Great multi-media reporting!!!
On the Right stomping all over civil liberties, I think we should be on the offensive against both the overt Right and the pseudo-left on this issue.
The pseudo-left joins together with paleo-conservatives and liberals who have always supported torture and ruthless crushing of the left by tyrannical repression to undermine the war against tyranny by both pretending that no harsh measures are required in suppressing fascist terrorists and that the fight is really phony and just an excuse to empower oppressors against the people.
The Right directly undermines the war effort by chest thumping about how "tough" they are. Instead of mobilizing the widest possible united front to isolate the real enemy they do in fact use the war as an opportunity to promote their own anti-democratic agenda.
The biggest setbacks to the war against tyranny so far have been caused by:
1) the natural reaction to US chest thumping about imperial hegemony at the start
2) opportunistically pretending that the invasion of Iraq was to "disarm Sadaam", solving a short term problem of not being able to launch the war without lying about it, in a way that didn't prepare people for the later turn and completely undermined public support
3) continuing to resort to the same old repressive measures including torture in association with the same old tyrannical allies and with the same old military and intelligence leadership that could hardly be expected to know how to fight a revolutionary war since their whole careers were based on fighting counter-revolutionary wars.
Each of these setbacks was caused by the Right. In particular Abu Ghraib was the biggest setback to the liberation of Iraq and currently the Bush administration is on the defensive covering its arse against prosecution for war crimes while also rallying "patriotic" opinion for "tough" coercive interrogation in a way calculated to divide Americans rather than unite them.
That's no excuse for siding with the enemy of course and there's no point whining about the Right's lousy leadership when there has been no genuine Left prepared to step forward and provide better leadership. But we do need to call the Right's bluff on this.
The "tough" stance against people like "Jihad Jack" is actually a sign of weakness. It provides a "feel good" substitute for effective security work.
In general "taking the gloves off" really means covering up incompetent security work.
Strategically it would obviously be better to "take the hit" of a few thousand more civilian casualties from successful terrorist attacks that would mobilize people to understand "why we fight" than to undermine the war against tyranny by continuing to rely on repression rather than revolution.
But the Right just isn't tough minded enough to face up to that. They take the easy path of mouthing patriotic (and even religious) stupidities instead of actually doing what must be done to win.
Imagine if Lt General Sanchez et al had been hauled before a Military Commission appointed by the Commander in Chief and then lined up against a wall and shot for allowing Abu Ghraib. Let the liberals whine about due process. It would have shown some really tough minded determination to win.
Anything that makes life easier for police and security services in avoiding public scrutiny makes it easier for them to cover up sloppy incompetence and continue doing what comes naturally to them instead of effectively mobilizing muslim communities to isolate and defeat the islamo-fascists.
Anybody can laugh and jeer at the way that people like "Jihad Jack" and David Hicks have been held up as some kind of heroes.
But it took spectacular incompetence from the Right to achieve that level of popular hostility and incomprehension.