Here's the Owl over at Power Line:
Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, could be a free man very soon. A U.S. military jury sentenced him to five and a half years following his conviction for supporting terrorism. It was bin Laden's terrorism, of course, that led to the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans. And Hamdan didn't just drive bin Laden, he also guarded the master terrorist. His defense is that he was just a working stiff.
It really has to hurt guys like the Owl who stood by and led cheers for the detention and interrogation scheme at Gitmo, the denial of even the most basic rights of the accused, and the development of a "judicial" process that Franz Kafka would have loved, to see that Salim Hamdan probably - Spot says probably - won't spend the rest of his life rotting in jail. This is a bitter pill indeed for our revenge-nik friends.
But the commission that heard Hamdan's case really did the administration a favor. There was another US Supreme Court case with Hamdan's name written all over it concerning whether the war crime of "material support" even exists under international law, or whether it was an ex post facto law as applied to Hamdan - and undoubtedly others at Gitmo, too.
Johnny "Two Cents" Rocketseed seems a little wistful about the good old days when the warron terra was more popular:
JOHN adds: I think it's one more sign that the "war on terror," which with all its faults has kept us safe for the last seven years, is winding down. It's impossible to say what the consequences will be.
Maybe we're recovering our senses, Johnny, and not listening to pants pissers like you quite so much. Maybe we'll figure out that our militarism is making more enemies than we eliminate, and that we're bankrupting the country in the process. And maybe, just maybe, we'll figure out that the United States without civil rights and liberties really isn't the United States at all.
Richard Bruce Cheney was right that we're in an existential conflict; it just isn't the one that the vice president and the boys and Power Line think it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment