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I hear....

Judging detainees on the facts (see sig)

Boston Globe, By Sabin Willett, November 30, 2008

EARLIER this month, US District Judge Richard Leon ruled in the case of six Bosnians held at Guantanamo Bay. One is Lakhdar Boumediene, the lead petitioner in last summer's Supreme Court decision restoring the rights of Guantanamo detainees to a habeas corpus hearing. So Judge Leon gave him that hearing, and Boumediene won. The judge ruled that he is not an enemy combatant.

Leon's ruling was the second habeas judgment to follow the Supreme Court mandate. He ordered five Bosnians released, and upheld the detention of a sixth. A month ago, in the first habeas judgment, district Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered 17 Uighurs - Chinese Muslims - released.

Twenty-three cases have now been heard. The president has lost 22 of them.

This was a disaster, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey wrote in the Wall Street Journal the next morning. It meant terrorists were being released, and a compromise of the nation's war-fighting ability.

As one of the lawyers in the Uighur case, I had to scratch my head. Mukasey wasn't in court with us that day, but his deputies were, and the point of the ruling - which was based on facts, not public relations - is that they aren't terrorists. They aren't the enemy. The nation's war-fighting capability isn't involved at all.

Mukasey was undeterred. The problem, he wrote in the Journal, is the rules. We need new rules.

New rules? Neither decision had anything to do with rules. When finally it reached the deadline for telling the judge its case against the Uighurs, the government abandoned it. We won't contend that they are enemy combatants, it wrote. The Bosnian case was similar. For four years the government asserted, and the men denied, that they had plotted to bomb an embassy. At last the day came to tell the judge the facts - which Judge Leon, a Bush appointee, permitted the government to do in secret. "We won't proceed with that theory anymore," said the government. This is nothing new. When forced to justify its "war on terror" detentions to judges, the government doesn't bring cases, it drops them. In 2004 it argued that Yaser Hamdi was so dangerous that he mustn't see his lawyer. A federal judge scheduled a hearing. The government dropped the case and sent Hamdi to Saudi Arabia.

So what rule is Mukasey asking America for - a rule that lets the government hold a man on the basis of a case it drops? He mistakes us for a small and frightened people.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/11/30/judging_detainees_on_the_facts/

I know who the media whores are but am confused about these "Villagers." Could you please explain and tell me how they are different from the "village" it takes to raise a child???

Answer the question, Tim ... Stop complaining about the cards you're being dealt.

I just got back from shopping and was going to respond but saw Glenn had already done so. I thought, well, that retort is probably better than my retort (all [mysterious] inches of me--and I love "retorts," especially the raspberry kind).

RE: Village and villagers

See for example this post by Glenn Greenwald:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/03/smith/

Infallibility? Once one belongs to the Infallible Elect, can one ever be wrong?

the explanation of Beltway Village. That was also worth reading on its own. I didn't read Glenn much back then.

Let's at least have a real air war.... It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road, and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set back your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too. NYT (4/23/99)

Even O'Reilly didn't want to kill em all.

I believe that we have to go in there and drop leaflets on Belgrade and other cities and say, 'Listen, you guys have got to move because we're now going to come in and we’re going to just level your country. The whole infrastructure is going.'... Any target is OK. I'd warn the people, just as we did with Japan, that it’s coming, you’ve got to get out of there, OK, but I would level that country so that there would be nothing moving—no cars, no trains, nothing.(4/26/99)

Why is this screaming for blood and heaps of guts steaming in the streets acceptable political discourse in America?

Yes, and that is what we know about. Large parts are "hidden" in the budgets of other departments.

The Will Smith film Independence Day had a theory about where some of that money to the military ends up, but that involves aliens.

The truth is likely to be far more sinister, even if it does come down to the usual greed and lust for power:

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/12/02/18464823.php

Even Rumsfeld has said the Pentagon cannot account for trillions:

"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.

"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml

This should suggest not only a way of financing the enormous bailouts for the economy, but should also suggest why these bailouts are necessary in the first place.

Must the working poor and homeless suffer for the next 1,000 years just so the generals in the pentagon have toy soldiers to order about in every corner of the globe?

And use them to rob people in other countries.

Yes, that's US foreign policy since WWII. It costs the average family of four over $10,000 per year, plus the occasional family member who very strangely feels compelled to sacrifice life and limb for the enrichment of war profiteers.