I just caught a minute of Attorney General Gonzales answering questions on Habeus on CSPAN. The sentence I came in on ended with, “we’re not taking habeus corpus away from these people, because they never had it to begin with.”
Well, first of all, let’s ditch semantics. Just because militants in Iraq don’t ‘have’ habeus in their own country doesn’t mean we are denying them it when they come here. There’s the rub: by “taking it away” I understand “denying.” It is now easier to say that we are denying these people habeus.
But you don’t need to be content with that stretch of reason. Understand that American citizens, like Jose Pedilla, have been branded enemy combatants and had their right to habeus stripped from them. Indeed, any American citizen could fall into such a situation. Would Gonzales really argue that American citizens don’t have habeus to begin with? Certainly not. Additionally, Gonzales and the Administration’s platitudinal repetition of “picking people up off the battle field” is at least misleading and at worst a blatant lie. What battle field was Pedilla on? American soil? What battle field is that? Please, don’t act like every single person in Guantanamo was found holding an AK-47 and staring down US troops in the middle of a fire fight. I will grant no such absurdity.
With a somewhat loose interpretation, we can argue that the Constitution applies to all people under US jurisdiction: if we claim the ability to abduct these people, a decent respect the dignity of mankind commands we give them the chance to challenge their detention. Any other position is untenable.
