27.4.04
We Have Always Been at War With Eurasia
First two grafs of a Salon.com piece on the coming American totalitarian state:
U.S. Supreme Court justices listened skeptically last week as Solicitor General Ted Olson argued that foreign detainees being held in U.S. military facilities in Guantánamo Bay have no right to seek relief from U.S. courts. Wednesday, Olson will be back before the court, this time arguing in two historic cases that the government has the authority to lock up U.S. citizens, too -- without charges, without a lawyer, without a trial, without any rights at all -- simply by declaring them "enemy combatants" in the administration's war on terror.
Having government agents sweep U.S. citizens off the streets and into prison cells, holding them incommunicado for as long as the government likes -- it sounds like a dark fantasy of life in a totalitarian state, the kind of thing we're supposed to be fighting against in Iraq. But this is no fantasy. In the cases of Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, the Bush administration is advancing a vision of governmental power that is both far-reaching and unprecedented, at least in the United States of America. And it is a vision -- like the one the administration articulated Tuesday during Supreme Court arguments on the secrecy of Vice President Cheney's energy task force -- that leaves sole discretion, sole authority, and almost unfettered power in the hands of the executive branch.
There is no joke here; there is no overstating how bad this is.
U.S. Supreme Court justices listened skeptically last week as Solicitor General Ted Olson argued that foreign detainees being held in U.S. military facilities in Guantánamo Bay have no right to seek relief from U.S. courts. Wednesday, Olson will be back before the court, this time arguing in two historic cases that the government has the authority to lock up U.S. citizens, too -- without charges, without a lawyer, without a trial, without any rights at all -- simply by declaring them "enemy combatants" in the administration's war on terror.
Having government agents sweep U.S. citizens off the streets and into prison cells, holding them incommunicado for as long as the government likes -- it sounds like a dark fantasy of life in a totalitarian state, the kind of thing we're supposed to be fighting against in Iraq. But this is no fantasy. In the cases of Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, the Bush administration is advancing a vision of governmental power that is both far-reaching and unprecedented, at least in the United States of America. And it is a vision -- like the one the administration articulated Tuesday during Supreme Court arguments on the secrecy of Vice President Cheney's energy task force -- that leaves sole discretion, sole authority, and almost unfettered power in the hands of the executive branch.
There is no joke here; there is no overstating how bad this is.
perma-linky posted by jkd : 22:53
