Bad Attorney General! No Biscuit!
Ashcroft takes time out of his busy day busting glass-pipe makers and fornicators to beg for more double-secret powers against terrorists. Not gonna happen, zippy.
You know what really frosts my bagel about Ashcroft (and also Tony Scalia)? They both claim to be strict constructionists (well... Ashcroft used to), yet when strict constructionism would trump their personal moral order, they ignore the standard, and then deny doing so. I don't have a problem with strict constructionism-- it's consistent, often fair, and eminently sensible as a policy. But if it's rolled out only when convenient, it becomes as meaningless as consulting the Tarot on matters of policy, law, and jurisprudence. An Attorney General who consults his personal morality before consulting the law is a bad Attorney General✶Morality does come into play. Always does. It just doesn't bat leadoff. M'kay?.
Oh, and also? This secret-disappearance-and-detention thing, even if it only happens to Suspected Terror People, is creepy beyond words and rather un-American.
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I''m gonna give you a rousing
I'm gonna give you a rousing "you're damn right".
It's my experience that Americans are totally willing to give up someone else's rights/liberty/property in a heartbeat. They just don't like giving up their own.
"Well," they say, "terrorism is a very bad thing. And sometimes we need to lock up good people because of the bad thing".
Sure. This line of reasoning says that because we are/were/might be at war with Arabs, our threshold for locking them up can be arbitrarily low. The sad part is it inescapably boils down to racism, pure and simple.
When we were at war in Yugoslavia, we didn't go around locking up white people.
The thing that absolutely stuns me is how little this Administration cares about the constitutional rights of individuals. That constitution thing is there for a reason. It's because we've all learned something from history.
You CANNOT trust a government. The Bush-Ashcroft-Wolfowitz just can't understand why we don't trust them. After all, they'd never lock up anyone who didn't need locking up, right?
Wrong. Ashcroft won't even TAKE QUESTIONS on his own department's rather scathing report, delineating the treatment of the "detainees".
Lack of respect for individuals coupled with some serious cover-your-ass, and we have the situation we're in.
Even better, Ashcroft thinks that Zacarias Moussaiui (apologies if I've misspelled) shouldn't be able to call witnesses in his own defense. What the hell kind of trial is that? You want to talk about a dangerous precedent -- there it is. The government gets to choose who testifies in a trial? What on earth are they thinking?
There is an adversarial system, and there is lunacy. As officers of the court they're supposed to be interested in, and ethically bound to find, the truth.
Mossaoui will probably turn out to be the screwup he claims to be. He probably did want to be in on the hijackings, but was turfed out for being an idiot. He should go to jail if that's true. Our government should CEASE its pursuit of frictionless justice.
Like I said, if you ask the average American, they're all for giving away someone else's liberty. Just not their own.