The Evil We've Etched Into Law

In a just nation, the fact that the rubber stamp Republican Congress, at the behest of the White House, just rubbed out an 800 year-old law by suspending the writ of habeas corpus, and just gave the President the sole authority to determine what's torture and who is an unlawful enemy combatant, would be the biggest issue in this election. You actually aren't hearing anything about it, and the fact that the Democrats are focusing on the disaster of Iraq is noble and right, but giving this Administration all they wanted on torture, giving them the ability to indefinitely detain suspects, to allow coercive testimony in their military commissions, should be completely unacceptable. The Constitution has been completely trashed, and Americans - not Democrats, not Republicans, but Americans - should be outraged.

And the effects of this dastardly act are already reverberating within the country and around the world. Because the Administration is already backing the courts off of their Constitutional function of judicial review:

Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that "no court, justice, or judge" can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.

Beyond those already imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere, the law applies to all non-U.S. citizens, including permanent U.S. residents.

AND, Washington Post, and it applies to all "unlawful enemy combatants," including US citizens if the President is so inclined.

Meanwhile, as predicted by myself and plenty of Democratic leaders, other countries are following the Administration's lead:

Several governments around the world have tried to rebut criticism of how they handle detainees by claiming they are only following the U.S. example in the war on terror, the U.N. anti-torture chief said Monday.

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator on torture, said that when he criticizes governments for their questionable treatment of detainees, they respond by telling him that if the United States does something, it must be all right. He would not name any countries except for Jordan.

"The United States has been the pioneer, if you wish, of human rights and is a country that has a high reputation in the world," Nowak told a news conference. "Today, many other governments are kind of saying, 'But why are you criticizing us, we are not doing something different than what the United States is doing?'"

Oh yeah, and apparently we're still holding people in secret prisons in violation of the Geneva Conventions, even after Bush claimed nobody else was being held. And, the CIA tried to get Germany to shut up about an al-Qaeda suspect being held and tortured in a Moroccan cell. The bargain was that the CIA would give German intelligence access to the suspect, as long as they got the EU to look the other way on Morocco's human rights record.

This is the United States of America, supposedly the world leader in human rights, doing this. Larisa Alexandrovna calls the Military Commissions Act of 2006 the Reichstag Fire decree. She's overheated, but certainly you cannot have a full democracy when individual rights are at the whim of one man in the executive branch. For those who want to rationalize this by saying "we face a new kind of enemy" (news to those Nazis, the fascists of Italy, and the Soviet Union) and "what if there were a ticking time bomb" (a fictitious scenario right out of "24" that has no antecedent in the real world and neglects the fact that torture routinely provides bad information), I'd advise them to heed the words of Arthur Silber:

Make no mistake: the advocacy of torture, no matter how "limited" or how narrowly drawn, is the advocacy of evil. That torture's advocates must utilize lies to make their case is only one of the numerous ways in which that evil reveals itself. The deliberate and pointless infliction of unbearable pain on another human being -- the infliction of agony for its own sake -- cannot be other than evil. Advocacy of behavior of this kind must always disguise itself; it must always offer rationalizations in presenting its arguments. When evil's masks are removed, most people will shun it. When it covers itself with tendentious arguments that most people cannot untangle, it increases its chances for success. Today, in our country, evil is succeeding to a terrifying degree.

We've lost touch of our leadership so much as citizens that we enable them to etch this kind of evil into our nation's legal structure. On November 7th it's crucial that we reconnect and go to the polls to offer some opposition to this power grab, this dangerous expansion from the rights of an elected President into the rights of a king.