Hypocritical Democrats

So what else is new? But in this post, Glenn Greenwald shows the hypocrisy of Democrats who are criticizing Sen. Lindsey Graham for demanding that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev not be treated like a normal criminal defendant, Miranda warnings and all. It turns out that President Obama and AG Holder essentially killed Miranda some time ago.

Slate's Emily Bazelon nails it too.

"As Warped and as Evil as It Gets."

72% of Guantanamo detainees who finally were able to obtain just minimal due process (which is what a habeas hearing is) -- after years of being in a cage without charges -- have been found by federal judges to be wrongfully detained. These are people who are part of what the U.S. Government continues to insist are "the worst of the worst" who remain, and whose release is being vehemently contested by the Obama DOJ.

That's from Glenn Greenwald's May 28 post. He reminds us that the Bush administration and Congress specifically forbade habeas corpus hearings for Guantanamo detainees, many of whom were swept up in raids in Pakistan without any evidence of wrongdoing. It took the Supreme Court to knock that prohibition out of the Military Commissions Act.

Think about what that means, what the people who voted for that (including 12 Democratic Senators) tried to do: had the Supreme Court not struck down that provision by a 5-4 vote in Boumediene, all of these innocent people would continue to be denied any rights of judicial review, and would unjustly languish in prison indefinitely. The people who voted for the Military Commissions Act, and the 4 Supreme Court Justices who sought to uphold it, knowingly acted to deny scores of innocent prisoners any opportunity for judicial review. That's as warped and as evil as it gets.

...It's commonplace to label something a travesty of justice, but who can deny that knowingly imprisoning innocent people for years and years while scheming to deny them all judicial review is a disgrace of historic proportions?

Read the full post. Individual lives have been ruined by this heartless U.S. policy. The stain on America will never be removed.