I thought about it awhile, and my first instinct was to stay away from this subject entirely since I'm not an authority on it.
The Supreme Court decided 5-4, with the usual suspects on either side, that the prisoners at Guantanamo still had a few fundamental legal rights. Predictably, the Bruce Willis wannabes are howling at the moon over that one. People who can't write a sentence without misspelling three words are commenting passionately on editorial message boards explaining why five USSC justices have no understanding of the constitution. Personally, I expect my trusted legal scholars to be able to spell.
After 911, W laid it out for everyone: Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists. The implicit message, later becoming explicit, was that our patriotism, our very Americanism, would be measured by our support for W and Cheney and their appalling foreign policy decisions. By those broad standards, I'd be considered one of the terrorists since I haven't supported W and Cheney or any of their agenda items since January 2001.
Because the administration's definition of what constitutes a terrorist bad guy is so indiscriminate, it occurs to me we may have some people locked up who don't fit the usual concept of terrorist. Maybe we do, maybe we don't, but either way we need to get the paperwork processed on them. Something about locking people up and throwing away the key without a hearing, or detaining POWs when the war will be of infinite duration, bothers me. I'm a guy who has bad dreams about being buried alive, so maybe I'm misplacing metaphors, but I haven't seen anything in seven years to inspire confidence that W's government gets things right; I don't trust those guys. And anything Scalia and Clarence Thomas are against can't be all bad.
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