Many men are falling....

Where you promised to stand guard. But precisely what is anyone guarding these days? I know this is happening south of me, but Senator Joe Lieberman's recent comments regarding the suspected Times Square bomber are downright frightening. Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen, has been arrested in conjunction with last week's attempted bombing of the famous New York intersection. As any other American citizen, he was read his Miranda rights. His case has thus far been handled according to constitutional legal channels. Lieberman has suggested that Shahzad, and any other terror suspect, ought to be denied these rights, because, well, they're terror suspects.
His logic is that, if people do something that can be perceived as 'against the United States' they should no longer belong to the United States, nor be entitled to the protections thereof.
It takes approximately three seconds of thinking to start seeing problems with this logic. First, and most alarmingly, is the fact that the word 'suspect' is included in this. Lieberman is proposing that constitutional protections not apply to those who are 'suspected' of certain crimes.  The Arar case, and the continual official denial of wrongdoing, has proven that the system by which an individual is declared a terror suspect is inherently flawed.

The American legal system was developed as a mechanism for allowing a person's innocence or guilt to be proven according to a set of standards that contain checks and balances in order to ensure the rights of all involved, both victims and perpetrators. Yet Lieberman wants to deny rights to those whose guilt has not even been proven. This boils down to open season for any law officer, prosecutor, or homeland security official to grab literally anyone off the street, accuse, and torture them, all within the bounds of the law. Perhaps Lieberman’s been reading an old KGB manual.
Lieberman’s comment, and the GOP officials who are enthusiastically hailing his wisdom, speak to a growing trend that’s causing a great deal of alarm. Those very civil liberties against which the terrorists are supposedly fighting are being eroded in the attempts to stop them. Precisely how, then, is the war on terror being won, if that which the terrorists hate is disappearing anyhow?