Everyone* Deserves a Trial
Has the world gone crazy? At one point, it was considered fairly normal to want the worst individuals in society to be brought to justice. And giving everyone a fair trial just showed that the American judicial system worked. We didn't need secretive kangaroo courts because we wanted to be better than our foes. John McCain used to agree.
Flip
At some point, John McCain realized that it was important to our nation to uphold the standards of fair justice. He made an argument that's downright reasonable but today would probably be equated with terrorist sympathy.
“Now, I know that some of these guys [at Guantanamo] are terrible, terrible killers and the worst kind of scum of humanity. But, one, they deserve to have some adjudication of their cases. And there’s a fear that if you release them that they’ll go back and fight again against us. And that may have already happened. But balance that against what it’s doing to our reputation throughout the world and whether it’s enhancing recruiting for people to join al-Qaeda and other organizations and want to do bad things to the United States of America. I think, on balance, the argument has got to be — the weight of evidence has got to be that we’ve got to adjudicate these people’s cases, and that means that if it means releasing some of them, you’ll have to release them.“Look, even Adolf Eichmann got a trial.”
That's real logic, and it sounds like a nice change of pace!
Flop
Of course, it didn't last. Judging by McCain's recent reaction to the Supreme Court's decision that detainees at Guantanamo must have the right to habeus corpus, it's clear that he's no longer bound to his opinion that everyone deserves fair justice.
Interestingly, this is a multi-step flip-flop. His first reaction to the court case was a mild "We need to move forward." Apparently that answer was not good enough to satisfy whoever he was trying to convince. The next day his reaction was a nearly hysterical ranting about the Court making "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."
Reeeally. Worse than the Dred Scott case? Worse than Plessy vs. Ferguson? Worse than the Korematsu case? The decision stated that the US needs to prove that it has some basis for detaining people indefinitely. Is that really so audacious?
