Moral Issues 101

A federal judge has ruled that a Guantanimo Bay prisoner is entitled to legal representation. The president was not authorized to hold the prisoner or otherwise try him outside the U.S. legal system.

But W and his advisors have, from the beginning, believed they had the legal right to use military tribunals to indefinitely imprison and even execute prisoners whom they said had no rights before our legal system.

So, Mr. Bush, however you dress this up, in the end your actions with these prisoners, terrorists or not, have no better legal or moral standing than those that would be used by a 3rd world dictatorship.

Once again, you and your advisors, show no thought to the consequences of your actions, while opening the way for our captured citizens and GIs, in wartime and peacetime, to be treated exactly the same way by adversaries who would just point to you for their example.

Holding prisoners indefinitely, without legal representation, with no actions to establish their guilt (or innocence), and with the supposed justification to be able to punish and execute them, are not the actions of a moral leader, much less one who leads evangelical Christians to the polling booths.

Neither are they the actions of a thinking and moral President of the United States.