A Thought

I haven't posted much recently, for reasons I'll get into later. But I think I need to comment on this:

"Don't give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it's all about."
-John McCain

Under virtually any understanding of rights, they are not something given to a person; they are something a person already has. All of this talk of how we should have "withheld" the Miranda rights of Faisal Shahzad is incoherent. You can't withhold that which someone already has.

Governments can, of course, violate someone's rights. And if our government had--instead of respecting Shahzad's rights--taken him to Gitmo and waterboarded him (or implemented whatever torture-filled scheme our so-called conservatives had in mind for him), our government would have done just that: violated the rights of one its citizens.

It's worth pointing out, I think, that rights are not selective; indeed, they are, in some sense of the word, collective. We all have them, and if one person's rights are abridged, then all of rights are abridged.

That goes for you too, Arizona State Legislature.