Habeas Corpus - RIP

I already did a longish post on this at the Detroit News, but I do have couple more thoughts on death of Habeas Corpus. This quote, from a great post of Digby's that I urge you to read in full, really struck me.

...al Qaeda looks for any excuse. But the truth of the matter is, they hate us, and they hate freedom, and they hate people who embrace freedom. And they're willing to kill innocent Iraqis because Iraqis are willing to be free. Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country. And we will help them rid Iraq of these killers.

How times has he repeated that propaganda? I want to call him up and say, "Hey George. Didn't you notice that we're the foreign people who came into their country, uninvited, and destabilized it?" They didn't have all these killers until we threw our "fly paper" around. And how on earth can he talk about freedom with a straight face when he killed Habe? If that's not the death blow to democracy, I don't know what is.

As Keith Olbermann notes in another kickass commentary, without Habe we're down to one rule in the Bill of Rights and I figure when Bush declared martial law, we can kiss that one goodbye too. There will be nothing to stop the jackboots from taking over your house.

But Glenn Greenwald has the really scary stuff. If you read nothing else, read the description of what happened to Padilla, the alleged dirty bomber. It makes Abu Ghraib look like a church picnic and it happened right here in America. Whether the guy is guilty or not, (and he's never been charged with a real crime), this shouldn't happen in a free country but this is what the Senate "torture bill" codified as law. It could happen to anyone who pisses the White House off.

If this is the cost of safety, I'll take my chances with the terrorists. Less chance of them destroying our freedoms, that is if we ever manage to restore them after this administration is through shredding them to "save us from terror."