Hamdi v. Rumsfeld

[sabine]

Here's the CNN.com article that I was sent this morning. It is interesting and distressing all at the same time. There are too many ways that our freedoms can be curtailed - at what point will the majority of citizens decide that we can't pay that price?

Yes, I'm being cynical. No, I haven't had enough coffee to be happy and hyper yet. Deal.

All italics are my points for emphasis.

The majority opinion:

Justice O'Connor explained that "history and common sense teach us that an unchecked system of detention carries the potential to become a means for oppression and abuse of others." She elaborated:

It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad . . . [D]ue process demands some system for a citizen detainee to refute his classification.

and:

"At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society,"...The executive detention of subversives, Justice Stevens wrote, may not be justified "by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information . . . For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny."

and:

When the government moves detainees like pawns between the civilian and military systems, the legitimacy of both is undermined. When our government locks away people incommunicado, indefinitely, in a military brig, without charging them, it invites comparison to some of the world's most abusive regimes, now and in the past.