The Gitmo Ruling

This is a reply to Hugh Hewitt, who wrote about the Guantanamo ruling that detainees in Guantanamo have a right to challenge their detention in US civilian courts, that habeas corpus applies to everyone.

Fuck. You. With bells on. He begins:

Thursday's 5-4 decision awarding "unlawful combatants" at Gitmo --terrorists-- the "privilege of the writ of habeas corpus" has left millions of Americans stunned. What in the world is the majority of the Supreme Court thinking?

That America is a nation of laws, built upon principles that no pipsqueak of a president can usurp, that no national emergency invalidates, and that are far more important to the survival of the nation than a string of show trials using secret evidence obtained from torture and challenged by a straight-jacketed defense team could ever conceivably be. Not a hard one, Hugh.

Justice Scalia, writing in dissent, was blunt:

Fuck, that's like saying Jesus was preachy. Of course, his ham fisted approach to the law reveals that his view of the Constitution is so fundamentally skewed that he shouldn't be allowed to preside over traffic court.

America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon,

In, what, 1983? Completely different people. Completely different motivation.

...19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 60–61, 70, 190 (2004). On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. See id., at 552, n. 9.

Wow, you actually have to site a source for 9/11? I thought that qualified as "common knowledge." Of course, you have confused Al Q'iada with other groups, but that's ok.

It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed.

Now this is just fucking retarded. Iraq is our fault, and invoking it in a legal opinion about habeas corpus is mind-numbingly irresponsible. How many of those people were killed by al Quiada, and how many by militias who are understandably pissed off that we trashed their entire country?

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.

And that's true. The President could not have done a worse job by improvising a faux "justice" system. He coerced confessions by torture, denied human rights and due process, and thought he would get away with it. Of course, the law always still applied, and in doing so, he made it impossible to land a fair conviction on even the most heinous of detainees. From that point of view, the legal point of view, it almost requires an acquittal, as best as I can tell. That's yet another complete and unqualified failure of the Laughing Stock of History, George W. Bush. I lay any lives lost because trials were not conducted in accordance with national and international standards. The Supreme Court is not there to protect the President (and by extension by the jackasses who voted for him) from his own mistakes.

These are harsh words, unusually so even for ordinary debate, but amazingly so among the nine. Justice Scalia is quite obviously as frustrated with his aging colleagues as are the vast majority of Americans. There’s a war going on. These terrorists and their still-at-large allies are trying to kill us.

If I might interject, you bloated bag of burro guts, you have no factual basis to call these people "terrorists." Being picked up by the military (or in many cases, sold to the military) doesn't mean you are guilty, I mean unless you live in Crazy Saddam World, which you, my dear chode, are flirting with whorishly.

Also, I detect a whiff of ageism. That's fine. Old people look like lizards and scare me. (By the way, Hugh, as a political pointer, conservatives might want to avoid slamming old farts this election cycle. Just saying.)

John McCain
(h/t to Stephen Colbert)

[...] Now [the] Supreme Court-mandated [legislation that passed Congress] has been struck down, and the “great writ” is open to the worst killers who have ever set their sights on the homeland.

It always has, and, Shatner willing, always will. Get it through your thick cranium. I don't particularly care about the people in Gitmo...I don't know them (the Administration has seen to that). It's easy to not care. But goddamnit, I don't ever want some flighty former coke-addict whose drug-addled brain decides that intellectual elites are scheming against the country to ever define me as an "illegal meano" and throw away the key.

What this means, of course, is more litigation, more delays, and more confusion. Only one thing is certain: Our terrorist enemies still at large must be amazed, amused and encouraged by the continued insistence by legal elites that they be treated like petty American criminals rather than fanatical killers eager for martyrdom.

You know, I was thinking about this passage as I was taking a dump, which seems appropriate (and also, at the same time, never appropriate. Funk dat.). You casually toss out "elite"--of course, there are only some people who are qualified or credentialed to making legal rulings. But it's curious how when he's talking about the 5 Justices who for once lined up on the side of precedent that they become "elite," and while I would never call Scalia "intellectual elite" he's in the club. It is, then, not about elitism, but ideology. You have transformed "elite" into a vast empty burp of a word which signifies "to whomever my ad populum doesn't appeal".

And another thing. It seems that this "elite" buzzword has ironically taken on a decidedly Marxist tone. The elite are the "bourgeoisie" of the right and everyone else gets to be a prole. Funny that.

It is as though the five justices and their clerks are wholly ignorant of the rising stack of books and flood of articles detailing the nature of the enemy and their creed of death.

Thank fuck. If you have read them and they evoke anything like the "ideas" you have, they can line my cat's litter box.

What is more alarming than the prospect of ignorance on the part of the majority is their collective seduction by hard left elites, particularly those in the Academy.

Meanwhile, in another argument... Blame the people who educated themselves and are trying to drag knuckheads like yourself up to their level.

Supreme Court justices don’t get out much. When they do it is typically to the nation’s law schools and to judicial and ABA conferences, where they are no doubt surrounded by thousands of elites who have as much experience with the war as the justices, but are perhaps even less well read on the nature of the jihadists’ ideology and tactics.

Wow. That was the worst reasoning in the history of stupid. Wow. I mean, it's like guilt by association, but less so. Guilt by having been in the same room once.... That's a new one. You suck, Hugh.

Andrew McCarthy’s brilliant new book, Willful Blindness, A Memoir of the Jihad, recounts how unprepared the American legal system was for the assault by the fanatics when it first crashed into the World trade center in 1993 and how even after 9/11 it could not adjust to cope with the war in which we are engulfed. Obviously the highest rank of our legal elite have not yet come to grip with the nature of the enemy.

I'll make this perfectly clear. I would literally endure a thousand 9/11s before surrendering a single Constitutional protection of the least worthy of the people caged in Guantanamo. Surrendering those protections is to forfeit the rights of every American, and whether or not some puke gets off because due process wasn't followed is far less important to the security of this country than the integrity of our Constitution. This is what crazy monkey-rage virus infected conservatives need to understand, that the price of satisfying your blood lust is far greater than you have allowed yourself to believe.

HJ