Boumediene vs. Bush

There’s only five loyal Americans left on the Supine Court

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
6/15/08

Anyone concerned with human rights in the remains of the United States this week heaved a sigh of relief over the Supreme Court decision Boumediene vs. Bush, which ruled, once again, that the detainees at Guantánamo are covered by the ancient principle of habeas corpus, and thus are entitled to their day in court.

Before the fascist Republican takeover of the Congress and the White House back in the nineties, the vote would never have been that close. Even with the two fascists already on the court, Tony Scalia and Slappy Thomas, the vote would have been 7-2. The bone of contention, after all, was nothing less than deciding if the accused could have a fair trial or not. Before the Republicans, it was a bedrock principle in America, usually beyond question. While politicians had attacked it in the past, usually during times of dire national emergency, such as the Civil War or World War 2, or in the very earliest days of America when the new, Constitutional government was still feeling its way (“The Alien and Sedition Act”), the Courts had always stood firm for habeas corpus.

You can’t really count on that any more. If you take four ultra-right wing monkeys, dress them in long black robes, call them “judges” and get them on the Supreme Court, then any right under the American constitution is at risk.

These particular monkeys can’t even keep their crackpot notions of rule over America consistent. Chief Monkey Justice John Roberts, for instance, called the majority ruling, “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.” Aside from the fact that constitutional rights don’t stem from ANYONE’S generosity, particularly that of ignorant right wing monkeys, Roberts blew his own previous rationales for keeping uncharged people locked up indefinitely by calling them “enemy combatants”. That means they are someone America is at war with, and formal combatants, and thus, are prisoners of war. That wouldn’t entitle them to trials, but it WOULD grant them a raft of rights granted specifically to POWs under the Geneva Convention, which Roberts says doesn’t apply because they aren’t enemy combatants.

Scalia was playing the usual Republican fear card. He, wrote “the nation will regret what the Court has done today,” and added, perhaps hopefully, that the majority ruling “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

This is part and parcel of the GOP stance of ruling through fear. The conceit is that the rag-tag bunch of disaffecteds in the middle east pose such a grave threat to the US that the US must get rid of all those rights and freedoms that America has enjoyed for over 200 years. Creatures like Roberts and Scalia really believe that the state must have the ability to throw anyone in prison indefinitely and without trial or sentence in order to preserve freedoms. Such things as fair trials and determinate sentences will only make the state weak and incompetent in its ability to fight terrorists, when in fact those freedoms show that it was the administration was weak and incompetent to start with.

Granted, the current administration is extraordinarily weak and incompetent, but there are ways other than throwing away habeas corpus to deal with that. Honest elections, for example. Next time, Scalia, try letting America have an honest election. Scalia, we shouldn’t have to pay for the fact that you appointed an incompetent and vicious jackass as president.

And we do pay the same price that the “enemy combatants” do. Only a fool would think that such draconian measures were ever limited to a class called “enemy combatants.” Hundreds of the “worst of the worst” America had locked away in Gitmo have been released because it slowly came to light that those victims weren’t enemies, weren’t combatants, and in at least a dozen cases, were actually allied with American troops in Afghanistan! It’s come to light that when America was shelling out $25,000 for every terrorist turned in by Afghanis (about ten years’ good pay), quite a few Afghanis hit on a way to get rid of someone they hated while getting rich at the same time. Quite often – and at least two dozen of them wound up in Gitmo for five years or more – those turned in were turned in by neighbors who were angry because they believed those turned in were collaborating with the Americans! And the admin, anxious to look like it was “winning the war on terrorism” didn’t inquire into the substance of the accusations. They simply packed the accused off to Gitmo and crowed about how many terrorists they had captured.

If ANY of the captives at Gitmo are guilty of crimes, then the admin should welcome public trials by the normal standards of pre-Republican jurisprudence. If they are guilty, prove they are guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Then Americans – and most of the world – would see the incarcerations as legitimate.

But the chance that any of those in Gitmo were actually a danger to the US is slim to vanishingly small, and the admin, a cowardly pack of liars, knows that. So do the four GOP hyenas on the Supreme Court. Much better to let innocent people rot in jail than to curtail the power of a government that is willing to make freedom march.

The court did uphold habeas corpos, but by only one vote, the thinnest possible thread. One more right winger, and America is finished, and in the hands of terrorists; not the Islamic freaks of Afghanistan, but the home grown fascists of America. And I suspect they would be even worse.

John McCain showed why he must never be president in his response to the decision. He said, “These are people who are not citizens; they do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have. There are some bad people down there.” He called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country:” He went on to make the strange, unfounded claim that “thirty of the people who have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again.”

To give you some idea of how goofy McCain has gotten, he also warned that the 270 prisoners in Gitmo would “bog down” the entire legal system with petitions and appeals and the like. As if the several hundred thousand other criminal cases and appeals going on at the same time don’t.

That’s the McCain stance as he runs for president: there’s no more room at the inn for any more goddam rights.

Time to turn away from fascism. If the terrorists want to defeat America, they’ll have to do it from the outside.