--- Woolgathering. Feel free to skip on by, if you so choose.
I'm really glad I'm not a Supreme Court Justice.I
have absolutely no idea how to tackle this one, but I do realize it's
important that someone---namely the court---suss this one out. Habeas
Corpus has been suspended. Citizens of this country---no matter how
nasty they might be---have been categorized as enemy combatants, but
instead of being tried for treason, they sit in jail cells, waiting for
the end of the war. And they belong there. In the Sunday paper, I was
treated to this article about
Jose Padilla. Jose does not sound like a very nice guy to me. He's
already murdered. He's familiar with firearms. He apparently has a
problem with law enforcement. That's his criminal side, but his
personal side is no different. He's an opportunist. He marries for not
for what he can give, but for what he can get. He mooches off his
mother, family members, his mosque. He lives in Egypt for a good long
time, hooks up with another woman before he divorces his neglected
wife, then decides to take a trip home. He deplanes in Chicago---and
because Abu Zubaydah ratted him out, he's captured and now sits in
jail. Classifed as an enemy combatant, despite the fact he's a citizen
of this country. Yaser Hamdi is also a citizen. Born here while his dad
was working in Louisiana. But he was raised in the Kingdom. He was
captured in Afghanistan by Allied troops and has been sitting in a brig
in South Carolina for the past two years. Neither of these men are
great people. You could call them any number of names, of which
"traitor" would be the most obvious choice. Yet, you have to ask, why,
if they're citizens, aren't they being allowed their Constitutionally
protected right to a speedy trial? But the government hasn't done that.
It's kept them locked up, without access to counsel for a time, and
it's said that if they were to have access to the legal system it would
be detrimental to the war on terror. The government, of course, has a
point. We are at war. The Executive branch does have to make hard
calls---this being one of them. I don't presume to know better than the
people in charge what is and isn't necessary when it comes to gathering
intelligence by means of interrogation. I just don't know, but neither
am I going to automatically assume that because there isn't any
regulation that, of course this means that there is
a car battery, a bucket of water and a pair of jumper cables involved.
There is middle ground. If, for instance, Hamdi had committed treason
against his home country, Saudi Arabia, he'd be dead by now. Beheaded.
They still do things old school in the Kingdom. I'd like to think the
US is a little more evolved that that. All these men are being deprived
of is their freedom. What they would choose to do with that freedom is
the issue under debate. I don't know how to resolve this one. It's a
damn good thing I'm not Solomon, because I sure as hell don't feel very
wise about this issue. They're citizens of this country: no matter what
they did, they deserve access to a speedy trial. If by their
citizenship, they have betrayed the country to which they are
traditionally supposed to be aligned, treason should be rather easy to
prove. Send them off to trial, find them guilty or not, but let the
system do the work it was intended to do. That's the way the founding
fathers set the gig up in the first place. But I also think that we need to make sacrifices, and our
liberty is one of the areas where sacrifices will need to be made for
the greater good. I don't think this has ever been more apparent than
now, with this war. But many people refuse to see this. They refuse to
acknowledge that we are, indeed, at war and that has a greater capacity
to harm our country than these two bozos ever will. These men
surrendered their liberty the minute they started playing for the other
side. Why should they get access to a fair trial, if it's in the best
interest for all of us that they stay exactly where they are
until the end of the war? I don't know and I'm no further in coming to
a better understanding of this issue than I was when I started
pondering deeply on this whole thing.