Shocked and Unnerved

Everywhere and anywhere, those seen as rejecting even a small measure of an America-centric perspective will be labeled undesirables, subversives, and even “enemy combatants,” whether or not evidence supports the assertion.
--Chapter 11, "Social," Financial Armageddon

Although I predicted as much in my 2007 book, even I am shocked and unnerved at how quickly the U.S. is abandoning principles that once defined our nation as "the land of the free and the home of the brave." In "Supreme Court Guts Due Process Protection," Naked Capitalism highlights a recent development that should frighten the wits out of any American who is still capable of thinking:

Reader Walter passed along this distressing sighting from Chris Floyd’s blog. American civil liberties were gutted last week, and the media failed to take note of it.

The development? If the president or one of his subordinates declares someone to be an “enemy combatant” (the 21st century version of “enemy of the state”) he is denied any protection of the law. So any trouble-maker (which means anyone) can be whisked away, incarcerated, tortured, “disappeared,” you name it. Floyd’s commentary:

After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this horrid decision. The fact that the Supreme Court authorized this land grab says we no longer have an independent judiciary, that the Supreme Court itself is gutting the protections supposedly provided by the legal system. Per Floyd:

In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Now Floyd saw this mainly as an issue of the treatment of enemy combatants and Obama hypocrisy about torture, which is bad enough:

The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of “national emergency.” And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama — who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer — has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution….let’s be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand — in court — that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities.

Yves here. The implications are FAR worse. Anyone can be stripped, with NO RECOURSE, of all their legal rights on a Presidential say so. Readers in the US no longer have any security under the law.

Roman citizens enjoyed a right to a trial, a right of appeal, and could not be tortured, whipped, or executed except if found guilty of treason, and anyone charged with treason could demand a trial in Rome. We have regressed more than 2000 years with this appalling ruling.

Comments

[buzzsaw99]

Yeah, and when it comes guillotine time the same applies to them.

[C K Michaelson]

Sometimes I simply can't believe what I'm seeing. Glad others see it to.
And some saw it coming long off in the distance.
ckm

[M. Weiss]

It´s only a question of time and the chinese people will only laugh at Obama when he mentions human rights (will he even dare....?)

America looks more and more the place NOT to be!

MW

[Matt]

This is like something they would do in Germany (WWII era)

[Are Riksaasen]

If you incarcerate someone on the grounds of being an "enemy combatant" or "suspected enemy combatant" it sounds like they have been turned into a Prisoner of War. The Third Geneva Convention governs the treatment of Prisoners of War. Case in point, they are not to be subject to torture.

The United States of America signed the Geneva Conventions in 1955. As such they are bound to follow the rules therein, even when treating their own citizens, or rather former citizens turned "suspected enemy combatants".

To me it looks like the Government of TUSOfA is gearing up for a war on (part of) it's own populace. That is the final and logical step in a development we have seen brewing the last 50 years, a movement towards making TUSOfA unpopular in as many places as possible. Then you obviously have to take care of your own backyard as well.

[Jimmy]

Fofoa.blogspot.com

It's a very good blog about gold. Knowledge is golden power...

[Jimmy]

And www.debtorsprisonblog.org is also a missing blog in your blog list.

It's my favorite blog to read it...

Sincerly

Jimmy

[Minimal Imagination Required]

Well, now that the pesky issue of the law is settled.... we just need to round up those suspected enemy combatants. It might help if we had some sort of specialized police force...

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9432/index1.html

It's nice to see someone was thinking ahead.

[someone]

where can one find original material re this case?

i won't believe unless i see an official publication....

[Intuition]

Link to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit opinion that the Supreme Court denied certiorari for: http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/docs/common/opinions/200801/06-5209a.pdf

[Square_Hedge]

We must protest louder. Even the Iranians have more guts than we do. Some of us may have to die (and suffer greatly in the process) before change will come.

Where is an Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt when we need one?

Movies you must see:
"Rendition"
"In the Valley of Elah"
"Body of Lies"

[Square_Hedge]

BTW, "denial of certiorari" does leave the lower court ruling intact, but it is NOT the same as "affirming it." Another Circuit Court could rule differently and is not bound by the the DC Circuit decision.

However, the scary thing is that most of these issues will originate in the DC Circuit because they will result from action taken by the government ... which happens to be located in DC!!

[kevin]

In response to Mr Dynamite:

Every so often, participants need to be reminded who labor is and who labor is not. Labor is not protected by government. Government works for capital, hunting down labor. Labor is protected by evolution, with mobility.

“never again” is political nonsense.

Capital is immobile, and is now consuming itself to death, from the bottom of the nexus up, because it cannot adapt without labor. Of course it is seeking martial law directly, rather than under the pretense of a constitution, given its current status.

Why fight over a shrinking pie, when you have everything you need to make pie, wherever you want to make it? Labor has moved on to the next economy.

Capital seeks to immobilize labor, with increasing force, as capital becomes non-performing. Nothing new here.

Short enough?

Good luck Mr. Dynamite

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

[roger]

We have a dysfunctional Government,Financial system,
economy,society,and a very angry citizenry,according
to history these are pre-conditions for violent change.
Culture in this country has been shaped by the corporate
structure with great emphasis on individualism and consumerism,at the expanse of social consciousness.
How this will affect future events is anybody's guess.
But the status quot is not to be

PS, Good article Kevin

[Don Ginsberg]

This hole comment is a lie, or there would be no trials here of the Guantinimo prisoiners.

[Square_Hedge]

@Roger

We are a long way from establishing these pre-conditions. Look around at the baby-boomers who have thrived over the past 30-40 years. They don't want change ... they just want to keep what they have. And they will be allowed to because to do otherwise would stir them into a frenzy. This government knows better than that and they won't let it happen. Let the sheeple keep enough for themselves to maintain some semblance of affluence and they won't rock the boat.

Still, their conscience burns at night when they try to sleep. They know something is not right, but they can't (won't) connect the dots and as long as they check their brokerage accounts each morning and the money is still there they won't bridge the chasm between what they think "is" and what really "is."

[roger]

Square_Hedge
public debt: 141% of GDP
corporate debt 317 %
household debt 99%
total: 557 % this is not serviceable , I call this
a dysfunctional situation, (and I wish to hell I was wrong )

[Mike]

Enjoy your blog, first-time commenter.

After 9-11, I expected a painful process of grappling with legal issues regarding this particular enemy. It's not our fault that the enemies' m.o. is to disguise itself as civilians while waging total war on civilians. Perhaps it would be very helpful if we would drop the generic PC moniker "enemy combatant" and go with something narrower, like "muslim enemy combatant" or "muslim holy warrior".

There's certainly no problem with treating foreigners in foreign countries as enemies of the USA. Obviously, there are serious constitutional issues involved when the enemy includes American citizens or foreigners in America. (But in the case of Americans serving in a foreign military force abroad, America has historically treated them like any other military enemy.)

Seems to me that the situation is complicated, not simple as some here suggest. Generally, though, the ruling as described here gives far too much blanket authority to the executive branch of the federal government and is certainly cause for concern.

We will know when abuse is occurring if pro-life activists, gay activists, militant environmentalists, the mafia, the Klan, the New Black Panthers, union organizers, or any other non-jihadist group gets labeled as "enemy combatants". Meanwhile, the law should certainly be narrowed to prevent such abuse.

[Square_Hedge]

@ Roger:
Those debt numbers are astounding are they not? Yet, we get up every morning and the lights still come on, the gas stations are open and the Waffle House is still crowded. What will cause this to all come unraveled and undone is anybody's guess - along with "when" it will happen. My guess is sometime between a week from next Tuesday and when Jesus returns. Not a minute sooner!! :-) Seriously, the trigger for widespread unrest will be, at first, something inconvenient, and then a mini-disaster. The news will travel quickly because of the internet ... unless the government decides bloggers are a threat to national security and starts shutting down websites. :-(

@Mike:
I see both sides of this but my legal training tells me that to preserve a free society it is better to let a few guilty go free than to put an innocent man in jail. I have to start from there and then move to justifications for infringements on freedom. I am superbly suspicious of any attempt to limit or detract from individual liberty - especially mine. I worry about things like the "Geneva Convention" and torture and rendition. I worry about American foreign policy that alienates people and nations I will never see and the citizens of which will never visit here. Why do we have to be the World's Police Force and on what do we base our hubris? (a new favorite internet word) Have we earned the right to be so arrogant? How? Where is it written down and endorsed by God Almighty Himself that we have the moral right to tell other nations what they should and should not do? Where is it written that the USA has the right to exist in perpetuity simply because .... ?

The Roman Republic became the Roman Empire became the trash heap of history. It failed as (not neccssarily "because") it became more corrupt and less free. I wonder sometimes if we have not already transitioned from the American Republic to the American Empire?

[Mike]

@Square Hedge,

I share your concern about liberty, and I also have legal training.

War and the criminal justice system are two very distinct things. Anytime they are forced to overlap things get perilous.

War is completely awful and is therefore to be avoided whenever possible. Interesting anecdote from Chuck Yeager's autobiography: by the end of WW2, our P-51's were unopposed when they escorted B-17's over the heart of Germany. The brass noticed that they were landing in England with a full load of ammo and plenty of fuel. At the same time, German factories had been bombed out and making munitions had become a cottage industry. So how to better use those P-51's? An order was issued assigning a 50-square-mile area of Germany to each fighter. Once the bombers were clear, the fighters were to report to their assigned area and strafe anything that moved. As Yeager told his buddy, "if we're going to do stuff like this, we damned well better win". And we think of WW2 as "the good war".

The Geneva convention is all well and good. It is designed to encourage armies to fight as decently as possible so as to minimize civilian casualties. It rewards people for doing so. (Uniformed POWs have access to musical instruments, mail, etc.) This particular enemy intentionally hides behind civilians, making the loss of innocent civilian life much more likely. Historically, combatants out-of-uniform are regarded as spies and shot. To the extent we are not doing this, the enemy is getting more than he should expect.

One other point: the oldest rule in the treatment of enemy prisoners is the rule of reciprocity. The first of our guys to be captured in this war, as far as I can recall, was the SEAL who fell out of the helicopter in Afghanistan in late 2001. His captors dragged this wounded, defenseless man behind some rocks and shot him in the face. The same enemy captured some of our soldiers in Iraq and kept them only long enough to torture them to death with power tools. How we treat these people should be viewed through this lens.

Sorry for the rant. Again, I'm speaking here of foreign enemies in foreign countries.

I agree with your concerns about the Roman parallel. I'm not disagreeing with you about our foreign policy. I guess I'm just raising one of Machiavelli's points: try hard to avoid making enemies, but if you do make enemies, treat those enemies like enemies.

Anyway, Merry Christmas.