I know the lawyers will object, but we are talking about war here, not a judicial process.

If lawyers want to interject themselves upon the battlefield, they better buy lots of body armour, and lay a retainer on Blackwater for protection.

So you, who never received one, are indeed the One True Authority – and the rest of us have lives and have moved on.

Steverino: the Administration’s arguments in Padilla are more of an excuse that a real argument, and the amount of faith the government had in them can be estimated by their transfer of Padilla back to the civilian court system. But interestingly enough, even the Quirin defendants got counsel and a trial. I don’t know what precedent Bush was claiming for Padilla. Padilla was imprisoned entirely on Bush’s say-so that the AUMF applied and, on the Bush Administration’s arguments, without any recourse. The syllogism, as I have pointed out before, is to take rules for battlefield detainees, then declare that with terrorism the whole world is the battlefield as a justification for using these rules at O’Hare Airport and elsewhere.

“[Romney] can never quite make the sale. I mean, people would [want to] buy the merchandise, and they’d go up to the counter, and they would stand there, and end up taking it back. I don’t know what was missing.”

(V-8 like head smack) “Just arrest and jail the terrorists!” By jove, he’s got it! What a brilliant idea! It’s so simple! &lt/sarcasm&gt

Abandoning centuries of hard-won rights, that’s surrender to terror. To the terror you feel in your knees.

Ohhhh! Drama!

It never ceases to amaze me how some people describe necessary increases in domestic surveillance and new proposals to shore up pre-cellular communication law with language designed to invoke the same pictures in the mind conjured up by reading Orwell’s 1984.

And before you get the notion: Please don’t bother responding with yet another variation of the quotation commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin, “He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.” It’s one dead man’s opinion out of thousands of others, and that’s all. A blind squirrel finds a nut every so often, and one with 20/20 vision misses one occasionally as well.

Contrary to the belief of Ron Paul devotees, the Founding Fathers were not infallible demigods whose words were gospel, and whose experiences of life as musket-carrying eighteenth century colonials gave their every utterance greater relevance than that of our twenty-first century contemporaries on the watch for plastic explosives on a trans-Atlantic flight.

The GC text requires a “competent tribunal”. It also requires those who want its protections to follow that “text”. As said already, that means – you know, uniforms, chain of command, namerankserialnumber. Having Osama’s secret contact number doesn’t qualify.

(Incidentally, would you mind letting us know what your military experience is?) Unlike Bill Clinton, when the President sent me “greetings”, I invested two years defending your condescending ass.

I don’t see any way to support the Bush Administration’s original position in Padilla without acquiescing in unconstitutional martial law.

I’ll disagree with you there. Padilla, at the time of his arrest, was in possession of email addresses of AQ operatives. The AUMFT authorized the President to pursue persons aiding terrorist organizations that planned or had carried out attacks on the USA. So, yes, one could argue that Padilla was an enemy under the AUMFT. It might be a weak argument — it might even be an incorrect argument — but there’s a great deal of space between that and “unconstitutional martial law”. Supporters of Bush in this matter might be wrong-headed, but it’s a huge overstatement to say they’re pining for martial law.

The Administration is similarly disdainful of the Fourth Amendment, claiming a right to eavesdrop everywhere, all the time.

Nope, not quite. The Administration has claimed its authority to eavesdrop when one party is outside of the US, where the government has a reasonable basis to conclude that one party is somehow working or affiliated with Al Qaeda. (This is from Gonzales’s statements in December, 2005.) That’s not “everywhere, all the time”.

The ludicrous rhetoric got old long ago.

When bus-stops, pizzaria’s, and night-clubs within the USA start blowing up, all the ACLU lawyers in the world will not be able to stop the American People from becoming Jacksonians. And, when that happens, more than a few “innocent civilians” will be caught up in the mess. We have a history of intolerance for terrorism (by whatever name) within our midst.

As to Padilla, by a fair reading of his history, he has taken up arms against his country, he is a traitor in many eyes, and he should be hung.

I don’t want justice, I want to survive!