McCain and habeas corpus (warning: polemic)

The Supreme Court has just ruled 5-4 that detainees in Guantanamo bay have the right of habeas corpus: they can not be held indefinitely without being charged with a crime, without legal representation, in military prisons beyond the reach of the law. Naturally, Obama is cheering about this and John McCain is vehemently against the decision. Forgive me if I get a bit polemic, but this deserves to be replied to paragraph by paragraph in an appropriately angry manner:

Read the article here. It's fairly short, but I'll only be quoting part of it.

I used to have some residual shred of respect for John McCain left over from when he was running as a less conservative opponent to Bush back in 2000, back when he seemed to have some principles.

That respect is gone. McCain is a pitiful excuse for a presidential candidate and an unprincipled shill for the Bush administration.

“We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called … habeas corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases,” he said at a town hall meeting in New Jersey.

Frivolous lawsuits like "Stop holding me without trial." Frivolous lawsuits like "I've been in here for six years and have yet to be charged with a crime." Frivolous lawsuits like "Please stop torturing me."

McCain said he has worked hard to ensure the U.S. military does not torture prisoners but that the detainees at Guantanamo are still “enemy combatants.”

McCain has repeatedly defended and voted for torture and spouted the administration's "what we do is not torture because we're doing it and we don't torture" circlespeak. He's been lying about this for years now, in the most contemptible ways possible.

“These are people who are not citizens. They do not and never have been given the rights that citizens in this country have,” he said. “Now, my friends, there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people.”

No, you manipulative fascist, they are people. Ever heard of human rights? Hell, haven't you ever read the part of the Declaration of Independence that talks about "inalienable rights" and the "self evident" idea that all men are created equal?

Contrary to what McCain says, US citizens are not the only people who matter. US citizens not the only people with rights. The rest of the world is not filled with dirty subhumans who can be stepped on at the whims of fearmongering demogogues.

This paragraph is just so fractally wrong that I'm going to go back and quote parts of it again:

“These are people who are not citizens. They do not and never have been given the rights that citizens in this country have,”

PEOPLE ARE NOT GIVEN RIGHTS! Rights are not yours to give or take; they belong to every person, and they morally follow from personhood -- not from the mercy of the government. This is one of the fundamental principles upon which the United States was founded.

“Now, my friends, there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people.”

And I would sooner have all those alleged bad people go free than have a single innocent person detained indefinitely without charges in your illegal and immoral system of military prisons. There's a damn good reason that "Innocent until proven guilty" is so deeply enshrined in our legal system: without it, innocence and guilt cease to matter, and the "law" depends entirely on what the people in power want to do to you. Letting a few guilty people escape from justice is a small price to pay for this fundamental protection, because it is what lets us have rights at all.

And now McCain is desecrating all of our rights by declaring the prisoners guilty and claiming that his opinion on this is above the law. He is a natural authoritarian, a J. Edgar Hoover for the new millennium.