Stephen Walt explores how low the Cheney’s and those who support them have gone:
When I got out of the shower this morning, my wife was waking up to NPR. Her first comment to me was this: “I never thought I would hear an NPR reporter say those words.” What had she just heard? A report that the Obama administration was “under fire” for defending the rights of terrorist suspects.
She wasn’t complaining about NPR’s coverage, mind you, she was commenting on the bizarre situation where anyone — let alone a president and his administration — could be “under fire” for defending a core principle of the American justice system. The Founding Fathers would be spinning in their graves, about as fast as a nuclear centrifuge. They understood the dangers of giving executives arbitrary authority to arrest, detain, coerce, and try suspects (i.e., those whom authorities think might have committed a crime but whose guilt has not yet been determined). So suspects — all suspects — are accorded certain legal rights.
If we can’t live by what we value as a nation-then we are no better than those we oppose.