Tantor on June 18, 2008 at 2:48 PM

I should have been more clear when I said:

The constitution only brings up Habeas in terms of the suspension clause. For this clause to have any meaning, a fundamental right to Habeas must exist independent of any constitutional rights. New_Jersey_Buckeye on June 18, 2008 at 10:55 AM

The suspension clause I refer to is the very one you reference. Thus the Constitution assumes a basic right to habeas rights, and specifically limits the instances under which congruss may suspend those rights. (Article I refers to limitations on the power of Congress to act.) That is one of the main points of the recent supreme court decision, that Congress has not (properly)suspended Habeas Corpus.

“The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.”

If we grant the liberal argument, sympathetic to terrorists, that such illegal combatants deserve access to our domestic courts, then it’s still perfectly constitutional for the US to deny habeas corpus to terrorists on the grounds of invasion and public safety. However, the approved solution is that illegal combatants engaged in a war against the USA have no legal right to be tried under criminal law in our courts, but rather belong in the domain of international law. Obama’s attempt to move them from the domain of international law to the domain of domestic law is an attempt to ensure safer working conditions for terrorists.

Obama has so many flip-flops I can’t even keep up with them. I think that may be his tactic. If he keeps this up, it would boggle any normal mind attempting to battle him in a debate.

nottakingsides on June 17, 2008 at 8:49 PM

Yeah. The flip-flops are down to minutes now. He’s not triangulating. He’s heptangulating.

I’m quite sure that the Constitution, as written not as interpreted, is also a problem for him. Speaking at Pep Rallies and knowing what he is talking about is two different things.

Habeas Rights vs. Constitutional Rights
I think it should be noted that Habeas Corpus is not a constitutional right. It is an older right that predates the U.S. Constitution by about by 400 to 500 years. In a nutshell Habeas is the right to ask “Why am I here”.
The constitution only brings up Habeas in terms of the suspension clause. For this clause to have any meaning, a fundamental right to Habeas must exist independent of any constitutional rights. Meaning that in order to make special rules regarding when and how Habeas can be suspended, the Framers of the Constitution must have understood that there was a fundamental right to Habeas that predated the Constitution.
Therefore, Obama’s is correct in his statement that granting Habeas rights does not necessarily involve granting any constutional rights.

When the Supreme Court ruled that slaves had no rights a white man was bound to respect, did that mean that slavery was out of the hands of Lincoln?

Tantor on June 17, 2008 at 11:24 PM

Tantor, are you accusing Obama of wanting to start another Civil War in this country? :)

Gotta love Label Politics – everything is the same, except it sounds like something else.

Obama on Gitmo jihadis: You don’t have to give them the same protections as normal criminals

Expect Obama to give his brother’s foot baths, and all taxpayer expenses paid Club Med accomodations.

When the Supreme Court ruled that slaves had no rights a white man was bound to respect, did that mean that slavery was out of the hands of Lincoln?

Hasn’t the Supreme Court already decided this issue? Isn’t Obama implying that he’ll somehow attempt to relax the standard that was just set by the court? Isn’t this out of the hands of the next President?

Likewise, the terrorists did not comply with the GC. They did not identify themselves as combatants and they targeted civilians, both violations of the GC which denies them its protection. Technically, they’re spies who can be shot. When the OSS landed its Jedburgh teams in civvies behind Nazi lines, the Nazis executed them. It was perfectly legal and we made no complaint.

Kazuo Sakamaki was the first prisoner of WWII, the captain of a midget sub swamped outside the mouth of Pearl Harbor, caught the morning after the attack. There was no talk of trying him in a domestic court nor kicking him loose if we couldn’t prove he attacked us. Maybe some smart lawyer would have made the case that he was sunbathing on the beach when racist American GIs rounded him up and falsely accused him. We held Sakamaki for years until the Japanese empire ceased their war against us, then released him.

By contrast, when some of the Doolittle Raiders were tried for war crimes, unlike our treatment of Sakamaki, and executed, we considered that an outrage. Obama is advocating the Hirohito approach rather than the Geneva Convention approach.

The Geneva Convention was written to moderate war, to round off its sharp edges, to outlaw its terroristic excesses. When you give terrorists, who deliberately violate the GC, more legal privileges than legal combatants who abide by the GC, you are turning the Geneva Convention on its head and perverting its intention.

We can see that springing prisoners from Gitmo to rejoin the jihad results in more deaths of innocent parties. Where in this concern for the rights of jihadis is any consideration for their victims, past and future?

Had we granted habeas corpus to legal combatants we would have had to kick most of our Japanese, German, and Italian prisoners free in WWII. After all, we did not have witnesses to present evidence against each one to prove they had shot at our troops. Perhaps we would have had to parachute a division of lawyers behind the beach head at Normandy to ensure the German defenders rights were properly observed.

We should hold the terrorists prisoner at Gitmo until their patron organizations cease their war against America. It is their misfortune that Islam declares perpetual war against the whole world in its insane war of religious imperialism. They should bear the burden and risk of their rejection of international law and their relentless bellicosity, not us, their targets.

You can not fight a war with police, lawyers, courts, and judges. Such an approach is doomed to fail as reactionary and defensive. It attempts to micromanage each attacker’s case. To win you must take the initiative, go on the offensive, take the war to the enemy with the military. You must handle your enemy captives as a group, just as we handled our German prisoners en masse in camps. We didn’t grant them the constitutional rights of a US citizen nor did we ever consider that the way to acquire such rights of an American citizen was to kill one.

RUSH: This guy Obama is dangerous, because he’s an idiot. I mean, really. They talk about how brilliant this guy is, that he went to Harvard and so forth. I did some checking. This guy never wrote anything at Harvard Law. He just had a law review. He never wrote anything — probably on purpose, not to create a paper trail. Number two, he might not have been capable of it, for all I know. But I mean the things this guy says, the people he hangs around with, the associates he chooses to become part of his administration. Hell, he just went to somebody out there. He just hired somebody to be one of his big advisors on something who ended up quoting Winnie the Pooh! I’m not kidding. He quoted Winnie the Pooh in terms of foreign policy, how we have to behave. I’ll find this. I’ve got four stacks here. Ah. Here it is today. It’s Richard Danzig.

“Richard Danzig, who served as Navy secretary under President Clinton is tipped to become national security advisor in an Obama White House.” By the way, I thought Obama was about all this change. He’s getting a bunch of retreads from the Clinton administration to run the show here, just a full bunch of retreads. There’s nothing new, here. Anyway, Danzig ran the Navy for Clinton and is going to be national security advisor in Obama’s White House, “told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to this: ‘If it is causing you too much pain, try something else.’ Mr. Danzig told the Center for New American security, quote, ‘Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.’” Now, I got this from our old buddy Jim Geraghty at National Review Online at the Campaign Spot. Now, this sounds like something you’d see on a satire Web page. “‘Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.’ He spelled out how American troops, spies, and anti-terrorist officials could learn key lessons by understanding the desire of terrorists to emulate super heroes like Luke Skywalker and the lust for violence of violent football fans.” These are the people Obama seeks to surround himself with. He’s a blooming idiot, folks.

why not go whole the nine yards and grant them access to the criminal courts?

Because he doesn’t mean any of it. Unless it came off perfectly he would be the one blamed for the judicial debacle that freed terrorists. Rightfully so. Even McCain’s zeal to bash Bush at all costs stopped short of anything more than demanding military tribunals.

And while we are on the subject- The UCMJ is the legal system for our military. Do we really want to go down the path of applying a system designed for organized Western-style troops from nations with operable justice systems to the vermin of Gitmo?

Imagine the GOP attack ads! “Obama wants an OJ trial for Osama!”

How is that better?

Considering that he claims to be an expert in constitutional law, that is more than a little disturbing.

That Barry picture is … terrifying.

TheUnrepentantGeek on June 17, 2008 at 7:11 PM

Re: Obama Photo:

“Missed it by that much!”

1GooDDaDDy on June 17, 2008 at 7:19 PM

Or how about “Oh, snap!”

What is Obama talking about? Has he not heard of the Detainee Treatment Act or the Military Commissions Act?!

paul006 on June 17, 2008 at 7:09 PM

He was campaigning in the 54th State at the time and news gets there slowly.

“Missed it by that much!”

And just as warped.

Obama wings his policy chat the way a deaf bat hunts moths:

Swallow everything and hope for the best.

In fairness, this isn’t the general election pander it looks like. He alluded to trying jihadis under the UCMJ, as opposed to normal criminal statutes, near the end of his big foreign policy speech last August (the same one in which he talked about invading Pakistan) and his floor statement on granting habeas rights two years ago proposed limiting claims to the question of whether the petitioner was being wrongfully held

Isn’t it still a pander if he has said (or implied) other things in between. Like yesterday’s invocation of the 1993 WTC trials. And the prior approving message of the SCOTUS decision.
I think the relatively easy thing is to find when Obama has said something similar in the past. The hard part is squaring it with other things he said and what he actually intends his policy to be.