re: #257 soxfan4life

I don’t lack confidence in the system, but I find it absurd that the POS is being given the same rights and protections under the law that I am. And more than our military members are afforded, especially if they were tried in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I’ll take your second point, the bolded bit, first as it’s easiest: We afford it to them even though they deny it to us because we are better than they are.
the second, pragmatic justification: insofar as we refuse to treat captured persons badly, we make it harder and harder for the other side to do it to us and continue to slander us as doing that.

Now your second;

I find it absurd that the POS is being given the same rights and protections under the law that I am.

i don’t. I look at it as showing that POS and those like him that while they consider all human life worth nothing, we consider every person to have certain unalienable rights: and we are so unafraid of the terrorists that we will convict them under the very system of laws they loathe and wish to subvert—

The same system that ensures that I have the right to vote, the right to an education, the right to an abortion, and the right to drive. The system that ensures that a woman will get an education and forbids the exclusion of women from schools or professions. The system that allows people with the terrorists’ own views to express them freely!— and the system that defends our free speech rights to criticise our President, or anyone else.

Yes. I want them lawfully convicted under THAT system.

We aren’t ‘reducing citizens to their level’ by trying them this way. We are elevating them to the status of humans by treating them as such— and most of all, we are saying that we are so much above them that we can afford to give them the rights they deny to themselves and to their own people— because they are so afraid of that freedom.