Let’s play another round of name that Liberal! They’re a lot easier to defeat once you have spotted them.
Today, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the XXXX position, holding that even detainees abducted outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram have no right to contest the legitimacy of their detention in a U.S. federal court, because Boumediene does not apply to prisons located within war zones (such as Afghanistan). So congratulations to the United States and President XXXX for winning the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind.
… Can you smell the hypocrisy? How could anyone miss its pungent, suffocating odor? Apparently, what XXXX called “a legal black hole at Guantanamo” is a heinous injustice, but “a legal black hole at Bagram” is the embodiment of hope. And evidently, XXXX would only feel “terror” if his child were abducted and taken to Guantanamo and imprisoned “without even getting one chance to ask why and prove their innocence.” But if the very same child were instead taken to Bagram and treated exactly the same way, that would be called Justice — or, to use his jargon, Pragmatism.
And what kind of person hails a Supreme Court decision as “protecting our core values” — as XXXX said of Boumediene — only to then turn around and make a complete mockery of that ruling by insisting that the Cherished, Sacred Rights it recognized are purely a function of where the President orders a detainee-carrying military plane to land?
Independently, what happened to XXXX’s eloquent insistence that “restricting somebody’s right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer; in fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe”? How does our policy of invading Afghanistan and then putting people at Bagram with no charges of any kind dispose people in that country, and the broader Muslim world, to the United States? If a country invaded the U.S. and set up prisons where Americans from around the world where detained indefinitely and denied all rights to have their detention reviewed, how would it dispose you to the country which was doing that?
Answer: It’s a trick question! There is no liberal mentioned here. This is an excerpt from “Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review“, Glenn Greenwald, Salon, 21 May 2010.
About those conservatives screaming warnings about our radical leftist President — they’re crazy.
Other chapters in the “Name that Liberal” series
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