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Re: This inflames me
Steve Schafer wrote:
> But let's clarify something-the "immigrants" referred to here are not legal
> immigrants, they are illegal ones. Someone who has entered the country
> illegally has never had constitutional rights.
But they do have human rights. What worries me about this bill is that the
punishment is so out of proportion to the crime. So they overstayed a visa.
Is it *really* appropriate to haul these people into jail for *months* (where
they are subject to physical and mental abuse), deny them access to family and
lawyers, not charge them with anything, not send them back home, etc.? There
are *still* an undisclosed number of people in jail *now*, nine months later.
No charges filed, no cases pending, just hidden in the system. Doesn't that
worry you? Isn't it hypocritcal that we're fighting a "war on terror" and yet
the people in Guantanamo Bay are not prisoners of war? Isn't it troublesome
that Jose Padilla is being transferred to a special military situation where
they don't have to put together a case against him, precisely because they
don't have a strong enough case against him to stand up in a regular court?
I'm not defending him, for all I know the guy might be guilty as sin; what
troubles me is the *process* here. For better or worse, Padilla *is* an
American citizen, and his constitutional rights were blantantly trampled on.
That could happen to you or me, if someone decides they don't like us enough to
invent an accusation. Remember the poem: "First they came for the Jews, and I
didn't say anything because I wasn't a Jew..." That's why this citizen watch
thing is *such* a bad idea. When you get scared and angry people who want
something to get *done*, because they're *sure* this guy (or these people, or
whatever) is guilty, even if they can't prove it... that's when you either get
a lynch mob or a Gestapo. That's what due process and the Bill of Rights is
supposed to prevent. If we give that up, we're just a few short steps away
from the Japanese-American internment camps of WWII (or worse), which I think
we all agree now was a shameful wrong, despite the fact that it was legal at
the time, and even the Supreme Court declared it constitutional. So there's
legal, there's constitutional, and then there's *right*, and we have to
remember that those three are not always synonymous.
I guess that's enough politics from me. I now return you to your regularly
scheduled program.
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"Life is ... moments flabbergasted to be in each others' presence."
- "Speed" Levitch in _Waking Life_
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