Cute:
Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers said Tuesday that Osama bin Laden, if captured, should be allowed to appeal his case to U.S. civilian courts, a privilege opposed by John McCain.
Responding to questions from The Examiner, Sen. John Kerry and former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said bin Laden would benefit from last week’s Supreme Court decision giving terrorism suspects habeas corpus, the right to appeal their military detention to civilian courts.
“If he were to be brought back,” Clarke said of bin Laden, “the Supreme Court ruling holds on the right of habeas corpus.”
***Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser, said those rights should not be extended to bin Laden or the hundreds of terrorism suspects being held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
“The individuals we hold at Guantanamo are very, very dangerous people,” Scheunemann said. “To give them full access to the federal courts and the criminal justice system is fraught with danger, moving forward, and likely to make America less safe, unlike Senator Obama’s claim of supporting the decision that it made America safer.”
Hey Randy- sure would be nice if Osama was captured before we worry about trying him don’t ya think? And why do these guys assume that habeas automatically assumes the imprisoned party will win the appeal?
See also, this.
*** Update ***
Best comment on the topic:
So the guys that railroaded an innocent Democratic governor don’t think they could win a case against Bin Laden?
Can’t these people ever say something credible?
Win.
*** Update #2 ***
And this:
I guess not a single person in the Justice Department has ever figured out how they’re going to try Osama bin Laden. I know it’s a complex case involving some difficult-to-pronounce syllables and maybe even some maps with even more difficult names, but are we really unprepared for a Habeas response regarding Osama Freakin’ bin Laden?
I could put two inmate lawyers in a room with a copy of an old pirate novel, a pencil, and twelve sheets of paper and they could come up with a bullet-proof response in five or six hours, depending on their rec and visitation schedules.
Grand Moff Texan
Wrong.
Looks like McCain is counting on the quivering coward vote.
.
cleek
Constitutions are for pussies
bootlegger
A habeus hearing is simple to determine if the government has enough evidence of a crime to hold the individual in question. If we don’t have that kind of evidence, then what the fuck are we holding them for?
They are treating the habeus writ like a verdict, which it absolutely is not.
nightjar
MCcain was for Habeus Corpus rights for Gitmo detainees before he was against them.
Punchy
Unfuckingbelievable.
Samwise
I suspect that for many it’s because they have no idea what habeus corpus is. I think it’s like those who imagine that if Obama is actually a closeted Muslim, once elected president he will have the absolute power to impose sharia law and violate their sacred white women.
Their paranoia seems to come largely from a profound ignorance of the law.
Martin
So the guys that railroaded an innocent Democratic governor don’t think they could win a case against Bin Laden?
Can’t these people ever say something credible?
Dork
What a non-starter. There is NO WAY OBL would ever be allowed to taken alive. He’s given orders to his subordinates to kill him first (can’t find the link), and I guarentee the US soliders have identical orders as well.
A bit OT, but a strange comment from someone over at TP:
Anyone else heard this? How Maliki can just tell the US to STFU and GTFO, i do not understand, but interesting nonetheless….
Dreggas
– Matt Taibi in Rolling Stone
Nuff said.
cleek
he’s good. almost good enough to get me to renew my subscription. but then i realize i don’t need to read any more Led Zeppelin retrospectives.
Martin
And so much for whitey hating Obama. Polls have him up in FL, OH, PA now. And up 60/25 with Latinos. These Clinton memes are gonna take a long time to shake off.
El Cid
Yeah. I want more f***ing Republicans to lecture me about how not to deal with Osama bin Laden, because, yeah, up ’til now, they’ve really done a bang-up job with that.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Aren’t these folks who want to do away with Habeas Corpus the same folks who claim to be “strict constructionists”?
Svensker
Yes, but if we CAUGHT Osama and then gave him habeas, then would, like, totally, be set free and then he would be ON THE LOOSE and then he might, like, blow us up! ZOMG!
/wingerlogic
dm
John,
The tradition-aware hamster is all well and good, but I keep coming by hoping to get some local color on the McCain Campaign’s prominent West Virginia Democrat endorsing McCain.
John Cole
Umm- that is the guy who ran against Bob Wise because Wise had an affair with his wife.
daveinboca
Looks like Moonbats forget about Lincoln suspending habeas for the duration of the war.
Terrorists who fight without a uniform have no rights—period.
cleek
there is nothing more conservative than pissing on a pillar of western civilization in a time of undeclared war against a non-state enemy.
liberal
Samwise wrote,
Correct, but also a profound disrespect for the law. All those thugs understand is power.
frogspawn
So if they hate us for our freedom, all we have to do is divest ourselves of said freedom and then they won’t hate us any more.
Problem solved.
Cris
And the punishment-fetishists who present themselves as law-and-order conservatives will never understand that a civilized system of justice extends its rights equally to everybody, including — especially — to “dangerous” people.
liberal
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford wrote,
What struck me about some of the more polemic comments in (IIRC) Scalia’s opinion was that it seemed results oriented—we can’t do this because it will be bad for the war effort or whatever.
Of course, 2000 showed that Scalia was a judicial activist of the worst kind.
RSA
You know, once this gas crunch is over and I win the lottery, I think I’ll buy myself a Ferrari.
Hey, it’s fun to invent your own reality.
Dreggas
So much for teh Jews hating him there too, poblano broke down the FL poll and found Obama leading 61-31 among Jewish voters in FL.
Tsulagi
Exactly.
Always gets me that the same jackasses who are first to fill their lapels with flag pins invariably are first to brand U.S. courts and constitutional rights as like some foreign power or military on American soil.
cleek
daveinboca is an enemy combatant, trying to destroy the US justice system by supporting the illegal actions of a rogue administration.
he will be detained without trial, immediately. nobody, not even daveinboca himself, will be allowed to question his guilt. too bad for him!
Keith
‘Cause the judges are unelected! BOOGA BOOGA!
Cris
and the part where Lincoln claimed war powers for an open-ended conflict against an vague, ever-changing definition of “enemy” in which Congress never declared war
Bedlam UK
I’m assuming the Republicans are nervous about Habeas Corpus for fear that ‘Well he’s a muslim and he looks a bit dodgy’ might not cut it as evidence.
Other options they could try:
‘He had a picture of a gun on his T-shirt as he tried to board a plane’
Or perhaps ‘she had a necklace with a gun pendant’.
Genius.
Dreggas
More from the Rolling Stone article.
Grand Moff Texan
Yeah, and that makes it constitutional … in your trailer park.
While we’re all glad you finally got your period, we were talking about the Constitution.
.
liberal
daveinboca wrote,
Yes, Lincoln’s suspension didn’t follow the Constitution. But there’s a difference between the circumstances faced by Lincoln and those faced today (or on 2001-09-12, for that matter): as Mark Kleiman pointed out, in Lincoln’s case, the very Constitutional order itself was under threat.
9-11 was an atrocity and all that, but it presented no threat whatsoever to the Constitutional order. (Other than, of course, giving Bush more political capital with which to proceed to destroy the Constitution.)
But conservatives don’t understand that, because they’re a bunch of pussies who wet their pants anytime anyone lights a firecracker.
Dreggas
So explain Timothy McVeigh, The abortion Clinic bombers, and other home grown terrorists who got fair trials and fought without uniforms?
Lincoln had far firmer ground to stand on than these asshats ever did. Off with you and your straw-men.
El Cid
Right wingers love Western Values when they are used to assert Our Superiority to the Brown Ones, but they despise anyone who actually expects right wingers to live up to them.
Grand Moff Texan
To be fair to conservatives, the little pussies were really just pissing themselves, and some of it got on the Constitution.
Conservatives can’t win a clash of civilizations. They don’t have one.
.
Cris
Verily. Their vision is of a court system that gives rights to the innocent and no rights to the guilty, with “innocent” and “guilty” being known beforehand. The idea that innocence or guilt are determined by due process is repellent. And they would rather imprison 100 innocent men (as long as they’re the right kind of men) than let 1 guilty man go free.
It’s not even a double-standard. They don’t see any reason to provide fair trials to the poor, the powerless, and the minorities who are presumed guilty; because they don’t expect fairness themselves, they expect privilege.
bootlegger
The Constitution allows for suspension of Habeus during rebellion or invasion, so Lincoln was technically correct.
These Bush/McCain wingnuts apparently can’t be bothered to read the document.
Rosali
Someone should ask McSame if the Bush administration should have released Yaser Esam Hamdi from Guantanamo. He was the US citizen enemy combatant who was held in Gitmo for 3 years without a trial while the Bush administration argued to the bitter end that he was too much of a terrorism threat. When the Sup Ct ruled that he had a right to challenge his detention, the Bush administration said “Nevermind”, decided he wasn’t such a threat after all, and released him to Saudi Arabia.
Hamdi’s release also means that the government never had to explain why he was detained in the first place.
A Pentagon statement said Hamdi was released because “considerations of United States national security did not require his continued detention.” The statement added that no further details were available “because of operational and security considerations.”
Dennis - SGMM
Paraphrasing something that I posted elsewhere: So, US forces in a battlefield situation in countries where they don’t speak the language were able to round up, with 100% certitude, only the guilty. My local police, who do speak the language and aren’t on a battlefield can’t even do that.
marjowil
Yes, it’s a shame we used the federal court system on Tim McVey who is, oh yeah, dead now.
El Cid
Also, the famed big mouth right wing advocates of “limited government” when it comes to economic favoritism of the ultra-rich suddenly think complete unaccountability and monarchic powers causes the Executive Branch to act as perfectly efficient and moral supermen who will keepusafe.
‘Cause, you know, if you have to prove that you’ve actually charged somebody with something when you thrown them in prison, and that the charge has something to do with that person — i.e., you’re not arresting me for the murder of King Tutankhamun — it totally means you can’t stop the bad guys.
For right wingers, the historical record clearly shows that completely unaccountable and unchecked governments which act in secret are vastly more efficient and effective than those stupid wimpy “Constitution” freaks and their “democracies” and whatnot.
ThymeZone
So the keystone cops who couldn’t capture Osama the last 7 years are worried that if they do, they won’t have enough to keep him in jail because our porous judicial system will let him out? The porous judicial system that is the defense system all Americans depend on for their daily safety and liberty?
Makes perfect sense to me.
nightjar
* Article 3 describes minimal protections which must be adhered to by all individuals within a signatory’s territory during an armed conflict not of an international character (regardless of citizenship or lack thereof): Noncombatants, combatants who have laid down their arms, and combatants who are hors de combat (out of the fight) due to wounds, detention, or any other cause shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, including prohibition of outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment. The passing of sentences must also be pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. Article 3’s protections exist even if one is not classified as a prisoner of war. Article 3 also states that parties to the internal conflict should endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of GCIII.
Not so Genous. Go bounce around the wingnut echo chamber. You come here and facts will eat you alive.
jrg
Oh, goodie, a “teachable moment”! The CSA was an rogue enemy state, not a ragtag bunch of terrorists distributed over the globe. You can defeat and dismantle a state, you cannot “defeat” terrorism – it’s a (dirty, evil) _tactic_ that has been used all over the world, by all kinds of different movements.
If you’re suggesting that we eliminate habeas corpus until the threat of terrorism is gone, you’re talking about eliminating habeas corpus forever.
Also, as Dreggas pointed out, we’ve got “Timothy McVeigh, The abortion Clinic bombers, and other home grown terrorists”. If you’re suggesting that we can detain Islamic terrorists without a trial, we should be able to detain members of right-wing churches and militant groups indefinitely, as well.
Cris
US forces didn’t have to make that determination. They had the assurance of the local warlords who delivered prisoners for bounty.
The Other Steve
You know, I was thinking.
I think if we caught Obama and had him in jail, I think we could write a pretty extensive amount of documentation on why we are holding him in jail, and I doubt any Judge would dispute it.
Republicans remind me of this old joke.
At one of their meetings, Churchill opined “When we catch that damn Hitler I am going to have him hanged!”
to which Stalin responded “My dear Churchill, in my country first we have a trial, then we hang them.”
Dreggas
No, just like everything else. If they captured Osama they couldn’t use him as a bogeyman come election time. It’s the same as with anything else. Face it these rat-fuckers would never catch this guy or anyone else if it meant they wouldn’t be able to use him as an issue in an election to scare people.
cleek
Obama’s on the lam ?
crw
These assholes are aware something less than 2% of Habeas claims are ever resolved favorably for the defendant, right? Then again, they seem to think Habeas has something to do with suing the government for Cable TV or something, so I suppose expecting them to accept trivial things likes “facts” and “reality” is too much.
El Cid
Well, there might be a more than a few voters who might be curious to see the documents for themselves.
Dreggas
There you go mixing up Obama with Osama again! :P
ThymeZone
The real story here is that the morons want you to believe that safety in the age of terrorism depends on catching all the terrorists.
When, in fact, it depends on layers of homeland security that touch all aspects of our ability to protect people and resources from attack … homeland security at which the government SUCKS and has FAILED, in the same sense that it sucks when trying to catch Osama Bin Laden.
But as long as you are flapping your gums about habeas, then you aren’t paying attention to the unprotected and vital assets that are at risk every day. You know, the ones that might be affected by that perpetually-yellow National Threat Level Color Code signal.
Booo!
Steve M.
Looks like Moonbats forget about Lincoln suspending habeas for the duration of the war.
Terrorists who fight without a uniform have no rights—-period.
Er, Dave? U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 9:
The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
The Civil War was “rebellion.” This isn’t. And as for “invasion,” there may be jihadists under your bed (OMG DON’T LOOK!), but there aren’t any under mine.
RSA
And by the way, what kind of dumb-ass question is this for a newspaper to ask, anyway? “If we captured bin Laden, should he be treated the way the law dictates?” Good God. I’m all for interesting hypothetical questions (e.g., “If we invade Iraq, what’s likely to happen afterwards?”) but this is just stupid.
Steve M.
Oh, and the Rebs had uniforms, Dave — right snazzy ones, too.
jon
I guess not a single person in the Justice Department has ever figured out how they’re going to try Osama bin Laden. I know it’s a complex case involving some difficult-to-pronounce syllables and maybe even some maps with even more difficult names, but are we really unprepared for a Habeas response regarding Osama Freakin’ bin Laden?
I could put two inmate lawyers in a room with a copy of an old pirate novel, a pencil, and twelve sheets of paper and they could come up with a bullet-proof response in five or six hours, depending on their rec and visitation schedules.
Graeme
I’ll pile on and add that I do think it’s hysterically funny that those of the ‘limited government’ persuasion want to hand W. unlimited Executive power.
If our Rule of Law is so bad, why ‘conserve’ it? Why is it worth defending? I think the best thing we could do, in the eyes of the world, is to try Bin Laden in OPEN court.
But I agree we’d never take him alive. Which is fine.
I know he’s a nut, but it was so nice to listen to Ron Paul in the GOP debates (when he was invited) saying essentially: These are third world countries! There is no existential threat to the US or our interests! Come to your senses!
ThymeZone
Alright, now we are getting somewhere.
Face
WIN.
This is what makes Scalia the biggest fucking hypocrite in the entire SC. He who claims to interpret the Constitution nearly literally, suddenly decides its words are malleable if applied to the Bush Admin. Uh huh.
I’d rather just have Cheney on the SC. At least then, there wouldn’t be any phony pretense of non-bias and honesty.
jake
I will be so fucking glad to see the end of Rule By Damp Trousers.
handy
Dude, get your talking points right. Habeas Corpus only applies to innocent people who are imprisoned wrongly. So Justice Scalia is being perfectly consistent as a strict constructionist, since the magic crystals have already told him that all the detainees in Gitmo are terrorist evil doers. Gawwd!!! You liberals make it too easy to eviscerate your weak arguments.
Punchy
Just wait until this “Oh yeah, fine, drill the fuck outta the FL coastline” McCane meme sets in. You wanna see Obama win FL in a landslide? That’ll make it happen.
When I lived down there, there were two absolutely sacred things — dont fuck with the Everglades, and dont fuck with the coastline. McCane’s almost trying to throw FL to Obama.
Rosali
Remember the deck of cards with the 52 Most Wanted in Iraq? Good stuff. The chaos in Iraq would end once we caught the whole deck. Remember the breathless news reports announcing that the 4 of hearts and the 6 of diamonds had been arrested?
libarbarian
They want a government that is limited to one Conservative Republican person.
cleek
or at least a government that acts on the desires of one ConRep person. they tried to do it this time, but just couldn’t find enough Loyal Bushies to make it work.
Dennis - SGMM
Yeah, but, I sort of lost interest after we killed the #2 al-Qaeda in Iraq for the dozenth time.
nightjar
No quarrel with spoof.
Zifnab
With access to some federal courts, a criminal justice system, a cup of orange juice, and 10 oz glue, you can fashion a pound of explosives. Little known fact.
Would you really feel safe knowing a terrorist had access to all this?
Dennis - SGMM
I think that they had an abundance of Loyal Bushies, it’s just that being a Loyal Bushie also meant that they were so stupid that they couldn’t find their asses even if they started at their ankles and worked north.
Zifnab
See, I don’t think Ron Paul is a nut in the least. He’s a revolutionary. He sees the world running in a radically different manner than it currently does. In my mind, that makes him less a nut and more a visionary.
It’s not a vision I necessarily agree with, but I think his ideology is – at the least – academically interesting.
The difference between Ron Paul and the run-of-the-mill GOP is that Paul has a genuine ideology and a serious plan of how he would run his government. The current neo-con flock doesn’t. Paul might not run the government well, but he’d at least give it the old college try. So I respect him as a politician and as an ideologue far more than I respect the “bombing people gets us votes” yellow elephant brigades who can’t think past the next election cycle.
/OT
grey_hawk
And on top of all the other historical points people above have pointed out, it’s just as important to remember that the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the suspension of habeas by Lincoln was unconstitutional, too.
Ex Parte Milligan.
Too bad no one ever remembers this when citing Lincoln’s actions as a precedent to defend the suspension of habeas corpus. But then when have the modern right wingers managed to get a WOT analogy right?
ThymeZone
If we really captured him, we’d want to mine him for information first and then accidentally shoot him, wouldn’t we?
The “24” writers called and said that they needed some material for next season’s show.
Dennis - SGMM
There are some things that modern right wingers just don’t “do.” Among them are:
History
The Constitution
Serve
Tsulagi
You’re joking, right? These are the guys who had Saddam for three years. Three years in which to plan for his eventual execution, yet still managed to fuck that up making it look like an improvised lynching. Nothing escapes their special touch.
J. Michael Neal
Let’s call this what it is. The United States was buying human beings for the purposes of holding them indefinitely. In most circles, that’s called slave trading. It shows the complete ineptitude of the modern GOP that they would buy slaves, and then fail to make them do productive labor.
MLE
Good thing I am now proposing we prevent anyone held in US custody from having access to glue of all types. Sure, prisoner craft hour won’t be the same, but at least they’ll still have orange jouce with their breakfast in bed.
Calouste
Depends what you call productive. The Gitmo
slavesprisoners were definitely productive for propaganda purposes.chopper
yeah, if the DoJ can’t put together a cohesive case against bin laden then we might as well pack it in right fucking now. it was a fun experiment while it lasted, this country.
cleek
maybe they’re just afraid that even if the suspects are found guilty that Bush will
Scooterpardon them.Mike G
Their paranoia seems to come largely from a profound ignorance of the law.
Their political viewpoint seems to come largely from a profound ignorance of just about everything.
OriGuy
Charlie Crist has a new religion. Think he converted to make McCain happy?
reid
Didn’t OJ get off on habeus? Is that really what you want for Obama when he’s found? Think, morans!!
Scrutinizer
Not according to the CSA, which held that they had the right to dissolve the Union and go their own way. They weren’t seeking to overthrow the USA government, they were merely trying to leave. From the perspective of the CSA, Lincoln unconstitutionally invaded the South when he refused to quit Fort Sumter.
Patrick
Timothy McVey had habeas corpus rights. How did that work out for him?
Cris
That’s very interesting. I’ve been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to overcome my Yankee biases and learn to see the war from the perspective of the secessionists.
Lincoln claimed the right of the federal government to “hold, occupy, and possess” its properties. To the CSA, then, the very presence of Federal land within their territory was a threat. That attitude persists among the modern Constitutionalist fringe, who sees any and all Federal authority as a backdoor to oppression.
liberal
bootlegger wrote,
Problem is that, IIRC, only Congress can do so.
croatoan
In January 1993 Mir Aimal Kasi shot five people outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, killing two of them. He fled to the same border area of Pakistan where Osama bin Laden is now likely hiding. The FBI captured him in June 1997, he was sentenced to death in February 1998, and he was executed in November 2002.
A Democratic administration using law enforcement techniques tracked down a terrorist in the border region of Pakistan in a little over four years. Bin Laden’s been on the loose in the same part of the world almost seven years after planning the attacks that killed 3,000 people.
cleek
just FYI…
“9/11 was an invasion” (no really, literally) is an idea which is slowly gaining ground among wingnuts, especially after last week’s SCOTUS decision.
be prepared.
liberal
Scrutinizer wrote,
Fixed.
Cris
ow my aching head. the rolleyes, it hurts.
El Cid
As a native born white Southerner who still lives here (GA), let me speak to this perspective:
F*** the CSA, and f*** anyone who holds even the tiniest bit of nostalgia for it.
That is all.
Innocent Bystander
Well, I think it’s pretty obvious why Hussein’s lynching looked so rushed. It was….it had to be done before the Democrats took over Congress in 2006. He hanged a week before the change, IIRC. Can you imagine a House/Senate investigation that might actually ask Saddam questions relating to the historical relationship between himself, Reagan, Bush, Rumsfield, and Cheney? About his knowledge of 9/11, WMD, and Desert Storm 1?
At least he got some kind of trial in his country. Aside from the obvious problems of bringing a dead man to trial, why is it that the FBI has never fingered OBL as the prime mover in 911? Check out his FBI most wanted poster…no mention of his role in that event. This administration hasn’t even bothered to make a paper case to charge this guy. Yet, we have a lot of goat herders and dirt farmers fingered as ‘terrorists’ on this administration’s say so. How do we know they are guilty if there’s no public record explaining the case and the crimes?
I understand why this administration is violating Habeus for these people. It has less to do with their concern for US security and much more to do with keeping the American people from learning that the GWOT is a charade to mask the political-financial agenda of this administration. They needed ignorant, powerless actors playing the role of terrorists to torture, people who had no relevant information to divulge; evidence that would actually expose the international players who benefit from this faux GWOT. Certainly can’t go after people, like Prince Bandahar, who was funneling money to some of the alledged 9/11 hijackers. People with the money and motivation to do 9/11.
I assume that we’re going to have lots more ‘rushed lynchings’ in Gitmo and other locations, before this administration is finally forced from office. Like Saddam, dead men tell no tales.
bootlegger
The new Wingnut dictionary:
Surrender=leaving the battle field after you kicked the enemy’s ass.
Appeasement=telling your enemy to “go fuck yourself” to their faces.
Invasion=a dozen maniacs with box cutters.
DavidTC
The thing about Lincoln is, yes, the right is completely wrong about it. The Courts did eventually rule that Lincoln didn’t have the right to do with he did. Although it’s worth pointing out their main beef was the military trials.
But, and I say this as a Southerner, Congress could have. And I, and I suspect everyone else, would not mind in an actual emergency where Congress is not in session that the president does something that is technically only a power of theirs, especially if he, as Lincoln did, then attempt to get retroactive consent of Congress.
The problem where this all falls apart, where Bushies imagine a parallel where there isn’t one, is that this isn’t an emergency where Congress isn’t in session. In fact, it’s been six and a half damn years, and Congress was in session at the start of it. What happened on 9/11, sure, that was an emergency at the time, and if Bush had grounded all flights even if he technically didn’t have authority to do that….I’d be okay with it.
But then Bushies want to pretend things like holding people for six years is some sort of emergency situation.
TenguPhule
Fixed.