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Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Legal Beagle

Stupidity may sometimes be excused. Persistent stupidity has no defense.

Paul Campos doubles down on his earlier idiotic take on Guantanamo by demonstrating that he really does think the thugs in Gitmo are a legal issue:


It is a sign of how indefensible Guantanamo is that its defenders have been reduced to arguing that comparing it to a miniature gulag is unfair. Apparently, the claim that a prison camp is not as bad as the gulag is considered an adequate justification for imprisoning men for years on end, under brutal conditions, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, with no prospect of ever being allowed to tell their story to a court or any other neutral judge of their guilt or innocence.

Good grief, man! We are at war. These are enemy combatants and not some ethnic-looking guys picked up for loitering. Their profession of innocence is irrelevant. They are generally not accused of crimes--they are the enemy captured on the battlefield. And these thugs are not held in brutal conditions or on flimsy pretexts. These assertions by Campos are simply ignorant. Writers would not have to tell Campos that Gitmo is no gulag if he didn't pretty much insist that the comparison is true.

Campos can prattle on all he wants about proving the guilt of the thugs at Gitmo but that is quite irrelevant to the actual situation. A legal eagle he ain't.