The item bemoaned the fact that those accused of crimes in America actually have rights and praised the governments of the UK and Germany for increasing the state's powers of detention without charge and their ability to spy on their citizens.
Only a day before the Supreme Court handed down yesterday's Boumediene decision – which gives alien detainees access to American courts and American rights that they had sought to destroy – the British parliament voted to extend the time terrorist suspects can be held without charge to 42 days from 28. In the U.S., it's 48 hours.
The article fails to mention that the UK act barely passed and has proved terribly controversial, especially to British citizens increasingly concerned about the steady, creeping erosion of their freedoms. The government faced strong opposition from within its own party, and the fact that the act passed by only nine votes has been a big embarrassment for Gordon Brown's already tottering government.
The WSJ seems to think that the the US government should simply brush aside the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the cause of "National Security," and criticises the Supreme Court for audacious act of upholding the constitutional right of habeas corpus. Of course, this is the position that the current administration has taken from day one. Fortunately, our constitutional rights were designed specifically to prevent the government from encroaching on these rights, for whatever reasons, and we should all be deeply suspicious of attempts to subvert them.What surprises me the most, although I guess it should not, is the farcical logic they employ to make their point: They say we should deprive suspected terrorists of the rights they allegedly seek to destroy by actually destroying those rights. I cannot think of anything more un-American.
It reminds me of the old joke, "The operation was a great success. Too bad the patient died."
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