Sunday, February 12, 2006

 

We Can Have The Rule Of Law. Or We Can Have The George W. Bush Regime. But We Can't Have Both.

Glenn Greenwald's excellent law blog, Unclaimed Territory, has become a daily read for me now. Besides being a clear writer on the profound legal issues (read: assaults on the Constitution) facing us today, Glenn has debated at least one defender of the warrantless NSA wiretaps on CSPAN.

Toward the end of a broader and deeper piece on the burgeoning NSA scandal, Greenwald had this to say:

The right-leaning Jon Henke at QandO provides further evidence that one need not ascribe to a liberal political philosophy in order to find the Administration’s excesses and deceit repugnant to the values on which this country was founded. Jon points to a new article from National Journal reporting that only a small minority of detainees at Guantanamo had anything to do with Al Qaeda, and that the Administration’s assurances regarding who it was who was detained there were fundamentally false. As Jon concludes:

This is why we have due process. This is why we have transparency. This is why a free people who want to remain that way ought to insist we apply due process and transparency even to suspected terrorists. Instead, we've largely stood by while the Bush administration has run roughshod over innocent people; while the Bush administration detained innocent civilians and lawful combatants, and abused them into false confessions. And then that administration had the temerity to say that legislation removing legal recourse by those people "reaffirm[s] the values we share as a Nation and our commitment to the rule of law"....

Remember: the people who told us that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay were all Taliban, captured on the battlefield or otherwise terrorists are the same people who swear, really, that the domestic surveillance program is "solely for intercepting communications of suspected al Qaeda members or related terrorist groups."

A commenter here a few days ago remarked that he never really cared about political issues until recently, but has almost been forced into caring by the radical and extremist measures taken by the Administration, which truly threaten our most basic political values. I feel the same way. I am far more engaged politically now than I was, say, five years ago, because I really perceive that not just political differences, but the kind of country we fundamentally want to be, is what is at stake in our current controversies.

I fully share these sentiments expressed the other day by Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings:

I have spent my life loving this country for its values, among them the right not to be tossed in jail at the whim of some ruler, but to be guaranteed the right to live free from searches, wiretapping, surveillance, and arrest unless some official could convince a judge that there was probable cause to believe that I had committed a crime. I could scarcely believe it when Padilla was locked up: I was as shocked as I would have been had Bush asserted the right to ban Lutheranism, or to close down the New York Times. It was such a complete betrayal of our country's core values that it took my breath away.

I feel the same way about the NSA story.

I couldn’t agree more. For me, the real trigger - the final straw - was the due process-less but indefinite detention of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla in a military prison with no access to lawyers or even charges of any kind, while the Administration argued that he no right to even have a court review his detention, which occurred on U.S. soil. To me, nothing is more un-American than that – nothing.

And the rationale on which those actions were predicated are exactly the same as the rationale on which warrantless eavesdropping and a whole host of other excesses are predicated. If someone isn’t opposed to these things and isn’t willing to fight against them, it’s hard for me to see how someone can claim to believe in the values and traditions of this country.

It's good to see that there are other lawyers out there who recognize, and will say plainly on television, that after 9-11, we went right Through The Looking Glass, constitutionally-speaking. (Some of us, in fact, date the dawn of the Lewis Carroll Era from the decision in Bush v. Gore.)

posted by Michael 12:49 AM