To clarify something which I have inadvertently started here, I was not accusing Liberal of having hijacked the thread, but rather that, he having posted from his views on political philosophy (duly held, and as he points out, as appropriate as anyone else’s), we had gotten off into a rather theoretical discussion about the origin and nature of rights. I felt that the issue of Gonzales and his disgustingly wrong stance on habeas corpus was sufficiently important in and of itself that that theoretical discussion, interesting as it was, constituted a hijack from an important topic. My apologies to Lib for the seeming implication.
To Northern Piper, in furtherance of that hijack, my stance is something of a social contract one: we as a community (the US or Canada) have agreed that we will be governed by a government of law, and that the resistance of that agreement by force by any one individual will be repelled by even greater force – in other words, the cops arrest the criminal, the cops and National Guard enforce the state of emergency declarations in the area hit by natural disaster, the troops suppress the rebellion, each with the level of force appropriate and necessary. The speeding ticket is issued with no force whatsoever, the armed robber with a bit more, and the gang warfare with more yet. That’s the context in which I hear Lib meaning force: the power of state-as-community brought to bear to protect the rights of the individual and the community, against those who would use force or fraud to vitiate them.
The actual writ of habeas corpus comes up seldom in discussions of law, which masks its true importance. The point to the writ is that citizens of our respective nations have a right to a trial before a judge and/or jury in accordance with settled law, that they may not be held at the whim of the deciderer and his minions. You and I have the right to go about our legal business unmolested by the long arm of the law; should some officious official decide to interfere with that right, our recourse is to the courts, where we will be found guilty or not guilty of an offense known to the law – common or statute, regulation promulgated in accord with statute, whatever. But not for some nebulous night-and-fog violation of national security.
This is what makes Gonzales’s remarks so heinous: that the man charged with heading this country’s enforcement of the law is prepared to vitiate the historically most important means of ensuring government by law and not by the whim of the leader, to claim that it is not in fact a right. Bluntly, the license to torture that his other memo asserts pales by comparison.
If I were a lawyer active in the Republican party, upon reading this assertion I would immediately be compelled by my oath to the courts to take every possible step to ensure that the Attorney General is not only fired but disbarred and sent where he would have sent others.
This is not a theoretical issue. It strikes at the core of the nature of our government. Either that, or we can paint a star on the ceiling of some courtroom, and create a new District Court that sits in camera there, declining to publish its rulings and rubber stamped by SCOTUS.
That most cases are brought to court without the need to revert to the Great Writ does not diminish its importance. There are many powers which government rarely uses – but the fact they are there ensures effective government. In Canada, the Governor General may dismiss a ministry and call for an election. Ordinarily he or she will never do so. But that he or she has that power is the safeguard against a dictatorial Prime Minister retaining authority by force. Impeachment is rarely used in the US. But its presence is a safeguard against the abuse of power by the President, Cabinet secretaries, judges, and others. And the Great Writ, guaranteeing by right that any citizen detained has the right to a free trial before his peers and in accordance with law, is another such protection.
Personally, I hold to the Madisonian-Jeffersonian doctrine of natural rights: that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. That governments exist to provide governance by law and to guarantee those rights against all who would abuse them. Whatever your political philosophy, Americans are guaranteed certain rights by act of the Constitution, which is the only true source of their government’s power. To arbitrarily suppress such rights, in the name of whatever supposed authority, is to vitiate the social compact under which the very government derives its authority from the sovereign people.
“Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the second may profit by their example.” 
It was not a discussion about libertarianism. It was a discussion about political theory versus government structure. We were discussing things like democracy, republicanism, monarchy, etc. as well as communism, majoritarianism, and so forth.