re: #1327 LudwigVanQuixote

I don’t think that there is anything silly about not standing up for the core values of America. Honestly, I am disgusted with many here.

During what time period has America lived up to those values?

America is a dream, dude, it’s a work in progress. It started with a compromise about slavery. It committed near-genocide against American Indians. It’s manufactured wars, engaged in invasions to benefit corporate interests— the phrase ‘banana republic’ was invented to describe our actions.

But the interesting thing is that along the way, we’ve actually been getting better. We ended slavery, we gave women the right to vote, we’ve moved forwards in a thousand and one ways.

Bush put is in a hole, with the actions that he took. These prisoners are the epitome of a gray area. I don’t like the way they were captured— but I know there’s legal precedent for keeping a prisoner in arrest even if arrested by a crooked cop. I don’t like the way they were treated— but I know there’s legal precedent for not excluding other evidence even in the presence of tainted evidence. There are a hundred things I don’t like about the position we’re in, but that’s hardly important.

I am no lawyer. I want them accorded justice, I want it delivered in fairness. I think, as I said, that the federal court is the best, and truest place for them.

However, that does not mean I don’t think a military tribunal could dispense justice. I have no idea why you think this, either, why you think our court system is the only fair and just realm for trials of this sort. I do think that, though they have no country and no true people, that the terrorists who planned and committed 9/11 feel that they are at war with us. I would rather strip them of that illusion by prosecuting them in federal court. I do think we would lose something by prosecuting them in a military tribunal, but it’s not that we would lose the rule of law.

Maybe this is because, unlike you, I’m not a religious man. I have no belief in an afterlife, in a world of perfect forms, of a knowing and just god. What matters to me are people, and the welfare and advancement and happiness of them. And I am every day proud of humanity for actually progressing, for not simply going in ever-decreasing circles. I still think we may kill ourselves off before we spread out amongst the stars, but I’m hopeful.

To me, your position requires incredibly naivete about what America has done in the past, and an insistence on painting a muddy legal picture in black and white that, frankly, I doubt you have the legal credentials to understand. It ignores that we have many prisoners here in the US who are slowly being freed, one at a time, by the Innocence Project, who are fighting to liberate those wrongly incarcerated. The legal system is busy, right now, attempting to prosecute them for doing so, or otherwise smear them.

I consider that a much larger betrayal of American values than whether KSM will get one form of trial or another form of trial.