december you can’t be serious.
>> The initial story sympathizes with a long-time US resident from Jordan who was picked up. You have to read carefully where it says, “federal agents who told him his visa had expired and implied that they had information linking him to a terrorist plot.” Assuming his visa had really expired, he was breaking the law.
You can’t be serious when you support this. Three weeks in jail for not renewing his visa? Would you also support the same thing if he was a US citizen who was driving on an expired drivers license? That is breaking the law too.
>> Also, no matter how long he had been here, he might indeed have been supporting terrorism.
Please! Anyone, including you, might be supporting terrorism. But there is this principle called the presumption of innocence. The fact is he was let go after three weeks and was never charged with anything.
You think it is alright for a government to lock up hundreds of people on which they have no reasonable suspicions and to terrorize them in fear in the hope that they may get lucky and one of them will confess? This is terrorism and it is an abomination for any decent person. Terrorising innocent people is not what a decent country should be doing.
I will add that old hands in the FBI have questioned this course of action. They have said that the traditional system of watching known terrorists, wiretapping, infiltrating, etc. is what works best as that leads to incovering the network but that this type of action being done now for political gain and public comsumption will backfire for two reasons. One is that when you detain a terrorist, you have notified the rest of the network of what you know and they can act accordingly. Secondly, you are alienating the whole population where you would most likely find informants and infiltrators. If you have Arab terrorists you need friends in the Arab community more than anything else and these tactics are making enemies out of possible collaborators. It is not only immoral, it is also a dumb thing to do.
>> An early part of the article says, “A manhunt that has swept up 1,200 men.” You have to read much farther down to find out that half of these people have been released; only 603 ar being held.
So of 1200 only half have been jailed without cause for three or four weeks and you think they should be happy? And the rest who are still in jail are “only” 600 so that makes it OK? I do not think it is OK for any government to abuse one single person. Does it make you happy to know the Chinese government “only” abused X people last year? I find one person abused is one person too many. Or would you like to be in their shoes?
>> Furthermore, it’s an unsubstantiated slander to imply that these tribunals would be kangaroo courts…
One of the most basic principles of western culture is that we are governned by laws, not by people, and we have a healthy distrust for people so we have a system in place which provides for checks and balances. If you give a person a group a power which can be abused you can be sure it will be abused. That is why we require the police to get a search warrant from a judge. Because the police are part of the case and have an interest and so we require a judge, who is one step removed, to confirm that the search is indeed reasonably necessary.
I do not care if the military courts are formed by the most honorable men in the world. I prefer a system of checks and balances. We do not elect an honorable man for police chief and not require him to get a search warrant before he enters your home. We do not say “to hell with the legislative and the judiciary, we don’t need them, we’ll just elect an honorable man to be our president-dictator and we have nothing to fear”. Sorry, bad idea.
The entire executive order stinks and there is a good reason it applies only to non-citizens, a discrimination which is unsustainable. If and when a foreign national is tried by a military tribunal there is going to be a price to pay in terms of international relations and moral authority of the US abroad. Just by this fact alone it is probably a good idea to not use it. And it may well be that it is never used.