraction to folks who find the mundane court system far too "soft".   Soft?

Perhaps the real problem is so many of the elite, wealthy folks who have had cradle to grave financial security and privilege have never really looked into the Criminal Justice System.  They read the tomes of the people who want to revise history and praise McCarhtyism  (Ann Coulter),  and they really believe that the criminal courts are a sieve through which known criminals and mass murderers waltz with evil grins through the exit and slaughter with impunity!  When people suggest that Liberty and Due Process are a threat to national security, the implication is that we can't "afford" the fairness we give the run of the mill criminal.  That leads one to believe that there is a deep distrust of the system based on what our beloved and learned President Bush would call a "misunderestimation" of the courts.

Those of us in the system know better.  Conviction rates in excess of 90%,  hundreds of thousands locked up,  including factually innocent people,  and a system tilted strongly toward Big Brother - the Government.  Clearly if Scalia is concerned because people released from Gitmo committed terrorist acts,  his dissent is proof that maybe the courts would do better,  convicting 90% of those charged!  Professor Lawrence Tribe says Justice Scalia likes to set up a political trap with "red meat" in his dissents.

Unless of course, many of the 300 or so at Gitmo are NOT terrorists, and include innocents who were offered up on phony claims encouraged by cash bounty.  To argue that you can't have due process because it will result in "death for Americans" is essentially to surrender: "Osama,  you got us.  We can't afford our Bill of Rights.  Because you might blow up a building, we are going to let the President lock up anybody, revoke Habeas, and live happily unless the President decrees us "enemy combatants."   Its the essence of surrender that the neocons and the dissenters have embraced, riding a tide of fear and endorsing policy solely based on that fear.

The other concern is of course that the wave of fear also has had a ride on waterboarding and other coercion, and the Limbaugh/ Coulter crew is saddened by the prospect that violation of the law by the government could end up hurting some cases.  That in itself is a very frightening attitude, not unlike President Putin, who has gradually eroded a fledgling democracy with broad public support, largely on a wave of fear.    Fear is hard to beat, because it sweeps over rational arguments with bloody images, and you wonder what people will think of you if it turns out somebody does die in the wak of your decision, and you might share blame!  Its become somewhat trite by overuse,  but an excellent history of fear leading to a total loss of liberty can be found in JONA GOLDHAGAN'S "Hitler's Willing Executioners: The German People and the Holocaust"

What all of this right wing propaganda demonizing "Liberals" does is makes it easy for Americans to start thinking of illegal aliens, terrorist suspects, criminals, and anybody else the axis of domestic evil targets,  in terms of bigotry and prejudice.  You can talk to some of the 30%'ers who still love BUSH, and you get a chilling sense of their mindless subscription to the idea that "liberals are immoral" and their willingness to never hold W accountable for anything,  yet to reach back and complain about Jimmy Carter,  or to suggest the gas price spike is the fault of the new, democratic congress! 

What's really chilling is to see that four justices of the Supreme Court of the United States would turn back the clock if they could, and along with Ann Coulter happily suspend the Constitution (to what extent is not clear, but internment camps would not be incompatible with their stated rationale) without any empirical evidence to support that!  "More Americans will die because of this decision" is a stunning complaint, when at most 300 hundred petitioners are at issue here.   How frightened must we be to see these bums as so terrifically powerful!

Its very disappoining that the right, once so tough under Regan and Ike,  would now be full of cowardace to the point that they would give up core values for fear Americans might die.   There seems to be little fear related to the 60,000 wounded and 5,000 dead in Iraq,  and no counting at all of the tens of thousands of civilians (including children who supposedly have a "Right to Life").   But what was, militarily, economicially though not humanly,  a minor pinprick in a country of over 250 million people seems sufficient to approach Marshal Law.   It would be better to clean them out of Iraq and shrug about how sad and stupidly ineffective terrorism really is going to be in changing us.  

God help us if one of these bums blows up a subway.  The boots will be out.  We all have to be vigilant and speak out against the bigotry and demagogs.  They're at 30% or so,  but we might win back half of them if we can get them to start thinking.

G. Paul  - 6/14/08