Glenn Greenwald notes the debate going on now in Great Britain, where a plan to expand the government’s authority to detain terrorist suspects for 42 days without bothering to charge them with any crime had run into stiff opposition - from conservatives:
The official position of the British Conservative Party is to oppose the legislation, and former Tory Prime Minister John Major — who himself was the target of a 1991 bombing-assassination plot by the IRA — wrote an Op-Ed in the Times Online emphatically opposing these increased detention powers and also opposing new DNA and other domestic surveillance programs. Headlined “42-day detention: the threat to our liberty — The Government’s plan is simply part of an assault on our ancient rights,” the conservative former Prime Minister wrote: …
I don’t believe that sacrifice of due process can be justified. If we are seen to defend our own values in a manner that does violence to them, then we run the risk of losing those values. Even worse, if our own standards fall, it will serve to recruit terrorists more effectively than their own propaganda could ever hope to. . . .
So inscrutable, those Brits.
Because over here, conservatives are all in favor of defending our values in a manner that “does violence” to them. Indeed, on the heels of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, conservatives have spent the past 24 hours wailing that the court’s failure to sanction extraconstitutional powers means WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE…
Greenwald:
Hence, while British conservatives largely oppose a policy merely to allow the Government to detain terrorist suspects for 42 days with no charges, our “conservatives” react with fury over the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of the President’s claimed authority to hold such suspects in Guantanamo for 6 years — really indefinitely — without providing them any meaningful process at all. In fact, the Bush administration asserted the right to detain even U.S. citizens, arrested on U.S. soil, indefinitely, with no charges or any contact with the outside world, for years, and they proceeded to do so, with virtually no opposition of any kind from our self-proclaimed right-wing defenders of individual liberty or limited government. …
<snip>
Moments earlier, McCarthy declared the Supreme Court ruling to mean that “the American people had lost to radical Islam, 5 to 4″ — in the authoritarian eyes of the American Right, the American people “lose” when our Government is required to prove the guilt of people before it can imprison them for life or kill them.
The contrast between the British Right and the American Right could not be more glaring. The former is at least mildly faithful to the principles they espouse, while the latter has morphed completely into an authoritarian, government-power-worshiping faction that fantasizes it’s waging glorious war against — to use Antonin Scalia’s politicized term — “radical Islamists,” but which is only at war with its own claimed principles and the principles on which the country was founded.
Pretty clear and pretty obvious. This defense of America conservatives imagine themselves waging is simply tripped up by the niceties of the constitution; we must be free to be as brutal as our foes or they will win. Makes a mockery of everything we tell our kids this country stands for in the first place.
