These People Are Idiots

The standard Republican reaction to the Supreme Court's decision to disallow the US Government to indefinitely detain prisoners without charges is typified by John McCain's response.

The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country. Sen. Graham and Sen. Lieberman and I had worked very hard to make sure that we didn't torture any prisoners, that we didn't mistreat them, that we abided by the Geneva Conventions, which applies to all prisoners. But we also made it perfectly clear, and I won't go through all the legislation we passed, and the prohibition against torture, but we made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have. And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases. By the way, 30 of the people who have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again, one of them just a couple weeks ago, a suicide bomber in Iraq. Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation, and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.

He either doesn't know what a habeas corpus suit is, which is simply a manner to challenge indefinite detention without charges, or he's intentionally lying to his audience. I'd love to see a study of the reading level of Presidential town hall meetings, because McCain appears to be talking to third-graders who know nothing about the US Constitution.

Newt GIngrich was worse.

This court decision is a disaster, which could cost us a city. And the debate ought to be about whether you’re prepared to lose an American city on behalf of five lawyers — it was a five to four decision. … That ought to be a principled argument between McCain and Obama, about whether or not you’re prepared to allow any random, nutcake district judge who has no knowledge of national security to set the rules for terrorists.

There is of course nothing in that decision that would in its own right release any terrorist whatsoever. It merely states that suspects in detention must be charged. If the prisoners at Gitmo are so dangerous, the "worst of the worst," surely there's evidence to that effect which can be brought out to justify the arrest and detention.

Gingrich doesn't want to mention that. In fact, none of them want to break it down in those terms, because they would be forced to admit that a very large number of these prisoners are innocent of any crime.

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

It's not the consequence of delays in implementing military commissions that has transformed Guantanamo into a legal black hole. It is in fact DESIGNED to be that way. The Bush Administration doesn't wish to admit its mistakes - that hundreds of people they rounded up in the war on terror were innocent, were sent there as a result of tribal leaders in Afghanistan picking up bounties by ratting out enemies, and were abused for no good reason. And so allowing Gitmo inmates to ask what they are being charged with would prove the entire anti-terrorism strategy after 9/11 to be a failure. The Constitution was ignored, liberties were taken, and security was not aided. In fact, it was harmed, as Guantanamo became as much a terrorist training camp as it was a detention facility.

Of course, this is a bipartisan problem, as Democratic leaders ran away - at times literally - from making substantive opposition arguments to the Bush Administration's horrific practices. They passed the Military Commissions Act, part of which was struck down by the Supreme Court this week. They are about to allow warrantless spying on Americans because they don't want to be seen as soft on national security. As Glenn Greenwald notes:

But the broader and more important point is the one illustrated by the bold and principled acts being undertaken by British politicians in several parties there, the same principle illustrated by numerous acts of Russ Feingold over the past seven years: defending basic liberties, the core principles of our political system, and the rule of law is of such overriding importance that any worthwhile politician, by definition, will do so even if it entails some political cost. As British members of Parliament resign their seats and defend members of other parties in defense of their liberties, our own Democratic Party this week will -- yet again -- endorse and legalize the most extremist and illegal aspects of the Bush agenda in pursuit of the craven, illusory and increasingly irrelevant goal of protecting its own political interests.

There is a weird upset in this country, a belief that we're seriously off track, and I really think this is the reason. We have a rogue President seemingly dedicated to transgressing American values and nobody does a thing to stop him. People shake their heads. It undermines any faith in the entire political class.