From Terry Gilliam’s landmark movie Brazil (1985):
T.V. Interviewer: How do you account for the fact that the bombing campaign has been going on for thirteen years?
Mr. Helpmann: Beginners’ luck.
It wasn’t beginners’ luck. Fiction has become reality.
Charles Lane writes in the Washington Post:
Whether designating an American citizen as an “enemy combatant” subject to military confinement, denying coverage under the Geneva Conventions to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, or using the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on domestic communications, Bush has said that the Constitution and a broadly worded congressional resolution passed three days after Sept. 11, 2001, empower him to wage war against terrorists all but unencumbered by judicial review, congressional oversight or international law.
The government has used one very severe case of terrorism to arrogate to itself unprecedented powers. It used to be that conservatives were inherently mistrustful of the government and were loathe to cede it powers. Here’s another quote from Brazil.
Sam Lowry: I only know you got the wrong man.
Jack Lint: Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the right man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?
That scene calls to mind the case of Jose Padilla.
On November 22, 2005,
CNN’s front page broke the news that [Jose] Padilla had finally been indicted
on charges he “conspired to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas.” [8]
Many news sources correlated the indictment’s timing as avoidance of an
impending Supreme Court hearing on the Padilla case: “the
administration is seeking to avoid a Supreme Court showdown over the
issue”. [9] [10] [11]
None of the original allegations put forward by the U.S. government
three years ago, the claims that held Padilla in the majority in
solitary confinement throughout that period, were part of the
indictment: “Attorney General Alberto Gonzalesannounced Padilla is being removed from military custody and charged
with a series of crimes” and “There is no mention in the indictment of
Padilla’s alleged plot to use a dirty bomb in the United States. There
is also no mention that Padilla ever planned to stage any attacks
inside the country. And there is no direct mention of Al-Qaeda. Instead
the indictment lays out a case involving five men who helped raise
money and recruit volunteers in the 1990s to go overseas to countries
including Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia and Kosovo. Padilla, in fact, appears to play a minor role in the conspiracy. He is accused of going to a jihad training camp in Afghanistan but the indictment offers no evidence he ever engaged in terrorist activity.”
Kafka warned us about this, Orwell warned us, Gilliam warned us. Now it is up to the Supreme Court to protect us.
The case is Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , No. 05-184. And, ironically, the defendent was a chauffer for Usama bin-Laden.
In oral arguments Tuesday, an attorney for Salim Ahmed Hamdan will ask the justices to declare unconstitutional the U.S. military commission that plans to try him for conspiring with his former boss to carry out terrorist attacks.
Significant as that demand is, its potential impact is much wider, making Hamdan’s case one of the most important of Bush’s presidency. It is a challenge to the broad vision of presidential power that Bush has asserted since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In blunt terms, Hamdan’s brief calls on the court to stop “this unprecedented arrogation of power.” Just as urgently, the administration’s brief urges the court not to second-guess the decisions of the commander in chief while “the armed conflict against al Qaeda remains ongoing.”
In Bush’s world, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, and it always will be. We will never be able to second-guess the commander in chief so-long as our war with Iraq al-Qaeda continues. We will see how the Court rules on this case. John Roberts has to recuse himself because he ruled on the case as an appeals judge. So, there is a real possibility of a 4-4 outcome.
The Court would do well to remember what Simone Weil said about totalitarianism:
The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men’s inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.
Bush’s fear-mongering power grab must be reversed and repudiated. The idea that Americans will long submit to this tyranny is misguided, and the stability of our society can not be safeguarded by caving into Bush’s permawar legal reasoning. Quite the opposite.
