Constitutional Rights. Again.

[UPDATE: It appears Barack Obama was thinking the same thing I was, but as always, more eloquently. Click here for an article about a campaign discussion of this very topic. --Liam]

Watching some of the Republican speeches, it occurs to me this bears repeating...

One of the speakers (I forget who at the moment, I think it was Rudy Giuliani) commented that Obama just wanted to make sure the terrorists got their Constitutional rights.

This bothered me, because it showed the attitude the current crop of Republican leadership have towards the Constitution: As a sometimes inconvenient set of laws to be applied or ignored as befits the situation. I, on the other hand, view it as the foundation upon which our country is built, erode it at your peril.

But here's the key to the whole "maintaining terrorists rights" argument: It's not ABOUT the terrorists. Oh, sure, as Christians we're supposed to show mercy, even to those who have wronged us, but that's not why we do it. And we're supposed to be morally better than the bad guys, but that's also not why we do it. Heck, there's even that whole "as you treat the least of these" argument, but that's also not why we do it.

We do it because human beings make mistakes, and not everyone we capture is actually a terrorist. If they were, we would not have released large numbers of people previously held at Guantanamo Bay. To hear President Bush tell it, everyone there is a terrorist. But the problem is that our "wide net" method of picking people up clearly picked up a lot of people who were NOT terrorists, and it is for THEM that we maintain basic human rights, Constitutional rights, Geneva Convention rights, etc.

If there was a way to know, with 100% certainty, the guilt or innocence of an accused person, and to know with 100% certainty that there is no ameliorating factor to why they did what they did, there'd be a lot less hew and cry over rights.

But we take care to maintain those rights for even the most obviously guilty person so that we can feel confident that those wrongly accused have their fair opportunity to prove their innocence and go free. THAT is why criminals' rights are so important. It's not about coddling terrorists, it's about making sure that the non-terrorists who get swept up in our zeal get THEIR fair deal, and about giving us the moral high ground to protest if one of our guys is in their custody and is not afforded his or her rights.

Liam.