Supreme Court Guantanamo Decision
I am disgusted by all the right-wing nonsense I've seen about this recent decision the Supreme Court made which states that detainees at Guantanamo have the right to due process. Perhaps the best example of this is Antonin Scalia's dissent. His legal argument has virtually no legal points and simply scaremongers about how if these accused terrorists get to stand in front of a judge people are going to die.
The Supreme Court didn't say that these detainees should be set free. They didn't even say the detainees get the same rights as U.S. citizens. All the Supreme Court said was that these detainees get to go in front of a judge and make the government prove they have good reason to keep them in prison. If the government doesn't have enough evidence or other information to convince a judge that an individual prisoner is a potential threat that should be detained, then why on earth should we be detaining them?
Consider for a moment if we had Osama bin Laden at Guantanamo Bay, if that man used this Supreme Court decision to get himself a court date and then went in front of a U.S. judge and said he should be set free, then the U.S. military gave all their reasons and evidence the man should not be set free, what do you think the chances are the judge would set Osama bin Laden free? 0% ? Maybe slightly lower?
But let's consider what would happen if the Supreme Court decision had gone the other way. A friend of yours is on the phone with relatives overseas and the government is listening into the overseas conversation without a warrant (they're doing this already, but if the new FISA bill passes today or tomorrow it will grant immunity for past illegal actions, if you don't like the sound of that, make noise to your congressman and senator) and they misinterpret something and arrest your friend, shipping them off to Guantanamo.
You say it couldn't happen, but you're wrong. All it takes is for one person to make a mistake, because the Bush administration has removed all the checks and balances from the system. Now your friend is in Guantanamo and s/he is saying, "But what about my rights? I'm an American citizen!"
Well, if s/he could go in front of a judge and prove that, then everything would be fine, but if this 5-4 vote had gone the other way then your friend would have no recourse. There would be no one to listen to pleas of citizenship, or any other pleas. Your friend would have no rights whatsoever.
To deny someone the right to tell a judge why they believe they shouldn't be in a prison camp is despicable. To equate giving that right to someone with somehow setting guilty people free to commit crimes is downright dishonest, but what's worse is that not granting that right flies in the face of the Constitution.
Guantanamo Bay is sovereign territory and has been for a century. Where the U.S. government has sovereignty, the U.S. Constitution is the law. That's it, that's the bottom line and there is no way around that. The four judges who voted against this decision should be ashamed, and any lawyer who has read their dissenting opinions should instantly realize how shameful and pathetic these men are — political toadies who so clearly put partisan politics ahead of the law and Constitution that they can't even pretend to come up with a real legal reason they disagree with the decision to grant Guantanamo detainees due process of law.
They should be ashamed and they should be shamed publicly, but the mainstream media so often doesn't look beneath the surface because it's too much trouble and their viewers wouldn't care anyway. Right?
