Earlier today, I wrote about the radical legislation offered by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham yesterday, legislation that gives Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the power to hold people prisoner without ever giving them a trial or even letting anyone know that the person is a prisoner. Graham’s legislation also allows the Secretary of Defense to torture, abuse and perhaps even kill prisoners without anything being done about it – because under the new law, the courts will have no power to question or punish anything war crimes against prisoners committed by the American military. The American military, and its commander in chief, will be made above the law.
I’ll be writing more about this legislation more today, because it’s such a democracy-shattering event in American history, giving the Bush Administration the powers of dictatorship. But for the present, I want to answer only one question about Graham’s : How could Senator Graham possibly justify giving Bush and Rumsfeld the power of dictators?
The answer is disappointingly simple. For Senator Graham and the other senators who voted for the amendment to the Defense Authorization Act, the law is just too inconvenient.
No kidding. Senator Graham justifies the abandonment of the rule of law by saying that habeas corpus petitions from prisoners in President Bush’s Guantanamo Bay lockup are “clogging the court system”. Clogging the court system? For the record, there are just 160 habeas corpus petitions from Guantanamo Bay, being reviewed by the Combatant Status Review Tribunal. 160 pieces of paper.
Senator Graham wants us to believe that the legal system of the United States of America cannot handle 160 pieces of paper, that the practical burden of reading these pieces of paper is so heavy that we have to give up the right to hold the Secretary of Defense and President of the the United States accountable to the law.
Of course, this is nonsense. We don’t stop prosecuting traffic violations because dealing with the paperwork of traffic tickets is “clogging up the courts”. We don’t take away the power of the courts to hear shoplifting cases because those prosecutions are “clogging up the courts”. No, we devote the necessary resources to the courts to take care of the burden. We do so, because our democracy depends upon the full and equal application of the law in all cases, no matter how powerful the people who break the law are.
It seems pretty clear that this whole idea of a few petitions of habeas corpus clogging up the courts is just a ruse. So what might the true motivation be? Well, I can’t see inside the minds of Senator Graham and the other senators who voted for this shameful amendment, but I do see a pattern iin the behavior of congressional Republicans as of late.
The move to make the status of people held captive by the American military in foreign countries immune from consideration of the courts comes right on the heels of revelations that President Bush has set up secret and illegal prisons around the world – prisons in which torture is likely taking place. The Senate’s effort to change the law to block the captives in these “black site” prisons from gaining access to American courts would prevent the American public, and even more importantly, the American courts, from learning about what has really been taking place in these gulags.
This move follows the pattern established before Tom DeLay’s indictment for crimes related to election fraud in Texas. The Republicans in the House of Representatives knew that Tom DeLay would be brought to trial, and so sought to protect DeLay from losing power beforehand. The fact that the Senate Republicans are moving so fast to quarantine the actions of President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from the law suggests that these Senators know that Bush and Rumsfeld have been engaged in activities that could be prosecuted under the law.
As a matter of fact, Bush himself recently met with Senate Republicans to discuss details of what’s been happening in Bush’s secret prisons around the world. This stinks of a coverup intended to protect Bush and Rumsfeld from impeachment and other forms of prosecution. That Senator Graham and other members of the US Senate are willing throw away centuries-old liberties such as the right to habeas corpus just in order to protect the Bush Administration from prosecution is pathetic. George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are not worth the sacrifice.
Bush was at the meeting of Senate Republicans where they discussed the secret prisons? My information has it that Cheney was there, and speaking, not Bush.
Yesterday was Veteran’s Day, and I was asked to play “Taps” at a couple of cemetaries. Put on my tux, complete with my miniature “hero medals”, they took me to three locations. Didn’t go to any parades or other cermonies, though. Don’t think I could have stood it. I heard enough bloviating and prosing on about America’s “fight for freedom” and other crapola, the sacrifices of those of the past, the new struggle (of which my son is taking part), and I thought: “for THIS?” I always figured what they were hepping us on in school civics was just a shuck, now I know. I spent some time in Brazil during the time of the colonels, and see the same symptoms. I got a nasty letter in return from my congressman who told me, basicly, that I’d just have to trust my leaders, that the stink of Tojo, Hitler, and that crowd may be necessary for national survival, and such things as the punctilio of law sometimes have to be bypassed. But I remember I saw it coming since 1973. We’ve been written off, and I have a feeling that next “election” if it looks like the “wrong people” might get in or the present regime tossed, something may happen. If, as of now my rights and even citizenship are luxuries meted out by the state, to be withdrawn when the state finds them “inconvenient”, what’s next?