Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings -- give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else!... Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.
-Patrick Henry
I went Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon to get the skinny on yesterday's Supreme Court decision ruling that prisoners at Guantanamo have habeas corpus rights. That quote comes from his post. It pretty much says it all. If we give up everything this nation stands for in order to protect it, what are we protecting? Once again, the idea that we're "fighting for freedom" is shown to be a bunch of crap. We're fighting for authoritarianism, which has much more in common with modern day China than those original thirteen colonies.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that you don't get to lock people up forever without having to prove you've got a damned good reason to do it. That's it. They didn't set anyone free, they didn't keep anyone from being arrested, they didn't order Gitmo burned to the ground. All they did was require that the military and the administration give some good reason for keeping people in a dungeon.
The reaction on the right has been predictable. The BS flies fast and furious. The one response that really got to me while I was looking for reactions was Sen. Lindsey Graham's. "I am deeply disappointed in what I think is a tremendously dangerous and irresponsible ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court," Graham said. "The court has conferred upon civilian judges the right to make military decisions. These judges have virtually no training in military matters yet civilian judges, in some of the most liberal district courts in the country, will have an opportunity to determine who is a threat to the United States."
It's that "in some of the most liberal district courts in the country" that gets me. For the record, Lindsey Graham's a freakin' prick. What he's saying is that liberal judges aren't real judges and paints them as terrorist sympathizers. There aren't many people in government that I actually hate -- Lindsey Graham just made that short list with this divisive and stupid statement...
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