Brain meltdown

Every time Pretty Lady reads another piece of journalism, discussing the recent Supreme Court Decision to uphold the standard of habeas corpus, she experiences another episode of cognitive-dissonance-induced vertigo. She does not understand why it is the alleged conservative, constitutionalist judges that are dissenting the decision to Uphold The Constitution.

Of the two dissenting opinions, Justice Antonin Scalia’s was the more apocalyptic, predicting “devastating” and “disastrous consequences” from the decision. “It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” he said. “The nation will live to regret what the court has done today.” He said the decision was based not on principle, “but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.”

Chief Justice Roberts, in somewhat milder tones, said the decision represented “overreaching” that was “particularly egregious” and left the court open to “charges of judicial activism.” The decision, he said, “is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants.” The public will “lose a bit more control over the conduct of this nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges,” he added.

Excuse me? It is 'judicial activism' for the court to exercise its Constitutionally designed prerogative for checking a rogue executive branch, which decides to unilaterally decimate the Constitution, after six years of judicious deliberation?

Perplexed, she wandered over to NRO to see what the alleged conservatives over there had to say about it. Not a great deal, as it turns out.

The thing that has been bothering Pretty Lady, at the back of her mind, ever since this whole distressing terrorism/Guantanamo Bay/Iraq war/Abu Ghraib thing began, is that surely not every prisoner at these places is a terrorist. It simply is not logistically or mathematically possible. She has known enough law-enforcement agents of various stripes to understand that these are not the sharpest tacks in the box, by any means; furthermore, they have a lack of imagination and psychological perspicacity that virtually guarantees that they're going to be picking up a bunch of hapless schlubs who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong color skin, and accusing them of terrorism.

Furthermore, it has been established that training in police interrogation tactics does NOT increase the veracity of the information extracted; it merely increases the internal conviction of the interrogator that he's got a guilty one. (Pretty Lady read this in a hardcover book in a very nice bookstore in Grand Central Station; she cannot remember the title, the author or what the book looked like. If anyone can enlighten her, please do.)

So why on earth are these alleged conservatives so vociferously objecting to painfully slow, cautious, labyrinthine procedures that may eventually set a few wrongly-accused schlubs free?

Possibly because by the time they get done with us, they will have sufficient motivation to become anti-American terrorists?