prisoners at Guantanamo Bay- "You Have Rights"
Topic: Law
Only a couple of years late but the people captured in the war in Afghanistan are getting some small level of due process afforded to them. Prisoner Rights RevealedDue Process

In the words of attorney for some 51 of the prisoners, Rachel Meerpool, he described the procedures being contemplated as "inadequate and illegal, and they fail to satisfy the Courts ruling." This is pretty typical when the government feels no great compulsion to comply with court rulings they disagree with. The government will go very slowly and with as little actual progress towards compliance as possible. In the rage that followed the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center it's understandable that any feeling human would act in a vengeful and rage filled way. But the government isn't allowed to do that. It's supposed to be there to protect us and to follow the constitution which is supposed to be our ultimate protection- from the government. When a government goes past the letter and the spirit of the constitution the only thing to seperate us from the dictatorships and totalitarian governments we rail against is our hollow rhetoric. In that case you have China and others responding to our complaints about their human rights violations with valid complaints about us. For every human being that is denied human rights in Guantanamo we are all lessened for it. Yes, we are enraged by the attacks and those people who attacked us attacked our way of life, they attacked our visions of our own freedom and our response to that was to lessen our own freedoms. It's not right, the government knows it's not right and yet they do it. They fight battles in court that they cannot win (if the constitution has any meaning at all) and they defend the idea that rights and constitutionality don't apply to everyone. It's our shame.