In a Michigan speech yesterday, Barack Obama (”the guy running for President,” not “Barack the bomb thrower”) doubled down on demanding that rights traditionally reserved for US citizens be granted to terrorists captured while battling and killing US forces.

[W]hen you suspend habeas corpus — which has been a principle, dating before even our country, it’s the foundation of Anglo-American law — which says, very simply, if the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ and say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.’

“The reason you have that safeguard,” he said, “is because we don’t always have the right person. We don’t always catch the right person. We may think this is Mohammed the terrorist, it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You may think it’s Barack the bomb thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.

“The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism, it’s because that’s who we are,” Obama said as the crowd rose to its feet, applauding. “That’s what we’re protecting. Don’t mock the Constitution! Don’t make fun of it! Don’t suggest that it’s un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up! It’s worked pretty well for over 200 years!

Of course, the rights of foreign terrorists are not protected by the US Constitution.  Does the US Constitution also protect the right of foreign terrorists to keep and bear arms, or give the the US government the right to tax foreigners?

“Mocking” Obama for wanting to read foreign terrorists their rights does not equal “mocking” the US Constitution, although saying so does illuminate just how much the candidate thinks of himself.

Even if we grant Obama his point that habeas corpus does apply to foreign terrorists, Obama should know that habeas corpus has not always “worked pretty well for over 200 years.”  During times of war, for example, habeas corpus has been suspended.  Either Obama doesn’t know this or he doesn’t think we are in a time of war.

One example of habeas corpus suspension is a tiny little conflict known as the US Civil War.  Lincoln suspended the writ at that time.

Ulysses S. Grant suspended habeas corpus in a portion of the country to battle against the KKK in 1870.

Habeas corpus was also suspended during and after World War II specific to unlawful combatants like those we are capturing on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Is Obama unaware of these and other previous suspensions of or limits on habeas corpus, or does he feel that the War on Terror is not of sufficient national importance to use these as precedent?

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