McCain Leads The Fascist Charge

Kristol: McCain And Graham Plan To Introduce Legislation Undermining Supreme Court Decision On Guantanamo

If you’re going to allow them all the normal procedural and substantive rights, why do you need a whole separate system of courts with special rules?

Exactly.

National Security Courts are especial concoctions to provide fake legitimation for denial of the Constitutional, legal, and human rights of prisoners.

Lately, the complaint against allowing these prisoners their rights has been made that, once released, they will return to terrorism.

Some complaints have even pointed to some alleged particular case in which a person, released from custody, actually did resume his terrorist career.

And perhaps this danger is what Scalia was warning of in his dissent, rather than encouragement to terrorism through diminished deterrence.

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, whom some bullshitter at the WSJ (I think it was Paul Gigot) once said is always "the smartest guy in the room," instantly reverted to the argument from the bomb.

And then there's the "I’m not a lawyer but I play one on TV" guy.

Is this not the same complaint we hear so often about convicted criminals?

There is a high rate of recidivism among convicted felons.

If that justifies indefinite detention of people against whom nothing has been proved, how does it not justify such treatment of convicts?

There is not the least reason in the world to treat terrorists differently from other criminals, since the danger that they will go on with their criminal careers is the same.

The fascists know that.

They are just using terrorism as an excuse to get the camel’s nose under the tent.

As I said before, just as the 9/11 attack became a pretext for a war programmed in advance against Iraq it became a pretext for a war programmed in advance against the Constitution.

Today it's just for terrorists and tomorrow it’s for drug dealers and organized crime, and the day after it’s for whatever the Hell they want it to be for, and they will be the ones saying, “Hey. If it’s all right to do this to people at Gitmo who never even got a trial then it’s all right to do this to felony convicts.”

Remember Willie Horton?

The point of the attack wasn’t just to appeal to racial fears of whites, but to attack Dukakis for being one of those convict-coddling liberals, soft on crime.

For this one, the fascists are telling us to insist these prisoners be accorded the normal rights of prisoners is soft on terrorism.

The Democrats need to yell out like they’ve got a pair, and to filibuster this atrocity in the senate instead of negotiating or amending or compromising.

On this, those are just softer words for “sellout.”

Like what they’re doing with telecom immunity.