Antonin Scalia and police-state rule

[IndianaGreen]

Antonin Scalia and police-state rule

By David Walsh
14 June 2008

On June 12 the United States Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, ruled that so-called “enemy combatants” held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba have the right to challenge their detention in US courts.

Many of the inmates have been held for six years at Guantánamo, under barbaric conditions. None of them have been found guilty of a crime in a court of law.

The four dissenting Supreme Court justices, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Joseph Alito, defend the right of the Bush administration to proceed in its “war on terror” with utter disregard for the Constitution and elementary democratic rights. They are, in essence, proponents of authoritarian rule. The savagery at Guantánamo is not a source of shame or even concern for them, but the wave of the future.

Chief Justice Roberts, in his dissenting opinion, denounced the majority view, arguing that the “political branches” (the executive and the Congress) had “crafted these procedures amidst an ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough debate.” The former—“the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants,” according to Roberts—include interrogation through coercion and torture and kangaroo courts run by the military.

Roberts, in one extraordinary passage, observes that “The majority rests its decision on abstract and hypothetical concerns.” There is nothing “abstract and hypothetical” about the denial of basic rights to the Guantánamo prisoners or the character of their detention.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jun2008/scal-j14.shtml

[Adsos Letter]

1. excellent post...

(according to Roberts)= “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants,”

And for so many years I have thought that the basic principles underlying our Bill of Rights, etc. were founded upon universally applicable inherent human rights.

silly me...

[indepat]

2. If only there were a process to remove from office those who vote to tear our Constitution asunder

by judicial fiat, or executive or legislative fiat, for that matter. :D

[mitchtv]

3. I'd start looking at their finances

that kind is NEVER clean, especially Fat Tony

[unblock]

4. of course there IS a process. just declare them enemy combatants

then ship them off to guantanamo and you can even torture them.

oh, you do have to become president first.

[Judi Lynn]

5. It's a national shame these four clowns are in the Supreme Court.

Unenlightened inwardly, they have no real respect for human beings whatsoever. They're rigid, hostile people, primitive, childish, anal guys, completely self-absorbed, and preposterously self-important. That describes their best qualities. It goes downhill from there.

Of course we've seen right-wing pResidents don't need to have any standards when they nominate these guys, as long as the Democrats can't block their confirmations. Would would we expect, after all? What do they have to chose from? Please!