A Difference of Opinion

Your Humble Blogger notes this morning that George F. Will in the Washington Post writes about Contempt of Court; not so much agreeing with the Court’s decision in Boumediene as disparaging the, well, contemptuous manner in which opponents of that decision greeted it. An example of that contempt is John Yoo’s piece in the Wall Street Journal called The Supreme Court Goes to War. Seeing these two conservatives publicly disagree about the proper behavior of the Judicial and Executive branches is interesting, and faintly disgusting, but it did lead me to wonder if my Party and the middle-left have done a good job talking about why we agree with the Boumediene decision, and what we want our policy to be.

First of all, I’d make it clear: the U.S. should, when at war, take prisoners, and those prisoners should be treated as prisoners of war, fully complying with our obligations under the Geneva Conventions we helped to write and then signed. We believe in fulfilling our responsibilities; we don’t believe that agreements are to be followed only so long as they are convenient to us, and discarded the moment we fear some consequence or chafe under inconvenience. We keep our word. That’s the policy of the Democratic Party; the Republican Party may have another policy.

Second, we believe in our courts, and in the ability of crimes to be prosecuted in our courts. When we catch people who we think have committed crimes, we want to take those people to court and try them, fairly, because we have confidence that we will get the right people, and we will collect the evidence, and we don’t need to bend the rules to do it. That’s the policy of the Democratic Party; the Republican Party may have another policy.

Third, we believe in our judges. If we are going to throw a fellow in jail, we are willing to go to a judge and explain why, and we have confidence that the judge will rule correctly. We aren’t scared that we won’t be able to explain to the judge why we need to keep him. We aren’t scared that we won’t be able to explain to the judge why we need warrants, or why we need to keep security matters in closed sessions, or why we need this or that special treatment. Because we won’t make that shit up. And if we did make shit up, the judges should catch us. That’s the policy of the Democratic Party; the Republican Party may have another policy.

It’s very simple. If the US goes into another country, and takes people prisoner, keeps them anywhere—on a military base overseas, on a ship, in a prison—there are, it seems to me, only two possibilities. One, those prisoners are prisoners of war, and should be treated as such. Two, they are accused criminals, and should be treated as such. That’s it. If they aren’t prisoners of war, and they aren’t accused of specific crimes, then we should not be keeping them prisoner. That, it seems to me, should be the policy of the Democratic Party; the Republican Party may have another policy.

And I’ll take it one step further. If there is some other circumstance, some special case where we need to keep somebody imprisoned, someone who is not a prisoner of war, somebody who has not violated any law, if there is some circumstance that I can’t currently imagine that requires such behavior on the part of the United States of America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, we don’t think that the President gets to decide it, alone, secretly, without appeal, without explanation, and without review. That seems to be the policy of the Republican Party; the Democratic Party has a different policy, one that believes in the rights of man, equality before the law, due process and liberty and justice for all.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.