perfidy

"Very well... Security for some, and tiny American flags for others! [wild cheering]"

The Weekly Standard (!) (?) (!!) (???) (....!) (.) is running a cover story making the case for creating a federal terrorism court so that cases like Gitmo and Jose "dirrrty" Padilla can be dealt with in a clear, standard, and lawful manner. Whoda thunk the Standard would come around?

If you can stand a certain amount of horseshit (see the following excerpt... "bullying" my arse), do read it. Support for a very good idea, from an unexpected quarter.

Morally intimidated and bullied by civil libertarian ideologues, partisan opportunists, and a press almost universally hostile on these issues--yet having accepted, along with the rest of the country, the lessons of Korematsu, the Red Scare, and the due process revolution of the 1960s--administration officials seem, not surprisingly, to prefer to evade the debate or retreat behind the rhetoric of "security." The administration has failed to make its case well or to take modest actions that could strengthen its case. This in turn encourages the critics and deepens the government's reluctance to touch a set of issues on which it feels it can only lose.

The time has come for the government to break this poisonous cycle. Balancing liberty and security in a way that is plain and understandable to all is a tough job, but it must be attempted. The centerpiece of a Bush administration civil liberties offensive should be creative institutional reform. A new terrorism court is the place to start.

[wik] I had to pull out this observation too, which lends a particular urgency to the Standards' call: "The enemy combatant designation, while it fills a legitimate need in the current context, exists in a legal limbo where no court, civil or military, has clear jurisdiction, and thus opens the door to valid concern about due process." Damn straight.