Don't Just Get Angry About This Travesty -- Get Loud! [View All]

[mhatrw]

We are 100% right on this one and our opponents (in both parties) are 100% wrong.

We must engage everyone who will listen in every available venue -- online, with our email lists, with our families, in our offices, at our local hangouts, with all of our friends, acquaintances and neighbors!

Stupid, uninformed and ignorant people are obviously the target demographic for yesterday's cynical political embrace of totalitarianism. "Terrorists Don't Deserve Any Rights" is their battle cry. And I guess that battle cry sounds pretty good to anyone who is completely ignorant of the entire history of Western judicial systems and who lacks even the slightest capacity to think critically about the difference between being accused of a crime and being guilty of it. Yes, it may feel physically painful to have to explain political concepts so simple and fundamental as why totalitarianism is bad and why the rule of law is good to adult US citizens. But still we have to try!

Here is my attempt to frame the argument so that even the grade school kid of a freeper can understand it:

We all hate terrorists and terrorism. Nobody cares about the rights of guilty murderous terrorists. But every person who actually has an inkling of what it means to be American, who actually understands the freedoms that make our country great must care about the rights of the accused. Because, as the McCarthy communism scares and the Salem witch hunts have taught us, being accused of something is most surely not equivalent to being guilty of it.

Take Brandon Mayfield, for instance. Here's a guy who was accused of being involved in the Madrid bombings. He was arrested, and if he had been found guilty, a lot of promotions would have been in line for the FBI supervisors and federal prosecutors who brought him to justice. But the man was 100% innocent, and so 19 days after he was thrown in prison to wide acclaim, a judge dismissed his case.

Would you have preferred this US army veteran father to remain behind bars to this day? Indefinitely? Perhaps you would have liked to have seen this man executed for his sin of being an accused terrorist? Is your America's new motto to be, "It is better for a thousand innocent men to be put to death than for a single guilty terrorist to live"?

Now consider that most suspects accused of terrorism are arrested in the planning stages. They are arrested (and then perhaps charged) before any actual physical crime is committed. They are accused of plotting terrorist acts rather than actually committing them. The arrests of dozens or even scores of such suspects are accompanied by the resplendence of 24/7 media hoopla and huge rounds of public cheering for our intrepid protectors. Then, invariably, a number of these suspects are later released because they simply got caught up in the wide dragnet and there is no prosecutable case against them. But suppose we were to change the laws so that none of these individuals had any rights to a fair and speedy trial or even to be seen by a judge. Suppose we instead kept all of these suspects imprisoned indefinitely, even ones who were wholly innocent. Suppose we tortured all of them and then allowed our government to produce secret evidence and "evidence" extracted under torture against these suspects in secret courts.

Would you still be able to recognize the country you live in? Can you?

Now consider that every time one of these highly publicized terrorism busts go down, the political popularity of the FBI, our federal justice system and even the President himself goes up. Consider the incentive for abuse when all any of these people have to do to increase their public popularity is to stage another "highly successful" terrorist network bust with whichever poor patsies they feel like targeting this month. Even if you think our current administration is beyond reproach and would never even broach such a heinous scheme, consider a future administration in which a dishonest politician (oxymoron?) were President or a dishonest person headed the FBI, DOJ or Department of Homeland Security. Would you really put it past every single previous, current or future contender for these positions of power to "wag the dog" during a period of scandal or unpopularity by staging a fake anti-terrorism bust? Would you really put this past Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, every Bush and every Clinton? Without our court system to evaluate merits of the charges against the suspects, what would be the incentive for any less than scrupulous politician to refrain from such behavior?