it's not really a surprise that britain isn't too keen about some of its own citizens being detained down at gitmo. blair and bush discussed it during bush's trip, and bush didn't back down. well, it sounds like some of britain's judges are fed up with the issue remaining a pleasant disagreement between leaders:
A senior law lord last night delivered a scathing attack on the US government's and the American courts' treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, branding it "a monstrous failure of justice".Lord Steyn, one of the most senior judges in Britain's highest court, described the military tribunal for trying the detainees as a "kangaroo court".
The term, he said, implied "a pre-ordained arbitrary rush to judgment by an irregular tribunal which makes a mockery of justice". He asked whether the British government should not "make plain, publicly and unambiguously, our condemnation of the utter lawlessness" at Guantanamo Bay.
b-b-but they're evildoers. this is a new kind of war with new kinds of warriors, and the old rules don't apply. screw habeas corpus! would they have given us that if they captured us? hell, no. they hate us because we're free, so we're gonna give them exactly the opposite of that. and that doesn't lower us one bit, oh no.
The concession extracted by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, that the British detainees would not face the death penalty, gave a new dimension to the concept of "most favoured nation" treatment, he said. "How could it be morally defensible to discriminate in this way between individual prisoners? It lifts the curtain a little on the arbitrariness of what is happening at Guantanamo Bay and in the corridors of power on both sides of the Atlantic."
see? if you do what we say, we won't kill your citizens.
and hey, lord steyn, you better watch your mouth, or george w. bush will come back and fuck up your queen's gardens some more.
Posted by kilgore at November 25, 2003 10:05 PM | TrackBack