See, they'd say that by calling terrorists "criminals" you're not being serious about The War On Terror. It's a neat trick that Bush has been using for eight years--terrorists aren't criminals but our enemies in a war, so criminal procedures don't apply, and furthermore it's a special kind of war where people we capture don't deserve to be treated as POWs either. Amazingly, things work out exactly so that captors can do whatever they want to detainees.
The subtext is that the basic rights of the accused are not a universal human birthright but something that you have to earn by being in a deserving class of people. Since a major point of the protections of the accused is to make sure innocent people don't get punished, it's strangely self-annihilating logic. Terrorists are so bad that they don't deserve a reasonable effort to find out whether they are actually terrorists or not!
It's a good rule of thumb that when somebody argues against the rights of terrorism suspects with an argument that would apply equally well to depriving common criminal suspects of their rights, something funny is going on. But post-9/11 this funny business has been hard to attack. I'm hoping that period is gradually coming to an end, but I'm not sure if it has.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-09-04 01:12 pm (UTC)The subtext is that the basic rights of the accused are not a universal human birthright but something that you have to earn by being in a deserving class of people. Since a major point of the protections of the accused is to make sure innocent people don't get punished, it's strangely self-annihilating logic. Terrorists are so bad that they don't deserve a reasonable effort to find out whether they are actually terrorists or not!
It's a good rule of thumb that when somebody argues against the rights of terrorism suspects with an argument that would apply equally well to depriving common criminal suspects of their rights, something funny is going on. But post-9/11 this funny business has been hard to attack. I'm hoping that period is gradually coming to an end, but I'm not sure if it has.