Pirate's Cove

Democrats (and at least one Republican) continue their terrorist appeasement and love fest this week

One of the first measures the Senate will consider is an amendment by Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the panel’s ranking Republican, that would restore the right of habeas corpus to detainees that have been declared enemy combatants, as well as those awaiting military reviews that will determine their legal status. The measure also would reverse a ban on detainees appealing their treatment in prison.

In 2006, Bush signed a law (PL 109-366) authorizing military commissions to try enemy combatants at Guantánamo. The law gave such prisoners only limited rights of appeal and explicitly denied them the ability to file habeas corpus challenges, a centuries-old requirement that the state justify the detention of individuals. The Leahy-Specter amendment would repeal that 2006 language.

I really just do not get this. All snark aside, what propels Democrats (and at least one Republican) to want to assign American Rights to foreign nationals who were caught on the battlefields of Afghanistan, fighting on the side of Al Qaeda and the Taliban? I have spent quite a bit of time dumpster diving at places like the DU, Kos, HuffPost, etc, and have read so many other sites and books, and I still just do not get it. Yes, we know they hate America, but what makes them, along with the ACLU, a group whose purpose is (supposedly) to protect American Rights, do this? I guess you have to be a leftist to understand it.

Meanwhile, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a member of the Judiciary Committee, is preparing an amendment that would require closure of the prison at Guantánamo within one year. It also would prohibit transferring Guantánamo detainees outside the United States.

“A system that sets a double standard for detainees, holding them indefinitely on flimsy or nonexistent evidence, is inherently unfair and highly suspect,” she wrote in a July 30 commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Such a system does nothing to make America safer.”

Thanks, Di. Can we move them to California? Particularly San Francisco, near where she and her husband bought one of those McMansions on their Iraq war profits. She wouldn’t have a problem with that, since she supports the Club G’itmo detainees, right?

In July, the Senate passed, by a vote of 94-3, a non-binding “sense of the Senate” resolution declaring that detainees housed at Guantánamo should not be transferred to facilities in the United States.

Di voted for that resolution. Why the change?

Many Republicans are expected to counter that Bush also wants to close the prison, but not before he knows where to relocate the prisoners. Republicans have argued that any U.S. town that hosts a prison with an al Qaeda prisoner will become a target for terrorists.

I do not think we would have to worry about terrorist attacks in San Fran. Heck, so many of the residents, including Di and Nancy Pelosi live there. It is a place that does away with ROTC, refuses to allow the Blue Angels to fly an exhibition, and blocked the battleship Iowa, an icon of WWII, from being placed in San Fran as permanent tourist attraction, among others. So, let’s fix up Alcatraz, and stick the terrorists there. Bamm! Problem solved.