In all its splendor and majesty

In September 2006 the US right pushed the country “a step toward totalitarianism” when the Republican Senate majority passed a bill which essentially stripped the US Constitution of the protection of habeas corpus, one of the foundational guarantees against executive injustice and abuse of power which has been an essential part the British legal tradition for hundreds and hundreds of years.

As Chicago Tribune columnist Garrison Keillor said at the time:

“  Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an “enemy combatant” is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

[…]

The Senate also decided it’s up to the president to decide whether it’s OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators….[T]hey have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal.

[…]

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

[…]

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: ‘Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.’

 

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the court will dispose of this piece of garbage.

 

If, however, the court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.”

There were 65 Senators who voted in favour of the stripping of habeas corpus.

Three of them are now Republican Presidential candidates (none are Democrat candidates).

They were Brownback, Hagel and McCain. None of them now, as Keillor says, “has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal.”

Indeed, such “wretched figures” surely agree with the American military that the question of whether the Guantánamo prisoners – whose Military Tribunal cases were recently dismissed – were “Enemy Combatants” or “Illegal Enemy Combatants” is mere semantics. Of course. It is merely the law, and — as we know from the way that John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, Andrew Card, George Bush and Dick Cheney (not to mention McCain, Brownback and Hagel) view the law in general — when it gets in the way of their own agenda the rule of law and basic democratic principles are of small importance and the law itself (even though passed by the same vile and obsequious Senate) merely a minor hindrance when it comes to the Machtergreifung ¹.

But the law is not nothing, and the difference between an “illegal” and an ordinary “enemy combatant” is neither trivial nor semantic, as “rmj” clearly explains at Adventus [and also here].

(These are the people and the sort of people, by the way, whom John Howard’s government – especially Billy Bunter Downer, Darth Ruddock and the man who has lost any idea of morality or democratic principles, Michael Joseph Keelty – uses as its moral, legal and ethical benchmarks.)

Garrison Keillor went on to say, “Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.”

So, speaking of universities granting honorary degrees to dishonourable people…

One-time Acting-Attorney-General James Comey “testified before both the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Judiciary subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on the U.S. Attorney dismissal scandal…In early January 2006, the New York Times…reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to “certify” the legality of central aspects of the NSA program at that time…After Comey’s refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital, to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program”.

(Ashcroft refused. See Comey’s description here).

Nevertheless, about three weeks ago, “Andy” Card got his reward from – to its eternal shame and disgrace – the University of Massachusetts. But not without the almost universal condemnation of students and faculty in perhaps the most astonishing display of opposition and dissent ever, certainly recently, in a formal academic ritual.

[See the video above]

¹ “Machtergreifung is a German word meaning “seizure of power”. It is normally used specifically to refer to the Nazi takeover of power in Weimar Germany on January 30, 1933.

The term Machtergreifung was first coined by the Nazis themselves in order to portray their accession to power as an active seizure”