YALLA VOTE ‘08 Our Voice. Our Future.

It took only a few hours for yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Boumediene V. U.S. to become a political football, with partisans on each side talking past one another with accusations exaggerated and terrible.

That is sad.

Rule of law — and specifically, the notion of the executive being bound by the law, the writ of habeas corpus -– these things are in the basic DNA of the United States. (Didn’t ANYONE watch that HBO special on John Adams?) This was about civil rights in the most basic sense. No the folks at Guantanamo Bay aren’t U.S. citizens, but because they are under the control of the U.S. government they are have access to U.S. courts for the purpose of challenging their detention.

The U.S. argument in Boumediene was one we have heard before. In essence it boils down this proposition: “[X] is a bad guy, and he is where he needs to be – detained.” In other words, individuals can be detained by U.S. military order and held indefinitely, because the courts lack both the power and the expertise to second guess military judgments.

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ABC Primetime ran a piece on how Muslims are treated in America… absolutely worth watching. They set up a bigoted, nasty character behind the counter of a bakery in Anywhere, America, and filmed the customers’ reactions when the actor refused to serve a Muslim woman–also in on the setup.

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