Obama '08?

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Words are my stock-in-trade. I use them precisely. Please do the same.

Sorry, but a comment like this is precisely why you seem to be a pretentious prig.

Reporting from Washington "The Obama administration has won the legal right to hold its terrorism suspects indefinitely and without oversight by judges " not at Guantanamo or in Illinois, but rather at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

In a 3-0 decision, the U.S. appeals court in Washington ruled for the administration Friday and said the Constitution and its right to habeas corpus does not extend to foreign prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan because it is a war zone. The judges dismissed claims from three prisoners who were taken to Bagram from Pakistan and Thailand and have been held for as long as seven years

This is interesting.
Obama got from the courts what Bush couldnt get, and what many on the left screamed about when Bush tried to get it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-court-bagram-20100522,0,787686.story

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Reporting from Washington "The Obama administration has won the legal right to hold its terrorism suspects indefinitely and without oversight by judges " not at Guantanamo or in Illinois, but rather at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

In a 3-0 decision, the U.S. appeals court in Washington ruled for the administration Friday and said the Constitution and its right to habeas corpus does not extend to foreign prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan because it is a war zone. The judges dismissed claims from three prisoners who were taken to Bagram from Pakistan and Thailand and have been held for as long as seven years

So it was unconstitutional when Bush wanted it, but its ok now that Obama wants it?

Civil liberties advocates denounced Friday's ruling.

It "ratifies the dangerous principle that the U.S. government has unchecked power to capture people anywhere in the world, unilaterally declare them enemy combatants and subject them to indefinite military detention with no judicial review," said Melissa Goodman, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Just because the plane landed at Bagram instead of Guantanamo should not mean they can be held indefinitely without any court review," said Andrea Prasow, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch.

Most liberals exhibit a narcissistic pathology marked by grandiosity, envy, a lack of empathy, illusions of personal perfection, and a sense of entitlement.

The radical is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer;
The radical is building his own kingdom, a kingdom of heaven on earth;
The revolutionary’s purpose is to undermine the system by taking from the haves and giving it to the havenots;
We are not virtuous by not wanting power, because power is good and powerlessness is evil;
The most basic principle for radicals is lie to opponents and disarm them by pretending to be moderates and liberals;
The stated cause is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is accumulation of power to make the revolution;
The radical organizer does not have a fixed truth"truth to him is relative and changing;
To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles;
Life is a corrupting process;
He who fears corruption fears life;
The standard of the revolution is democracy--a democracy which upends all social hierarchies, including those based on merit.

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chap20.html

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The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

You still don't understand that asking a person how much you approve or disapprove of how a president is doing his job is a popularity poll.

I see so many things to reply to. Where do I start?

okie wrote:

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Today's term "progressive" basically translates into ultra socialist or communist . . . .

Ummm, according to dictionary.com:

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pro•gres•sive   [pruh-gres-iv] Show IPA "adjective 1. favoring or advocating progress, change, improvement, or reform, as opposed to wishing to maintain things as they are, esp. in political matters: a progressive mayor.

I believe that the term could be used to describe either the Republican or the Democratic party. It certainly appears from your posts that what you advocate you see as an improvement or reform. You most certainly do not, I take from your posts, "wish[] to maintain things as they are."

Words are my stock-in-trade. I use them precisely. Please do the same.

okie also wrote:

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Hitler was a leftist in may respects, in fact he was a socialist, although just a nationalist socialist, not an international one, which would have been closer to the communists of his day. Hitler in fact railed against capitalists, the rich, and Jews . . . .

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Please check your history. As with language, precision is key here.

Hitler was virulently anti-Communist, managed to “suppress” the German Communist Party (the KPD), and imprisoned party members in concentration camps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Germany#The_Nazi_era

In fact:

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Hitler was less interested in the "socialist" aspect of "national socialism" beyond moving Social Welfare administration from the Church to the State. Himself of provincial lower-middle-class origins, he disliked the mass working class of the big cities, and had no sympathy with the notions of attacking private property or the business class (which some early Nazis espoused).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party

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Nazi ideology stressed the failures of communism, liberalism, and democracy, and supported the "racial purity of the German people" and that of other Northwestern Europeans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party

Once again, precision and accuracy are more persuasive than hyperbole.

Words are my stock-in-trade. I use them precisely. Please do the same.

"But we hold that the third factor, that is “the practical obstacles inherent in resolving the prisoner's entitlement to the writ,” particularly when considered along with the second factor, weighs overwhelmingly in favor of the position of the United States. It is undisputed that Bagram, indeed the entire nation of Afghanistan, remains a theater of war. Not only does this suggest that the detention at Bagram is more like the detention at Landsberg than Guantanamo, the position of the United States is even stronger in this case than it was in Eisentrager. As the Supreme Court rec-ognized in Boumediene, even though the active hostilities in the European theater had “c[o]me to an end,” at the time of the Eisentrager decision, many of the problems of a theater of war remained:

My note: this is the difference, based on precedence between how the Courts look at Bagram versus Gitmo, and the comparison is NOT apples to apples.

In addition to supervising massive reconstruction and aid efforts the American forces stationed in Germany faced potential security threats from a defeated enemy. In retrospect the post-War occupation may seem uneventful. But at the time Eisentrager was decided, the Court was right to be concerned about judicial interference with the military's efforts to contain “enemy elements, guerilla fighters, and ‘were-wolves.’ “

*12 128 S.Ct. at 2261 (quoting Eisentrager, 339 U.S. at 784).

In ruling for the extension of the writ to Guantanamo, the Supreme Court expressly noted that “[s]imilar threats are not apparent here.” 128 S.Ct. at 2261. In the case before us, similar, if not greater, threats are indeed apparent. The United States asserts, and petitioners cannot credibly dispute, that all of the attributes of a facility exposed to the vagaries of war are present in Bagram. The Supreme Court expressly stated in Boumediene that at Guantanamo, “[w]hile obligated to abide by the terms of the lease, the United States is, for all practical purposes, answerable to no other sovereign for its acts on the base. Were that not the case, or if the detention facility were located in an active theater of war, arguments that issuing the writ would be ‘impractical or anomalous' would have more weight.” Id. at 2261-62 (emphasis added). Indeed, the Supreme Court supported this proposition with reference to the separate opinion of Justice Harlan in Reid, where the Justice expressed his doubts that “every provision of the Constitution must always be deemed automatically applicable to United States citizens in every part of the world.” See 354 U.S. at 74 (Harlan, J., concurring in the result). We therefore conclude that under both Eisentrager and Boumediene, the writ does not extend to the Bagram confinement in an active theater of war in a territory under neither the de facto nor de jure sovereignty of the United States and within the territory of another de jure sovereign.

We are supported in this conclusion by the rationale of Eisentrager, which was not only not overruled, but reinforced by the language and reasoning just referenced from Boumediene. As we referenced in the background discussion of this opinion, we set forth more fully now concerns expressed by the Supreme Court in reaching its decision in Eisentrager:

I remember that he said he majored in geology.

He put down the leftist students at his school as being pathetic drug takers but the leftists I knew were honors students, were in both the sciences and the humanities and were much better writers than the righties. I also remember that leftists went to graduate school.

Not long afterwards, I wrote that liberals were, in general, more well educated than conservatives and okie challenged that, asking for verification. I supplied it and he did not respond.

Okie also said he bought his first home 40 years ago . . . but . . . I will take "40 years" as a conversational 40 years . . . you know how people estimate. But, that could mean that he graduated in '66 or '67, which would have given him time to have been in Viet Nam and still have purchased a home four decades ago.

The prisoners in question were from Pakistan and Thailand and captured outside of Afghanistan.

What is of signifigance here is that the Obama administration, which has made so much of criticizing Guantanamo, has essentially done the same thing as its predecessor: Looked for a place to stash terrorists where it can be argued that they are not entitled to the protection of the Constitution.

Maybe that is a commentary on the quality of Bush's lawyers. After all, Liberty U. is no Harvard.

The material difference between sending these prisoners to Bagram rather than Guantanamo is difficult to detect.

(1) the citizenship and status of the detainee and the adequacy of the process through which that status determination was made; (2) the nature of the sites where apprehension and then detention took place; and (3) the practical obstacles inherent in resolving the prisoner's entitlement to the writ.

Such trials would hamper the war effort and bring aid and comfort to the enemy. They would diminish the prestige of our commanders, not only with enemies but with wavering neutrals. It would be difficult to devise more effective fettering of a field commander than to allow the very enemies he is ordered to reduce to submission to call him to account in his own civil courts and divert his efforts and attention from the military offensive abroad to the legal defensive at home. Nor is it unlikely that the result of such enemy litigiousness would be a conflict between judicial and military opinion highly comforting to enemies of the United States. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. at 779.

We do not ignore the arguments of the detainees that the United States chose the place of detention and might be able “to evade judicial review of Executive detention decisions by transferring detainees into active conflict zones, thereby granting the Executive the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.” Brief of Appellees at 34 (quotation marks and citation omitted). However, that is not what happened here. Indeed, without dismissing the legitimacy or sincerity of appellees' concerns, we doubt that this fact goes to either the second or third of the Supreme Court's enumerated factors. We need make no determination on the importance of this possibility, given that it remains only a possibility; its resolution can await a case in which the claim is a reality rather than a speculation. In so stating, we note that the Supreme Court did not dictate that the three enumerated factors are exhaustive.

And that thought is just as troubling to me as it was to the D.C. Circuit in Al Maqaleh.