I haven't yet read the links you've posted, but I tho't I'd post my thought BEFORE I read them, since I grew up in a muslim country, I've studied arabic and the qur'an at the master's degree level, and since I have some formed opinions about these religious fanatics . . .

we're in for a real ride since our constitutional protections assume western judaeo-christian ideas about what religions are and should be, and since it assumes there's a distinction everyone can understand between "secular" life and "religious" life . . .

Islam, its culture and religion, and the qur'an do not recognize these notions . . .

flying civilian airplanes into civilian buildings kafirs built has both legal and religious sanction in Islam . . .

detonating an atom bomb in one of our kafir cities has both legal and religious sanction in Islam . . .

if the people who handle these cases (the lawyers on both sides, and the judges at every level) do not keep in mind and insist on these distinctions AND DRAW THE CORRECT IMPLICATIONS therefrom about the teachings of Islam when making their legal pronouncements in these cases, we risk all that we have won over centuries of religious conflict in the west . . .

drawing these implications will conflict with "modern" ideas about tolerance and diversity . . .

I count myself a liberal in every sense of the word, but the silence of the left and in the feminist community in regard to how Islam treats ideas of individual liberty and women's rights inspires in me dread for the future: I despise the idea of a southern baptist preacher leading the clash of civilizations in which we are now embroiled . . . Bush was bad enough, but Huckabee???

Notes made while reading the complaint: howappealing.law.com/Padilla...aint.pdf

¶ 14. Padilla is not an enemy combatant and his designations as such has never been reviewed by an independent tribunal.

He should get an independent review of his designation as such: our system of "what's fair" demands it; we didn't before this conflict of civilizations have such a category, but I think it's a good idea to have one to take some of these legal issues (and people) outside of the Geneva Conventions, since the people we're fighting against (1) do not recognize the national sovereignty that signed on to the conventions and (2) are people operating outside the scope of nation-states which forms the bedrock of international relationships since the 1700s or 1800s . . .

¶ 19. There was no statutory or constitution authority for the military seizure and detention of Padilla.

I agree. But we're fighting a new conflict in which old rules don't have definitions that reach people who apparently want to detonate atom or dirty bombs in our cities in the name of a "religion" that makes such acts "moral" and "legal." This creates the legal dispute, and the only authority we have to decide it lies with our courts. God, I hope they are sufficiently educated to know they probably don't know enough about Islam and the impact these people may have on our ideas about religion and its role in civilized societies. I'm glad we have people trying to reach beyond our constitutional and statutory scheme to find a way to keep such people off our streets; I'm glad so few people have been affected by the effort.

¶¶ the allegations about torture and sensory deprivation: if provable and true, this pisses me off: I thought I lived in a better nation-state. The bit about being deprived of a time piece to determine the "correct" times of prayer is bullshit: the time piece wouldn't keep perfect time in any event and muslims aren't under any compulsion to pray at perfect times each day, especially when excused because of captivity: this is a bit of islamic dissembling into which his attorneys are buying . . . dissembling has a long history in that part of the world and the Sufis in particular developed it into an amazing ethics designed to keep their head attached to their necks . . . and the people who wanted separate the two were muslims . . . lying is ok for a muslim in almost any circumstance, just keep your fingers crossed when uttering the bullshit and you're ok in the afterlife . . . Sufi's have a more nuanced view, but they are "muslim" only so long as it fits the (muslim) power's purposes . . .

I'm not involved in this dispute, thankfully . . . and I'm going to quit keeping notes now and post this post as evidence of my contemporaneous opinions . . . his lawyers need to stop kowtowing to his bullshit if they want to stay on the western side of this divide.

All I have to say is that torture, secret prisons, and the suspension of habeous corpus and suspension of the requirement of a search warrant are all disturbing trends, and are not justified by any threat.

The threats we face from a band of terrorist assholes are not so different from the threats we faced from Nazi assholes, Nuclear Communist assholes and Imperial Japanese assholes. It's hysteria to claim otherwise.

911 does not justify shit canning the bill of rights and habeous corpus. It just doesn't.

What makes us different from these assholes is our constitutional government with its bill of rights. Suspend the bill of rights and what then are we fighting for, other than tribalism?

news.yahoo.com/s/csm/2008...onspirators

apparently there's some real lawyering going on in the sentencing phase of criminal trial . . .

www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13...farmer.html

a good read

obscene that uc berkeley calls yoo a law professor!!
exceptionally shocking!!
berkeley??!!!
a professor??!!!!
totally wack!!!

www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/0...ap/index.html

here's an article on the memo: apparently it's now in public domain: pls post a link if you find it on the inet