If President Obama allows this, he is simply no better than Bush...

From the NYT:

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

The provision could permit military prosecutors to avoid airing the details of brutal interrogation techniques. It could also allow the five detainees who have been charged with the Sept. 11 attacks to achieve their stated goal of pleading guilty to gain what they have called martyrdom.

Or maybe I should have said, He's no better than Dick Cheney, since Cheney recently argued that some Gitmo detainees should simply be killed.

The idea that we would take detainees, charge them with capital crimes based on evidence we won't show, and then allow them to plead guilty and be executed without a trial represents the full circle breakdown of our society being a government of laws and not of men.

There really isn't room for equivocation on this one, but I'm sure we'll hear it--or just silence--all the same.

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A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

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More of This, Please

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A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point: Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo: Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1. Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...

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