Harry Shearer observes that the recent arrests in Britain do not jive with the Bush Administration's policies on "enemy combatants" in a "time of war"...
This is a group of people who allegedly conspired, according to British officials like Home Secretary John Reid, to commit acts of mass murder that would have dwarfed 911. If we were at war with them, according to the Administration's own well-documented legal arguments, we would have killed them or detained them and thrown them in Gitmo. Instead, where did we--or our allies in the "war", the Brits--put them? Right where we're told by those same arguments we cannot put enemy combatants--in the criminal justice system.
1 comment:
"""where we are fighting a war are not citizens and are not entitled to protections under our constitution, and therefore can, and should, be held in a different kind of facility like Gitmo."""
I fail to see why the American constitution should apply. International conflicts should be subject tot he Geneva convention. Unfortunately that requires an identifiable (by nationailty or some other determining charateristic() enemy, and doesn't allow you to declare arbitrarily detains individuals as "enemy combatants".
If you place the constitution above the Geneva Convention then you shouldn't really be taking part in international conflicts. Alternatively you could worry about the 40,000 American a year who die in traffic accidents.
It's also clear that George W Bush has little respect for the constitution, since he won't even concur with his own supreme court's interpretation of it.
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