Thursday, June 14, 2007

We're Kidding You

Ah, the smell of shamelessness in the morning.

From the June 12 press gaggle:

When asked if the indefinite detention of combatants at Guantanamo undermined the President's push for democratization, Snow answered:


Are you saying that detaining people who are plucked off the battlefields is an assault on democracy? Are you kidding me? You're talking about the people who were responsible for supporting the Taliban, somehow detaining them is an assault on democracy?

To which Scott Horton has an entirely reasonable reply:
The battlefield that Al-Marri was “plucked off of” was an apartment complex in West Peoria, Illinois, where he had been living, under constant observation, for many months. He was a computer science student at Bradley University at the time.
So this is the true state of the union here. Just so we're clear here (since this is a fairly important point), the president now has the power to define where the battlefields are (even if the battlefield is your bedroom), who the enemies are (including American citizens - see Padilla - and terrorists' 8 year old children), and is allowed to detain them for as long as he wants and with no due process of law, up to and including Verschaerfte Vernehmung (i.e., torture). In fact, the preliminary evidence shows that Al-Marri may have been reclassified as an enemy combatant because doing so would make it easier to torture him. Topping all of this off, I want to mention the fact that Guantanamo is only the public face of Bush's entire corruption of justice. Obscured in all of this is the existence of secret CIA prisons (black sites) scattered all over the world. Toss in a little destruction of habeus corpus and I'd say we're at about September of 1983. Only 3 months to go.