Nail.Hammer.Head

Posting will be very light for the next month, however, I would like to follow up on a comment Matthew made about the Obama speech. Matthew stated:

The question is whether non US citizens deserve the right/privilege of habeas corpus. Nothing passed applies to US citizens. Just to be clear.

I'm not sure why my reaction to this comment seems so cut and dried in my mind, but surely the answer is 'of course they do', not just because it's the moral choice, but because of what has eventuated thus far with regard to the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists. From an article in Reason:

The law bars detainees who are not U.S. citizens from challenging their detention in federal court, so they have no legal recourse outside the executive branch. The government can arrest "aliens," including legal visitors and residents, and hold them indefinitely, based on nothing more than the president's unilateral determination that they qualify as unlawful enemy combatants.

To recognize the danger of giving the executive branch this kind of unreviewable power, you need look no further than the men sent to Guantanamo Bay because they were falsely identified as Al Qaeda or Taliban hangers-on by Afghan warlords hungry for bounty money. Or Maher Arar, the Canadian our government mistook for an Al Qaeda member based on bad intelligence and shipped off to Syria, where he was tortured and imprisoned.

Given the elastic definition of "unlawful enemy combatant," such mistakes could morph into detention of anyone seen, rightly or wrongly, as impeding the War on Terror. Whatever your assessment of George W. Bush's character, do you trust future presidents to exercise this open-ended power conscientiously and unerringly?