foreign army is naughty enough to lose him his constitutional rights."
First of all, I don't even think that "depriving someone of their constitutional rights" is the major issue in this case.
On a very simplistic level (apparently the only level that Tim May seems to think Tyler Durden operates on), the US "trial by a jury of your peers" and "innocent until proven guilty" are not supposed to be Rome-like luxuries of being a citizen. They in theory represent a system that protects the accused from basically being the target of whatever political interests may be in charge.
By bypassing this system, isn't there a subtext here that on some level says "He's guilty if we say he's guilty"? In other words, they apparently don't trust that our legal system works the way they (Bush and the military) want it to. In this sense, our legal system is now caricatured as being essentially a luxury of US citzenship, as opposed to reflecting some basic human right.
Yes of course I know that there are probably practicalities involved: "If we don't try him as an enemy combatant then he might go free and kill more US soldiers". But again, this statement assumes complete and infallible knowledge on the part of the military concerning this man, and then the right to bypass the rights of American citizens to determine what to do with him.
It's a bad sign.
-TD
If *that* decision-making process has weaker legal protection than a normal criminal trial would have had, the effect is that the legal protection of the whole system is reduced. If the process of removing someone's constitutional rights is not itself subject to those rights, then those rights are hollow and can be removed at will.Ken Brown
_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8 is here: Try it free* for 2 months http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup
