Tyrannical Attitudes Hurt National Security

This is a bit dated, but last week John McCain referred to the Supreme Court's decision to allow detainees a right to request a hearing one of the worst decisions in history.

Paleo-Conservative George Will asks, really?

Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect? With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which affirmed the constitutionality of legally enforced racial segregation? With Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the wartime right to sweep American citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps?

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Dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia says that we might lose a city because of this ruling. I read his ludicrous dissent in full. It didn't mention that investigative journalism conducted by McClatchy Newspapers uncovered that individuals that were wrongly detained in the Bush administration's post-9/11 panic to look like they were securing our nation once released actually became militants.

Using Scalia's logic, one could say that our unjust process that led to the creation of new militants could one day cost us a city. Why is this activist Supreme Court Justice working against national security?

Know Your Factions

One of the reasons why the American people seem to lack a clear understanding of what's going on in Iraq is the misuse of accurate terminology for the factions fighting in Iraq by the Republicans and by the mainstream media. Any non-American, non-Iraqi Military fighters are labeled al-Qaida in Iraq. Much of the problem is laziness, and the rest of the problem is a more nefarious, intentional shell game meant to divert Americans from the truth.

Two of the main offenders are President Bush and John McCain. These two continually mistake al-Qaida, who are Sunnis, with Shi'ites from Iran and other Shi'ite factions in Iraq, and then expect everyone to believe that these are innocent mistakes.

Steven Benen at The Carpetbagger Report takes a look at the mysterious phenomenon in a post called, "Intellectual laziness and the 'al-Qaeda Shorthand'".