Why are Americans against the Gitmo detainees having full civilian trials? What is wrong with this?

Sorry. Again, I just must be very stupid, but I do not see why anyone would be opposed to giving the same rights to these detainees we give to American citizen serial killers and terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh.

So, why, RD and others, are you against this?

“…the guys in the powdered wigs would have flipped over the idea that habeas extends to foreigners we are in combat with who have been captured and are being held by us abroad. While this crude formulation may hardly be equal to the scholarship the issue demands, it is hard to brush the conclusion off inelegantly though it may have been stated.”

“I think the only question remaining is this. Do we ship Bush, Cheney, et al to the International Criminal Court at the first opportunity, or do we hold out until they bring back hanging?”

The last disjunction (“or do we hold out…”) makes this question sound facetious, which is a great pity. Sure, we’re all wondering how to fix a broke system, but there has to be some punishment for those who created this system. Torturing is unacceptable, period. Saying, “Sorry, my fault” is unacceptable, period. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are responsible, period. Sending them to the ICC is too good for them, because the wishy-washy Europeans, who don’t have a death penalty, are likely to give them 6 months of probation. Either Americans decide to punish this lot or they lose what little moral standing they have left in the world, which is approaching 0.
Period. And this is not a joke.

Yeah well, Tom Disch couldn’t get his basic historical, easily-checked facts straight when doing published research on said science fiction, so I’m not terribly impressed by his opinions about us, either.

I could say something equally snarky about pseudo-academics with more arrogance than intellect, who think that public acclaim entitles them to make generalizations without doing their homework myself – but nobody would know if I was talking about Disch or David Brooks. (Or their fans, for that matters.)

Re-Alignment not Impeachment

Impeachment in Seven Reasons

OTOH, when the President is bottoming out in the polls, the Republican Party is reeling and collapsing from its internal contradictions, investigations are finally gaining momentum, externalities in Iraq and the economy are damaging the opposition, that prominent liberal bloggers would pre-emptively initiate an amnesty mechanism for Republican war-criminals is utterly incomprehensible to me.
…
GF at 87:Thomas Disch at one point said a science fiction fan was most often a case of arrested development who was unable to maturely understand that reason and logic do not rule human affairs.

2. I’m fine for Congress having the courts enforce what procedures its specifies; not with Congress basically asking the courts to make up procedures.

3. Congress and the President can do all kinds of awful things overseas which would be evil and wrong but which have no constitutional remedy in US court. If the Constitution applied full stop to our actions everywhere, you could see Syria trying to sue for some sort of equal protection injunction on the grounds that the pressure it’s under is part of a suspect pattern of bullying Arab, or Muslim, nations in a discriminatory way. Some people might like this, but of course its ludicrous.