Euphemism time?  Basically Spain gave their part of the Louisiana territory back to France through the treaty of Ildefonso.

But your point is well made.  It was definitely out of character for Jefferson, and he hated doing it as he was a States Rights advocate.  And this purchase was basically a usurpation of those rights by the federal government.  The beast he feared the most.

You are right that Lincoln - our nation's first dictator - suspended Habeus Corpus.  But you are wrong about Bush - our nation's second dictator.  He ended it, for US citizens and everyone else.  Bush locked up US citizens without ever bringing charges and with no intention of ever having a trial.

I said at the time that he would be setting a precedent for future presidents to go further.  This has already happened.  Obama now claims the power to murder any US citizen anywhere, at any time, with no arrest, no trial, no conviction, no nothing - merely on suspicion of them being a threat.  Bush enabled this.

It's one thing to say the Constitution doesn't protect or extend benefits to non-citizens.  If it did, we'd have to go to war with every nation on the planet who mistreated its citizens.  But it's another thing entirely for our own government to mistreat captives or anyone else, and deny them their rights.

Just because our Constitution doesn't protect non-citizens (and I agree that it doesn't) doesn't mean that you, I, or our own government for God's sakes should be in the business of torturing them, denying them Habeus Corpus, etc.

Bush may have made some very bad decisions, but don't blame him for Obama doubling-down on those errors.  Sure, his prior actions may have enabled Obama to make such a decision, but Obama was the one making the decision, not Bush.

And how. Some hindsight might be 20-20, but there's definitely also some historical version of beer goggles at work in many, many discussions of our founding era, not to mention nearly every president, the War of Northern Aggression, the War to End All Wars, the Big War That Followed That One, etc. History is not fine dining; the meals are often ugly and difficult to digest, at least if they're well-prepared.

You've been drinking way too much governmental cool-aid propaganda.  What people swept up in Afghanistan had ever "slaughtered innocent American citizens?"  There were 12 year old boys swept up, tortured, and then thrown in Guantanamo.  You think 12 year old boys living in huts in Afghanistan slaughtered American citizens?

The US had to have "terrorists" to show the American people.  So they bought them in Afghanistan, by paying Afghan warlords $5000 a head to find and turn over such "terrorists."  The warlords then grabbed people at random, grabbed rivals for their power, or grabbed people with whom they had scores to settle, and sold them to the Americans.

What had these Chinese ever done to us?

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/02/18/gitmo.detainees/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/01/guantanamo-china
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/10/08/court.chinese.muslims/index.html

Our government wanted to give this guy the death penalty.  Now we find that that the evidence against him is so non-existent that it can't even pass the test for habeus corpus: 

Judge Orders High-Profile Gitmo Detainee Released

Federal judge James Robertson today ordered Mohamedou Ould Salahi, once referred to as the “highest value detainee” in all of Guantanamo Bay, released after ruling that the government lacked any legal basis to hold him. The details of the release order are classified, but a redacted version is expected in the next few weeks.

Salahi has been held by the US since November 20, 2001. The memo regarding his detention accused him of traveling to Afghanistan to wage jihad, though this was decades ago in response to the Soviet occupation. He was arrested in Mauritania and renditioned to Jordan.

Salahi’s abuse in US custody, amid accusations that he was a “top” al-Qaeda operative, have been well documented, and prosecutors have repeatedly expressed hope that he could eventually be executed.

Though the Justice Department is said to be reviewing the ruling and Salahi remains in custody for the time being, the order does serious damage to the credibility of the military commissions system, as his attorney, Nancy Hollander noted: “they were considering giving him the death penalty. Now they don’t even have enough evidence to pass the test for habeas.”

There have been articles on this stuff in the news every day for years, if you cared to locate and read them.  What about this?

From The Times
April 9, 2010
George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'


George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”

He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

He added: “I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.”

Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.

He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr Hamad claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damages action against a list of American officials.

Defenders of Guantánamo said that detainees began to be released as early as September 2002, nine months after the first prisoners were sent to the jail at the US naval base in Cuba. By the time Mr Bush left office more than 530 detainees had been freed.

A spokesman for Mr Bush said of Colonel Wilkerson’s allegations: “We are not going to have any comment on that.” A former associate to Mr Rumsfeld said that Mr Wilkerson's assertions were completely untrue.

The associate said the former Defence Secretary had worked harder than anyone to get detainees released and worked assiduously to keep the prison population as small as possible. Mr Cheney’s office did not respond.

There are currently about 180 detainees left in the facility.

Although he wasn't denied habeus corpus, what about Johnny Walker?  What innocent American citizens had he slaughtered?  He went to Afghanistan before 9/11 to fight in the civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.  He's gonna spend the rest of his life in prison.

Says who?  Bush?  What the hell is an "enemy combatant" anyway?  Just some amorphous label the Bush admin came up with, that's what.  Anybody can be labeled an "enemy combatant," which is the point of it.

Look, instead of arguing whether people are entitled to habeus corpus or not, why don't you ask yourself why any government would ever deny it to anyone regardless?  Why did the medieval kings of europe grab people and lock them away in dungeons for the rest of their lives, with no charges, no trials, no evidence, no convictions, no nothing?  BECAUSE THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE AGAINST THEM, WHICH MEANT THE KING WOULD LOSE IN ANY TRIAL!  THEY WERE SIMPLY POLITICAL PRISONERS!  Bush and Cheney denied habeus corpus to people because they had no evidence, yet they needed "terrorists."

Try to think of a good reason why a government would deny habeus corpus to anyone, whether you think they have a right to it or not?  If you can think of a reason, can you figure out a way that it wouldn't be abused?  I mean, if the government doesn't even put on a trial and show evidence against someone, how the hell do YOU as a citizen know whether the government is telling the truth or not?  If you say "you trust them," then why not simply do away with habeus corpus for everyone?  Why is habeus necessary?

You are like most Americans.  You think civil liberties like habeus corpus protect criminals and "terrorists."  They protect YOU, fool!

To relate this to the topic of this post, yeah, we unfortunately live in a very different America, with very different values.  What do you think Jefferson would have said here about the topic of habeus corpus?

Allegations are cheap, but proof is hard to come by.  And as already stated, even if what you allege is true, that would make Bush the 4th (or later) dictator.  Since FDR and Wilson did the same as Lincoln, just not on the scale Lincoln did it.  You might want to link to the laws, acts, executive orders where Bush suspended it.  Or perhaps cases where it was used.

Ke5trel

Flying is not a right.  That was nothing new that Bush magically created, it has a long precedence in law.  Prrivileges are not rights.  It would bolster your diatribe if you learned the difference.  And as I indicated above, allegations are cheap.  You might want to show where he did it.  But then that would take knowledge and not just naked hatred of the truth.

I think you are the first person I've ever run across who actually understands this.

I think he's trying to say that since flying isn't a right (in his mind), it doesn't therefore violate your rights if you are stuck on a no fly list.

Where he's wrong is that flying actually IS a right.  Some people think if a right isn't enumerated in the Constitution, it isn't a right.  They think that the Constitution grants rights.  It doesn't.  The purpose of the Constitution was actually to DENY POWER to the federal government (i.e. specifically state which powers the federal government has, and then specifically state that if it ain't in the Constitution, the federal government doesn't have the power to do it).  The forefathers stuck in the Bill of Rights as an example of the rights people have, but not an enumeration of them.  One of the forefathers - I forget who - was against doing this, because he said "if we do that, idiots will think this document grants rights, and it doesn't."  The others told him "nah, people aren't that dumb" but of course they are.

Dr. Guy is right in that some people (particularly liberals) try to make up rights that they don't have.  For instance, the right not to be offended.  You have no such right, and neither should you.  But you have the right to fly, to play your saxophone naked at 2 in the morning, and just about anything else that doesn't encroach on anyone else.

You may not care, as I think you were one of the guys flaming me for the 9/11 stuff, but some dude in the Obama administration said that 9/11 conspiracy theorists should be spied on, infiltrated, discredited, etc. and I have no doubt that this is occurring.

That's why this true conservative not only didn't support Bush's policies, but has completely divorced himself from the Republican party (not that I was ever enamored with it to begin with).

Ya.

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?

Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups

Numerous domestic surveillance programs are underway besides the NSA