Treating foreign terrorists like American shoplifters -- with full access to civilian lawyers, classified intelligence, and all the attendant rights of a normal jury trial -- is a surefire recipe for another 9/11. That is why the Bush administration fought so hard to erect an alternative tribunal system -- long established in wartime -- in the first place.
The few critics who acknowledge the existence of the tribunals argue they aren't sufficient. They "provided due process in form, but not in substance," as Newsday put it. That view is shared by a Carter-appointed liberal judge, but an earlier decision by a Bush-appointed judge upheld the tribunals. In the end, courts will almost certainly affirm the legality of the Gitmo tribunals, which, as noted, were modeled after the due process standards described in the Hamdi decision.
That ruling, may I remind you, addressed the detention of a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant. As former Attorney General William Barr noted last week in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, "Obviously, if these procedures are sufficient for American citizens, they are more than enough for foreign detainees."
Do John McCain and the anti-Gitmo gang actually believe otherwise, or are they too clueless to realize the implications of their gulag-Pol Pot-Nazi-Eichmann-hellhole harangues?
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Errata: Last week, I wrote that Barbara Walters "reportedly pronounced [an airplane encounter with a nursing mom] 'gross and disgusting.'" The quote came from The Calgary Sun, Ted Byfield, June 12, 2005, but Walters did not use those words as she frowned and complained she was "uncomfortable." My apology for the error. Walters also informs me that Elizabeth Hasselbeck has not completely given up nursing, and that Walters was "on a crowded shuttle," not first-class. All the more reason to cut the mom some slack.