Habeas Corpus For Everyone!!

Guest Post by Doctor Biobrain

It appears the implications of our theft of the 2008 elections are just starting to sink in for the moral absolutists on the right. Here’s a post from Mark Impomeni of RedState:

Six Years Ago Today…Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, later to be brutally beheaded by his captors with the video proudly posted on the Internet for the world to see.

The terrorists who committed this act, were they to be captured today under the Obama Administration’s policies, would be brought to the mainland United States for trial in civilian courts, be granted the rights of habeas corpus and the right to remain silent, could not be subjected to any coercive interrogation practices, and would have the right to see all evidence against them, as well as cross examine their accusers.

And he’s absolutely correct. Had a nihilist like Obama been in charge when we captured Pearl’s killers, he would surely have used his morally relative judgment to grant these special rights to those who clearly didn’t deserve them.  Rather than using a different set of rules based upon the motive of the attackers, we would have used our postmodern standards to grant them the same rules that all murderers get.  In essence, we would have lumped all beheaders into one category, rather than separating the good ones from the bad.

While our Founding Fathers had clearly intended to grant special rules like habeas corpus and not being tortured to us lucky ducky citizens; we’ve taken all that and turned it on its head by insisting that everyone be given the same inalienable rights. Bwa ha ha!  Nihilists strike yet another blow for equality!!

Habeas For Me, Not for Thee

As Wikipedia says “The writ of habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action.”

Indeed, and that’s the very reason why moral hardliners like Bush and Impomeni refuse to grant it to terrorists: Because without arbitrary treatment, we'd never be able to punish them with our high-minded morality.  And by allowing them to defend themselves in court, we'd be giving them the very freedoms we need to use as leverage to stop them from becoming terrorists in the first place.  Justice is a privilege, not a right.  And terrorists lose that privilege when they start terrorizing.  If they wanted to see the evidence being used against them, they shouldn't have created that evidence in the first place!  Or so the thinking goes.

Besides, arbitrary state action is what separates morally righteous nations like ours from the tinpot dictators like Castro and Sarcozy; the dictators never know how to do it right.  Back in the day, we even saw Saddam using his arbitrary judgment to torture his own people, even though they were helping us plot a coup against him.  That's not justice we can believe in.  Ethically righteous people agree that anti-American people should be tortured and killed; not pro-American.  If Saddam had been moral, he would have tortured his supporters; not his sworn enemies.  Perhaps then we wouldn't have had to kill him.

Besides, what if the only way we could know that we had a terrorist was to keep drowning him until he admitted it?  If a court wouldn't accept that proof, then we'd have nothing to nail him with and we'd never get to punish him for the things he wouldn't have told us about had we not tortured him.  After all, it's not like we'd torture anyone who wasn't a terrorist.  People get tortured because they're terrorists and we need to torture them so we can prove it.  That's just common sense.  And that's why us nihilists on the left hate torture; because it's only done to the people who deserve it.

The Alternate Reality

And the implications of this are obvious. Sure, it was Pakistani police who caught Pearl’s killers, using standard police techniques. And sure, the guy who actually did the killing confessed openly in court about being involved, so habeas corpus, the right to silence, and the right to not be tortured wouldn’t really have applied in this particular case.  And yeah, it wasn't even an American court and he would have been convicted in Pakistan no matter who was president; and Bush didn't suspend habeas corpus on this guy.  

But so what? The point is clear, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh might still be alive today if he had chosen to exercise the rights that a morally squishy president like Obama might have given him, if he had been in our custody.  And sure, Omar Sheikh actually is still alive, despite being sentenced to death over six years ago, and is currently in legal limbo (possibly due to his links with Pakistan's ISI).

But still, the point remains: If it wasn’t for Bush using a different set of rules for terrorists, we would have allowed terrorists to have the same set of rules that everyone else gets. And that sort of special treatment would just go to their heads and only encourage them to be even more terroristic against us.  After all, there's no better way to make someone hate you than to treat them as you expect to be treated.  

And that’s the very reason why Obama wants to give them these rights. Not because these are judicial standards which foster a superior system of law, but because he thinks terrorists are just as good as the rest of us.  And there's nothing more relativistic than thinking that anti-American terrorists deserve the same treatment as America-loving people who commit similar crimes.  That's why nihilists believe in justice and equality: To make sure the bad guys get away.

Habeas Corpus: Not just for good guys anymore.

For extra fun, be sure to check out the comments section, where I detail the adventures of a fellow nihilist who attempted to screw with RedState by disagreeing with them about habeas corpus.  Good stuff.