Even the worst of the Nazis got a trial, even though the trial was a sham. The indictments were created ex post facto and were not based on any nation’s law. Even US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. But I digress.
The top Nazis could get a trial despite plunging Europe into its most destructive war and caused the deaths of tens of millions of people. Yet the detainees in Guantanamo Bay are somehow undeserving of a trial because they’re too barbaric, or happened to be kidnapped and sold to the Americans for a cash reward. Forgive me if I think the Nazis were a bit more dangerous and barbaric than some religious fanatics upset that a foreign military started shooting up their country.
Supporters of detaining alleged terrorists without trial posit that we did the same things with captured Germans and Japanese during World War II. The problem with trying to classify captured terrorists as prisoners of war is that we are not at war. Terrorism is still considered a federal crime, and sending the military to fight the crime of terrorism doesn’t make us any more at war than sending the military to fight drug cartels makes us at war. The government doesn’t consider arrested drug dealers to be POWs, nor does declaring a “War on Drugs ” strip accused drug dealers of their right to a fair trial.
In the city of Forest Park, a suburb of Atlanta, people are getting ticketed for leaving their cars unattended as they warm up in the morning. This appears to be another one of those “for-your-protection” laws, where the people who the law is supposedly protecting are the ones who get screwed. [digg=http://www.digg.com/politics/Atlanta_suburb_gives_citations_for_unattended_idling_cars]
Forest Park police are enforcing a Georgia law that makes it illegal for someone to leave a car unattended while it is idling. Its original purpose was to prevent cars from rolling away. Today, however, Forest Park is using the law under the guise of preventing car theft. Except that the potential victim of car theft is the one who gets slapped with a $168 fine. Fourteen people have been find since January. I guess this is what happens when the police don’t have anything important to do. Of course, an infinitely better idea would be to educate citizens rather than going around enforcing more draconian laws.
Our society is moving more and more towards abrogating citizens of all responsibility of everyday decision making. The state believes that you don’t have the capacity or even the right to make choices or risks with your own personal property. And apparently the state doesn’t think people are smart enough to know that there’s a risk to leaving one’s car unattended.
