I love long talks and debates. I enjoy music, food, cooking, public radio, board games, and coffee. I love [old] dresses, jewelry, farmer's markets, and cats.
I blog so that my family and friends have a better idea about what I'm thinking from day to day.
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The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country. Sen. Graham and Sen. Lieberman and I had worked very hard to make sure that we didn’t torture any prisoners, that we didn’t mistreat them, that we abided by the Geneva Conventions, which applies to all prisoners. But we also made it perfectly clear, and I won’t go through all the legislation we passed, and the prohibition against torture, but we made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have. And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases. By the way, 30 of the people who have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again, one of them just a couple weeks ago, a suicide bomber in Iraq. Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation, and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.
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John McCain on Boumediene
This is revealing and worrisome. However moderate John McCain may be or have been, the same people who pulled Bush’s strings are now pulling McCain’s. If you like McCain himself, be scared of whomever is feeding him talking points.
To be clear, the case McCain is talking about did not hinge on citizenship—yet McCain is talking about “people who are not citizens.” Non-citizens in our country have habeas rights. If you are an immigrant awaiting citizenship or a tourist or even undocumented, the government must follow the constitution. Nobody would seriously challenge this except maybe Pat Buchannan or Tom Tancredo.
Furthermore, the sort of habeas plea has nothing to do with diet or reading material. Extending the purview of federal courts specifically for habeas corpus will not open a flood of litigation. It will not “bollix” up our courts unless we’re detaining a whole lot more people than anybody thinks we’re detaining.
This is not the statement of somebody who believes in the promise of America. John McCain, we are a better country than that.
(via squashed)
