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Today's
Stories
December 20 / 21, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
December 19, 2003
Elaine Cassel
Courts
Rebuke Bush for Trampling the Constitution
Robert Fisk
Raid
on Fantasyville: Shooting Samarra's Schoolboys in the Back
Zoltan Grossman
The
Occupation Has Failed to "Capture" the Loyalty of Iraqis
Mike Whitney
Bush's
Afghan Highway to Nowhere
Harold Gould
Has the Radical Arab Strategy Really Worked?
Gary Leupp
The
Neocon's Dream Memo
December 18, 2003
Ann Harrison
A
Landmark Victory for Medical Pot
John L. Hess
Catfish
Blues: The SOB's from Out of Town
Karyn Strickler
Ebola
is Good for You!
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Duryodhana
Dies
Harry Browne
Hail
Jim Hickey, the "Irish Hero" of the Colonial Occupation
of Iraq
Hammond Guthrie
Captured in Abasement
December 17, 2003
Robert Fisk
Saddam's
Cold Comforts
Gideon Levy
"Don't
Even Think About the Children"
Marjorie Cohn
The Fortuitous
Arrest of Saddam: a Pyrrhic Victory?
Andrew Cockburn
Saddam's
Last Act
December 16, 2003
Robert Fisk
Getting
Saddam...15 Years Too Late
Mahajan / Jensen
Saddam
in Irons: The Hard Truths Remain
John Halle
Matt
Gonzalez and Me
Josh Frank
The
Democrats and Saddam
Tariq Ali
Saddam
on Parade: the New Model of Imperialism
December 15, 2003
Robert Fisk
The Capture
of Saddam Won't Stop the Guerrilla War
Dave Lindorff
The
Saddam Dilemma
Abu Spinoza
Blowback on the Stand: The Trial of Saddam Hussein
Norman Solomon
For
Telling the Truth: the Strange Case of Katharine Gun
Patrick Cockburn
The
Capture of Saddam
Stew Albert
Joy to the World
December 13 / 14, 2003
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural
Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory
Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet
Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry
Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to
Gov. Mitt Romney
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD
Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand
William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War
Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency
Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy
Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East
Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman
Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised
Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed
Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review
Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee
Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians
Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race
December 12, 2003
Josh Frank
Halliburton,
Timber and Dean
Chris Floyd
The
Inhuman Stain
Dave Lindorff
Infanticide
as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies
Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?
Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva
Accords
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
December 20 / 21, 2003
The Nameless and the
Detained
The
Desaparecidos of George W. Bush
By BRUCE JACKSON
Immediately after the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, United States
officials began large-scale detentions of foreign Arabic nationals
and Muslims. Many, if not most, of the detentions were on the
flimsiest of excuses-overstaying a visa, for example-something
that would ordinarily have been dealt with by a note saying "come
in and get this straightened out."
It was important that these individuals
were "detained" rather than "arrested." Had
they been arrested, they would have been caught up in the criminal
justice system, and they would have had access to its protections.
If they were detained, they were in limbo, which is just what
the Bush administration wanted.
A June 2003 American Civil Liberties
Union report summarized a study by the Justice Department's Office
of the Inspector General that was "highly critical of what
it shows to be the wholesale and long-term preventive detention
of immigrants swept up in the months following 9/11." Immigrants
were detained without charges being placed against them, and
some spent eight months before they were released. They were
denied access to lawyers. Hundreds of videotapes of their prison
conditions were destroyed before the investigation team could
look at them. The government refused to release the names of
those detained. Deportation hearings were closed to the press
and the public. No one yet knows the names of those detained,
how many were detained, how many were deported, and how many
are still locked up. The report was ready for release a year
earlier, but Attorney General John Ashcroft blocked it because,
in its original form, it faulted senior political appointees.
(The Justice Department OIG report is online.)
An earlier Amnesty International report
had expressed similar concerns:
...although they are not charged with
crimes, many post 9.11 detainees are held in punitive conditions
in jails, sometimes alongside people charged or convicted of
criminal offences. AI has received reports of cruel treatment,
including prolonged solitary confinement, heavy shackling of
detainees (including use of chains and leg shackles) during visits
or court appearances and lack of adequate outdoor exercise. There
have also been allegations of physical and verbal abuse. Amnesty
International has heard reports from family members that for
weeks they have been unable to establish if and where their loved
ones were being held. Lawyers have also had difficulty trying
to establish where their clients are held or when they have a
hearing before the immigration court. One lawyer recounted how
he would call with a detainee's name and date of birth and was
told that they were ''not in the system'' even though they were
in detention. ("United States of America: Amnesty International's
concerns regarding post September 11 detentions in the USA,"
14 March 2002)
Some individuals detained for overstaying
their visas had in fact applied in proper and timely fashion
for extensions, but the Immigration and Naturalization Service
hadn't acted on their requests because of its ordinary backlog.
These visitors had done exactly what they were supposed to have
done under U.S. law, but even so, they were detained under brutal
conditions for long periods of time, and, in an unknown number
of cases deported in the dark of night with nothing but the clothes
on their backs without even the opportunity to call their families
to say they were alive and more or less well.
At first, U.S. Attorney General John
Ashcroft bragged about the numbers of detentions, but he fell
silent after November 5, 2001, when the total reached 1182 detainees.
The present total, says David Cole, author of the important new
book on abuse of aliens by military and criminal justice officials,
Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms
in the War on Terrorism (NY: The New Press, 2003), had by
May 2003 risen to at least 5000. The number remains approximate
because the government still refuses to release the names of
the prisoners or the total number of them. It justifies this
on the grounds of "national security."
Since September 11, 2001, writes Cole,
"The government has selectively subjected foreign nationals
to interviews, registration, automatic detention, and deportation
based on their Arab or Muslim national origin; detained thousands
of them, here and abroad; tried many of them in secret, and refused
to provide any trials or hearings whatsoever to  others; interrogated them for months
on end under highly coercive, incommunicado conditions and without
access to lawyers; authorized their exclusion based on pure speech;
made them deportable for wholly innocent political associations
with disfavored groups; and authorized their indefinite detention
on the attorney general's say-so."
And what have these thousands of extraordinary
detentions, imprisonments and deportations accomplished? According
to Cole, "Only five detainees (three noncitizens from the
initial wave and two citizens picked up later as material witnesses)
have been charged with any terrorist-related crime. Of those
five, one has been convicted of conspiracy to support terrorism;
two were acquitted of all terrorism charges; the government dropped
all terrorism charges against the fourth when he pled guilty
to a minor infraction, and the fifth is awaiting trial."
Detainees
This is not the first time that, during
a period of perceived threat, the United States government has
placed people under detention primarily on the basis of ethnicity.
During World War II, for example, the U.S. government placed
more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps under
Executive Order 9012. In addition, U.S. agencies forcibly brought
2000 persons of Japanese descent to the U.S. from Latin America
during World War II. They were imprisoned as well.
What happened to them was an abomination,
an atrocity, but it was not invisible and the detainees were
not incommunicado. Those people were unjustly imprisoned, but
they weren't disappeared. People knew where they were and when
the war was over they were set free.
Not so the case with thousands of foreign nationals detained
or arrested without notice after 11 September 2001. They were
imprisoned without cause, and kept invisible from attorneys who
might help them or families living in pain because of their unexplained
disappearance. Bush and Ashcroft are up to something new on the
American scene.
Guantánamo
In addition to the 5000 or more domestic
detentions, there are the approximately 650 Afghanistani, British,
Australian and other prisoners on the U.S. military base in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan presumably because it
provided a base for Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization,
which had executed the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. The Taliban,
religious fundamentalists who suppressed women and destroyed
public art, were disliked almost everywhere, and no government
seemed to mind that the U.S. went in determined to drive them
from power. However loathsome the Taliban may seem to westerners,
there remain serious questions about the legitimacy of the U.S.
removal of hundreds of people-some of them as young as 13- to
an isolated prison in a U.S. naval base in Cuba, where they are
kept under brutal and repressive conditions, permitted no access
to attorneys or any other visitors, held without formal charge
for a term with no end other than the whim of the captors.
Why are these men and children still
being held? Are they prisoners of war or kidnap victims? What
are they being held for? Are they being questioned for information
about bin Laden? How much useful information about bin Laden's
present whereabouts and activities could they possibly have?
Are they being tortured? Since no one outside the government
knows exactly how many persons were taken in the transports to
Cuba, no one will know how many die there, their bodies buried
in unmarked graves or dropped from boats at sea in the dark of
night. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch have condemned the Cuban situation, but
the Bush administration merely stonewalls all criticism.
Bush logic
The Bush Administration at first justified
what it was doing by saying the threat was great and the people
being so brutally treated weren't American citizens anyway, so
they weren't entitled to the same protections as U.S. citizens.
Even though the U.S. Constitution makes no distinction between
citizen and non-citizen when it comes to such rights as legal
representation, speedy trial, and cruel and unusual punishment,
over the years, especially during times of war, the courts have
been far sloppier with the application of those standards to
non-citizens, particularly those connected to the opponents in
war.
Bush insists these actions and powers
are necessary in his war on "terrorism." But terrorism
is a behavior or a strategy, not a nation or a group. We know
where a nation's boundaries are and who its citizens are; what
are the boundaries and citizens of a behavior or a strategy?
A war without an enemy is a war without end. So these extraordinary
wartime powers have, almost without notice by the Congress or
the press, become permanent powers. It will take huge work to
rid us of them.
The Bush Administration justifies its
secret detentions with the argument that if the government announced
the names and numbers of its detainees and deportees, then Al
Qaeda would know which of its operatives in the United States
were now prisoners or had now been deported.
This is probably as absurd as it seems.
The theory presumes that Al Qaeda leaders cannot do ordinary
arithmetic, that they cannot subtract the missing from the accounted-for
and figure out who is left and who is not.
This is very much like the U.S. military
classifying and keeping secret its estimates of National Liberation
Front casualties during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Surely
the NLF knew how many soldiers it sent out in that operation
and how many made it back. Surely the NLF was capable of subtraction.
In both instances-Vietnam in 1968 and
the United States in 2003-the numbers were being hidden from
the American people, not some real or hypothetical antagonist.
But why?
How citizens become
aliens
There is a third group of Bush Administration
desaparecidos: American citizens Bush and Ashcroft simply
decide are terrorists or involved with terrorists. Bush has asserted
that he has the power to declare American citizens agents of
enemy powers, and therefore not protected by international law,
U.S. domestic law, or the laws of war. No previous American president
has ever claimed such authority.
Bush has thus far exercised this extraordinary
new presidential power over two American citizens, each of whom
he has declared an "enemy combatant" and therefore
subject to military rather than civilian law. They are Yasir
Hamdi (arrested in Afghanistan) and Jose Padilla (arrested in
Chicago). Both have been placed in military prisons where they
have no access to lawyers, family or anyone else in the outside
world; both, presumably, will be subject to secret military trials,
secret post-trial imprisonment, and perhaps even secret executions.
No charges have been placed against Padilla.
The government has insisted that giving him access to a lawyer
would interfere with their continuing interrogation, and thus
far the courts have gone along. He was originally detained as
a material witness, then, when the federal judge in the case
said he was entitled to an attorney and held the Justice Department
in contempt for refusing to let him have one, the Administration
declared him an "enemy combatant" and removed him from
the jurisdiction of the court. His lawyers, with whom he cannot
communicate, are appealing that status.
Bush has, in sum, taken the position
that he has the power to declare individuals outside the protection
of the law. Merely by his own declaration, and without trial
or any kind of juridicial proceeding, ordinary visitors and ordinary
Americans can be immediately deprived of every civil right provided
by the Constitution of the United States and international law.
If someone is outside the law, then nothing
done to that person is illegal. That is what medieval notions
of 'outlawry' were all about.
This reminds me what Suetonius wrote
about the executioners in Tiberius' time confronted with the
problem of virgins who had been condemned to death. The method
of execution was strangulation, but it was considered impious
to strangle virgins. So the executioners first raped their victims,
then strangled them. Hitler made sure that everything
he did was legal. He had the law rewritten to legitimize what
he wanted to do and the German courts went along. Sometimes the
greatest atrocities are accomplished under the crooked mantle
of law.
What next?
Are there more desaparecidos about
whom nothing is known because they don't have family to call
and call again looking for their missing sons or brothers or
fathers? What of the seekers of American amnesty who have been
deported in secret and who were delivered to hostile authorities
in countries where they were jailed, tortured, or killed? Such
countries do not send out press releases and they, like George
Bush, do not permit their imprisoned and condemned to make telephone
calls.
Thus far, public response to Bush's and
Ashcroft's extraordinary arrogation of judicial power has been
minimal. Cole attributes the lack of outrage to the simple fact
that most of those affected are foreigners or resident aliens-largely
Arabs and Muslims. The two cases of American citizens having
their rights suspended on presidential order have aroused some
commentary in the general press, but not much, and few members
of the general public seem aware of either.
Government rarely gives back power it
has taken. What will Bush and Ashcroft do next? If they can put
Jose Padilla in cold storage in an unnamed naval brig, they can,
in theory, put anyone there. No one knows how far they are willing
to go.
In its astonishing decision upholding
the administration's refusal to allow Hamdi his ordinary Constitutional
rights, the Fourth Circuit wrote, "while the Constitution
assigns courts the duty generally to review executive detentions
that are alleged to be illegal, the Constitution does not specifically
contemplate any role for courts in the conduct of war, or in
foreign policy generally....Hamdi's status as a citizen, as important
as that is, cannot displace our constitutional order or the place
of the courts within the Framer's scheme. Judicial review does
not disappear during wartime, but the review of battlefield captures
in overseas conflicts is a highly deferential one.... The constitutional
allocation of war powers affords the President extraordinarily
broad authority as Commander in Chief and compels courts to assume
a deferential posture in reviewing exercises of this authority.
The executive branch is also in the best position to appraise
the status of a conflict, and the cessation of hostilities would
seem no less a matter of political competence than the initiation
of them. (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 4th Circuit Court of Appeals,
January 8, 2003)
That is to say: if the administration
says we are at war, then the courts cannot argue; if the administration
says civil rights must be suspended for certain individuals,
the courts cannot interfere. Do you want to see a court capitulating
to power? Read Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.
The United States, civil rights attorney
Elaine Cassel reminds me, has three branches of government that,
in theory, exist in an exquisite balance, each preventing the
others from sinking into excess. That balance, she points out,
is meaningless when two of the branches abdicate their responsibility,
which is what has happened in regard to the administration's
claims of power in its ill-defined and potentially endless war
on terrorism. The judiciary has, she says, "accepted without
argument the administration's claim that we are in a continuing
time of war, a war without end, with an amorphous enemy that
is whatever they say it is. And Congress is sitting idly by,
making a few noises, but not enough to make a difference."
In the face of considerable public pressure
and what might have been a Supreme Court decision going against
them, Rumsfeld and Bush recently backed off a little bit on the
Hamdi case: they've said he can have an attorney, but they haven't
agreed to let the attorney do anything for him. This may be one
more White House distinction without a difference. (See Elaine
Cassel, "Yaser Hamdi gets a lawyer: He just can't do anything,"
Buffalo Report, 7 December 2007)
Now that the Bush administration has
successfully claimed the right to create its own desaparecidos,
and the courts (with the notable exception of recent rulings
by the Ninth and Second Circuits) and Congress have been unwilling
and unable to resist that claim, one might argue that the U.S.
government is doing itself far more grievous harm than anything
carried out or imagined by the 9-11 plotters, or any of their
successors.
(This article appeared in Italian in
the December 2003 issue of LatinoAmerica.)
Bruce Jackson,
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University at Buffalo, edits the web journal
BuffaloReport.com.
His most recent book is Emile
de Antonio in Buffalo (Center Working Papers). Jackson
is also a contributor to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 13 / 14, 2003
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural
Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory
Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet
Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry
Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to
Gov. Mitt Romney
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD
Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand
William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War
Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency
Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy
Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East
Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman
Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised
Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed
Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review
Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee
Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians
Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race
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