Reply #122: The Hutaree will get trials. [View All]

[Capitalocracy]

And if they were killed, it would be during an attempt to capture them, not as a mission to assassinate them.

These things aren't different. Sure, today we're dealing with someone who's most likely a legitimate terrorist and possibly a threat to many lives, but if that list gets longer, people will start to appear on it who are innocent. Just like there are in Gitmo today. Once we get used to this, anyone they put on that list will automatically be a "terrorist", regardless of what got them on that list... even clerical mistakes. And as a matter of fact, if the administration kills people, especially U.S. citizens, deliberately without a trial, then YES he is running a "death squad" or an equivalent thereof.



My premise about killing liberals isn't a premise, it's history. I live in Argentina, where liberals, activists, union organizers, and even charity workers were tortured and killed systematically under a military dictatorship organized by Henry Kissinger and backed by the U.S. Their defense for their actions when people started to notice their loved ones were disappearing? They justified it by saying they had to fight the Montoneros, a left-wing group with activist and militant/terroristic elements. South America is where using the idea of fighting terrorism to justify eliminating human rights was tested. And after 9/11, the same thing is happening in the U.S. Now, maybe you can say that Obama won't abuse these powers, but simply exercising powers which are beyond the Constitution is an abuse of power even in a seemingly reasonable situation like fighting against a genuinely bad guy. It sets a precedent, and Obama is failing terribly at preserving these ideals. He's continuing Bush policy and failing to prosecute Bush administration crimes, which means this extrajudicial, extraconstitutional framework will be in place for whoever comes along next. And we won't always have a Democrat, and even if we do, we won't always have a good one. As a matter of fact, the way things stand today, we are in serious danger of handing a system designed to require no Constitutional checks and balances to an extreme right-wing lunatic who thinks they have to separate the good Christians from the heathens, atheists, fags, and liberals, and fight the Antichrist in the soon-to-come endtimes.

And as I posted above, this authority won't stop with Obama. Personal vendettas, personal insanities, personal beliefs, personal prejudices, will take over in various points in the chain of deciding who gets tortured, imprisoned indefinitely, or killed under these new extraconstitutional rules. Because these are humans, because the administrations change, because people get hired, fired, retired, promoted, all the time, with no strict systematic basis for making these decisions, the situation is extremely volatile and there's nowhere they can go but down. That's why I say it's inherently a slippery slope.

I understand that you don't want to see anyone else die in terrorist attacks, and I don't either, but I also don't want to see the U.S. destroy the rule of law in a theoretical attempt to prevent terrorism. I know someone who was arrested by Homeland Security and tortured on U.S. soil because one person, out of pure racism, called them. They didn't even ask for evidence. This was under Bush, but when he was told to stop telling his story and stop talking about the U.S. government online or he and his children would be killed, Obama was already in office. This isn't just about the president, we have a whole system in place of people who will take advantage of these unconstitutional policies to settle personal scores or advance their careers. We need some rules, my friend. It's as simple as that. And one of those rules is you don't execute people without a trial. That's the long and short of it.