Habeas Corpus and Bush-bot Bulimics

Swallowing that would hurt, at least twice: Stevie Starr is an illusionist who performs under the stage name "The Regurgitator." Here he prepares to swallow a billiard ball that will (apparently) return via a reciprocal route, which would be the (slightly) less painful alternative.


Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, Scottish illusionist Stevie Starr has been made known to hundreds of thousands of people once tragically ignorant of his existence.


Mr. Starr performs under the stage name "The Regurgitator," which lacks a certain subtlety but displays the virtue of candor: Nobody properly advised of the act has moral standing to protest if offended by the spectacle of someone swallowing and then disgorging large, unpleasant objects -- or at least appearing to.


A typical performance by Mr. Starr (who claims to have refined his gift for selective, on-demand regurgitation as a survival skill at an orphanage) might feature the performer swallowing, and then retrieving from his stomach, a light bulb, nails and coins of various sizes, live fish, and a billiard ball. His routine is embellished by sundry creative sound effects and a winsome line of patter intended to sell the audience on an act that depends on exceptionally cunning sleight of hand, tongue, and embouchure.





It is important to recognize that Starr is not actually swallowing solid objects much too large to pass through his esophagus, nor does he have the ability to select items from his stomach and evacuate them at will: This is a trick. (If you can stand to, pause the video and play it back very slowly from 2:48-2:50 and you'll see that the billiard ball was stored inside his left cheek.)


Convincing as Starr's act may be, it is humanly impossible to swallow something so big, and regurgitate it on cue. Impossible, that is, to everyone other than devoted Republican apologists, who routinely ingest and throw up falsehoods so large and unpalatable that they would make Stevie Starr retch. And in their case, there's no illusion involved -- ample self-delusion, to be sure, but where Starr is harmlessly fooling people who paid to be fooled, Republican slogan-spewers are engaged in a deadly campaign of public deception -- beginning, in many cases, with themselves. I'll examine one heartrending case study of this condition below.


The most recent outbreak of mass ideological bulimia among Republican apologists was triggered by the June 12 Supreme Court decision Boumediene v. U.S. (.pdf), which held that Congress had exceeded its constitutional authority by destroying the habeas corpus guarantee through the Military Commissions Act.


Boumediene was the result of lawsuits filed on behalf of several men detained as "unlawful enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay. Counsel on their behalf contended that the Military Commissions Act (MCA) nullified the habeas corpus guarantee in a way not provided for in the "Suspension Clause"(Art. I, sec. 9, clause 2 of the Constitution); that provision allows Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in the event of invasion or insurrection. Those challenging the MCA were involved in neither invasion nor insurrection; Congress has neither declared war nor suspended habeas corpus in constitutionally legitimate fashion. But the MCA was designed to prevent individuals designated "unlawful enemy combatants" by presidential decree from mounting judicial challenges to their detention. That would be true whether or not the person thus designated is a U.S. citizen.


Except for the right to armed self-defense, there is no guarantee of individual liberty more elemental than the habeas corpus guarantee. If the Chief Executive -- be he or she a monarch, dictator, or president -- can summarily imprison anyone indefinitely without a trial or independent judicial review, then all of us are free only by the grace of our Dear Leader.



"The Framers viewed freedom from unlawful restraint as a fundamental precept of liberty, and they understood the writ of habeas corpus as a vital instrument to secure that freedom," wrote the majority in Boumediene. They likewise note that "protection for the privilege of habeas corpus was one of the few safeguards of liberty specified in a Constitution that, at the outset, had no Bill of Rights." In the debate over the MCA, Pennsylvania Senator Arlen "Magic Bullet" Specter described the MCA, with its provisions eviscerating that foundational due process guarantee, as a measure that would "set back basic rights by some 900 years." He then voted for the measure.


This must be understood: The MCA was not a counter-terrorism measure. It was an instrument of a claim to absolute executive powers that can only be called dictatorial. This was understood by its supporters in Washington, if not by those who dutifully devoured the relevant soundbites and slavishly spewed on command in defense of Bush's dictatorial ambitions.


The Bush Regime insists that 1) Gitmo, located on Cuba, is outside U.S. jurisdiction, and thus not subject to constitutional due process guarantees; and 2) that foreign "enemy combatants" are not protected by the U.S. Constitution. The Court dealt with the first objection by demonstrating that the Regime's denial of the Constitution's extra-territorial application was selective and self-serving, and that Gitmo -- a military base under essentially permanent lease to Washington, over which flies the federal flag -- is very much part of U.S. jurisdiction. In answering the second objection, the majority offered a detailed recap of the relevant history -- both in British and American law and practice -- to support its conclusion that "at common law a petitioner's status as an alien was not a categorical bar to habeas corpus relief."

Appeaser! Defeatist! Dhimmi! Thomas Jefferson pointed out that habeas corpus protects everyone within our government's claimed jurisdiction, citizen and alien alike.


Interesting and edifying though the majority's historical tour may have been (they drew comparisons, for instance, between Bush's claims and those of the tyrant Charles I, a theme explored in this space as well), they could have saved themselves some trouble by merely quoting that notorious appeaser and coddler of Islamic radicals, Thomas Jefferson.



It was Jefferson's understanding that the habeas corpus guarantee must apply to everyone wherever our government claims jurisdiction. Habeas corpus, wrote Jefferson in 1798 (during an earlier war frenzy during which another despotic president was tearing great, gaping holes in the Bill of Rights), "secures the rights of every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume." (Emphasis added.)



The issue was not the identity of the individual claiming the right, but rather the legitimacy of the government's act in depriving him of liberty. This is why Jefferson, in his first Inaugural Address, described habeas corpus as one of the "essential principles of our government."


The majority opinion in Boumediene repeatedly struck Jeffersonian notes in its demolition of the Bush Regime's claim that the president, in wartime or any time, has supreme, unqualified, and unaccountable power to imprison anyone at his discretion for as long as he sees fit. "The Framers' inherent distrust of governmental power was the driving force behind the constitutional plan that allocated powers among the independent branches," noted the majority decision. "This design serves not only to make Government accountable but also to secure individual liberty.... That the Framers considered the writ [of habeas corpus] a vital instrument for the protection of individual liberty is evident from the care taken to specify the limited grounds for its suspension...." (Like Jefferson, I would prefer that the Constitution not permit the writ to be suspended at any time.)


Anticipating objections that the Court was intruding on the exigent powers of a wartime presidency, and thereby undermining "national security," the majority offered an elegant reminder that true "security" in the American tradition begins with protecting the rights of the individual, rather than the supposed prerogatives of rulers: "Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to to separation of powers..... Within the Constitution's separation-of-powers structure, few exercises of judicial power are as legitimate or as necessary as the responsibility to hear challenges to the authority of the Executive to imprison a person." So spoke the five-member "liberal" majority of the High Court.


"Don't ask me about that point of law; Jack Bauer hasn't yet shown us the way": Antonin Scalia, reality-challenged voice of neo-fascist "conservatism" on the Supreme Court.


To which the designated spokesthug for the four-member "conservative" minority, Antonin Scalia, replied, his voice thick with ignorance and glazed with contempt: "Yeah, but there are, like, weirdly dressed guys with beards tryin' to kill us and stuff, and have you forgotten 9-11?" Or words to that effect. At one point in his career, Scalia was regarded as a serious jurist with a taste for writing caustic dissents.


In recent years, he has apparently decided to abandon the Federalist Papers and other original documents as a source of wisdom regarding constitutional questions, choosing instead to consult the wisdom of Jack Bauer regarding the legality of torture, and -- apparently -- Republican-aligned talk radio regarding the open-ended conflict with "Radical Islam."


As a result, Scalia didn't so much write his dissent as regurgitate it, thereby inviting second-generation agitprop bulimics (I'll turn to a suitable specimen of the same anon) to retail selected samples to those within their sphere of influence. While Chief Justice Roberts wrote a separate dissent, it was written at a level of diction beyond the reach of the intended audience, for whom the statement "Muslims suck!" is a masterpiece of the polemical art.


Pancake makeup artfully applied to the forehead conceals the "vacancy" sign: Sean Hannity, whose unfortunate lack of higher cerebral functions gives him the ironic blessing of being zombie-proof.*


Scalia's dissent, on the other hand, was written in a key that the Hannity set could understand. It is a work of pugnacious sophistry, replete with rallying cries to the dead-ender Bu'uhists who still gather in their Mega-Church madrassas to feast on fear of the "Islamo-Fascists" and marinate in their untutored hatred of those who supposedly live for the sole purpose of hating us "for our freedom" -- while the government purportedly protecting us from the Mohammedan hordes destroys what remains of our liberties and prosperity.


"Today, for the first time in our Nation's history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war," lied Scalia at the beginning of his dissent.



Every element of that statement is a conscious falsehood: The decision "confers" no right, but recognizes one long guaranteed by Anglo-Saxon law; those affected by the decision include civilians who have never taken up arms against the United States; and the base at Gitmo is as much United States territory as any embassy abroad.



Not content to leave wretched enough alone, Scalia emitted another pre-digested outburst that indicates his clerks have been researching his legal opinions by reading Republican-created chain e-mails (go here for a representative sample): "America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Daran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen.... On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil...."



It goes on like this for some time, sentence after sentence of sententious dicta intended to pre-empt rather than provoke critical thinking. (In reciting the history above, for example, Scalia could have usefully asked why Marines were stationed in Lebanon in 1983, or run the clock back to disastrous U.S. interventions in the Arab world beginning in the 1950s, were he possessed of a molecule of intellectual honesty.)



When he finally gets around to quoting "authorities," one of his first citations is to a brief co-written by John C. Yoo and William J. Haynes III, two of the chief architects of the Bush Regime's torture policies. After countless paragraphs of adolescent trash-talking and tendentious history, Scalia concludes with another ready-for-Hannity harangue.


After lamenting that the decision will allegedly tie the hands of "our military commanders" on the battlefield, Scalia darkly intones: "The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today." Over to you, second-hand bulimics. Tragically typical of that cohort is Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance, a man of short acquaintance for whom I have no small amount of respect.

Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance: He's just as kindly as this picture would suggest.


In his organization's newsletter, Mr. Fischer -- who in this case was actually a third-hand bulimic, passing along twice-regurgitated soundbites by way of the demented and dishonest Hugh Hewitt -- literally picks up right where Scalia's gorge-casting left off. He refers to the Boumediene decision as an "incomprehensible" ruling "giving constitutional rights to terrorists who have never set foot on U.S. soil"; he recaps a handful of selected soundbites from Scalia and Roberts without so much as citing a syllable from the majority decision, which he apparently didn't deign to read.



In fact, Fischer displays no symptoms of first-hand familiarity with either the majority opinion, the concurring opinion, or the dissents; all he needs to "know" about the matter is what was pre-chewed on his behalf, and then shoved down his eager gullet, by apologists a little higher on the GOP's propaganda food chain.


Mr. Fischer, who yields to nobody in his concern over the distant and diffuse threat of "Islamo-Fascism," offers an unqualified endorsement of the real, immediate, and tangible practice of the all-American variety by way of brazen, dictatorial presidential lawlessness: "The ruling of the majority in this case has no constitutional, legal, rational, ethical or historical legitimacy and could and should properly be ignored by the Commander in Chief."



Once again, let this be understood: What Fischer is endorsing here is the notion that the president is, quite literally, our Living Constitution -- an individual whose word, will, and whim is law, not subject to checks and balances or the limits of any written charter of government. This is, in a precise and unmistakable sense, fascism.














Not surprisingly, this appears to be the course the Bush Junta will follow; they will proceed with the military "trials" at Gitmo -- which have been denounced as "show trials" in the totalitarian tradition by Col. Morris Davis, the man once assigned to serve as chief prosecutor therein -- and then simply ignore the decision for the rest of term. Their transparent hope is that Bush the Bloody will be succeeded by John "War Without End" McCain, who denounced the Court's decision and would appoint judges determined to kill the Great Writ for good.



That outcome is much to be desired, insists Fischer, because to do otherwise would be to set back "the rule of law beyond my lifetime and perhaps forever."


By "rule of law," Mr. Fischer apparently means the unaccountable, illimitable rule of the "Commander-in-Chief" -- at least this particular one, whose relationship to Mr. Fischer is roughly that of Imam to disciple. And in this Mr. Fischer is, once again, heartbreakingly representative of millions of genuinely decent Christian people who dutifully swallow any excuse for demolishing constitutional restraints on presidential power as long as the "right" politician is the immediate beneficiary. For such misguided souls, only the prospect of such powers falling into the "wrong" hands can trigger the long-dormant gag reflex.

__

*This diagnosis and observation comes courtesy of William Wallace Grigg, age 10.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

The Gulag State, Take Two: Breyer Proposes an American "Law of Suspects"

“For several centuries we had a proverb: `Don't fear the law, fear the judge. But, in my opinion, the law has outstripped people, and people have lagged behind in cruelty. It is time to reverse the proverb: `Don't fear the judge, fear the law.'”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

There are occasions when I wonder if the world-historic purpose of the Soviet Union's 74-year existence was to provide a first draft for the terror state our own rulers are constructing. Last week's oral arguments regarding the suspension of habeas corpus – in particular, a colloquy between Justice Stephen Breyer and Solicitor General Paul Clement – was one such occasion.

Breyer, a veteran of the ACLU, is regarded by GOP-aligned conservatives to be a near-perfect specimen of left-wing judicial activism. Yet in discussing the case of Boumediene v. Bush, which challenges the open-ended detention, without trial, of several foreign nationals at Gitmo, Breyer appeared amenable to a legislative solution, rather than determined to impose the will of the High Court. Indeed, according to Newsweek's account, Breyer all but begged Congress to intervene, indicating three times “that it would be possible for Congress to enact a law that would provide the basis for holding the detainees indefinitely without trial.”

Breyer's specific suggestion to Clement was that “long-term detention might pass muster with the Supreme Court under `some special statute involving preventive detention and danger, which has not yet been enacted.'”

Apparently, it isn't enough that the Military Commissions Act (MCA) eviscerated the habeas corpus guarantee, which is the indispensable foundation of the Anglo-Saxon system of individual liberty under law. It is insufficient for the Bush Regime to embrace a despotic vision under which the Chief Executive can consign specific individuals to prison in perpetuity, with no prospect of parole.

Breyer is suggesting that Congress needs to refine this crude pre-medieval practice into a system of pure totalitarian tyranny by institutionalizing preventive detention – and that the Court would be amenable to such a solution. Don't be surprised if Congress acts on that suggestion.

What Breyer seems to be seeking is a measure permitting the government to seize, and imprison forever, anyone it deems to be “dangerous.” The MCA already codifies the supposed authority of the president to detain individuals designated terrorists or “unlawful combatants.” Under a measure of the sort suggested by Breyer, the threshold for imprisonment would be much lower, and mass incarceration of “dangerous” people would become an acute possibility.

The notion of preventive detention of “dangerous” people is entirely foreign to the American concept of law, which is rich in impediments – such as the Constitution's proscription of bills of attainder and expropriations based on “corruption of blood” -- to arbitrary incarceration or punishment of people who have broken no laws.

Breyer's suggestion – which was made in all apparent seriousness, and with some urgency – is inspired by a more “modern” legal tradition with its origins in the bloodiest phase of the French Revolution.

What Breyer seems to have in mind is a contemporary version of the 1793 “Law of Suspects” enacted by France's ruling junta at the depth of the revolutionary terror, or Article 58 of the Soviet Basic Penal Code.

The Law of Suspects was enacted by decree on September 17, 1793 (ironically, the sixth birthday of the U.S. Constitution). The decree permitted the wholesale imprisonment of six classes of people deemed enemies of the State:

*Those deemed “partisans of tyranny” or “enemies of liberty” -- which in the Jacobin context meant defenders of the monarchy and traditional institutions;

*Individuals who had been denied “certificates of patriotism” issued by the revolutionary regime;

*Former “civil servants” who had been cashiered by the National Convention;

*Former nobles and emigres and their families, if they failed to offer constant displays of “devotion to the Revolution”;

*Those who emigrated from France between July 1, 1789 and April 8, 1792.

Promulgation of the Law of Suspects is generally recognized as the beginning of the Revolution's most radical phase. It “brought forth both the levee en masse [general conscription] and the Terror,” points out David A. Bell of Johns Hopkins University in his new book The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It.


















The strong arm, and the sinister brain, of the Revolutionary Terror: Alsatian General Francois-Joseph Westermann (left) liquidated tens of thousands in the Vendee, in furtherance of the terrorist designs of Maximilien Robespierre (right).

That year also saw the beginning of the civil war in the Vendee, a conflict that began after the traditional Catholic residents of that department rebelled against the conscription of their sons to fight against other Catholics abroad on behalf of an anti-clerical government. The war against the Vendee would prefigure modern totalitarian wars of extermination from Soviet Russia to Khmer Rouge-dominated Cambodia: Hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in campaigns that included mass drownings (called “republican baptisms”) and even through crude chemical and biological warfare.

The Law of Suspects was central to a system of “laws” intended to legitimize such systematic murder. It was enforced by a Committee of General Security, which acted through local Committees of Surveillance and enforced its rulings through a Revolutionary Tribunal (and its local appendages).

In the Vendee, counterrevolutionaries – whether militia or civilians – were often subject to summary execution as unlawful combatants by military commissions.

It's hardly coincidental that Lenin and his squalid little clique of murderers and perverts drew inspiration from the Jacobin campaign against the Vendee. And in 1922 the Bolsheviks created their own Law of Suspects by creating a Commission on “exiles” -- meaning people to be deported to the embryonic Gulag Archipelago – and then issuing a law against “socially dangerous persons” in Article 58 of the Basic Penal Code.


"Monsieur Henri," the youthful leader of the Christian forces in La Vendee

Article 58 was the legal foundation for the Gulag state created under Lenin, perfected under Stalin, and that remains, in residual form, today in post-Soviet Russia. It was the purebred offspring of the Jacobin Law of Suspects. And if Congress acts on Justice Breyer's urgent advice to enact a law for the preventive detention of “dangerous” people, America will have completed its legal transition to a Soviet-style gulag state: It will only be a matter of time before the camps are built and filled with “socially dangerous” people.

Consider this: There are roughly 120,000 people who are either on the Regime's “No-Fly List,” or subject to detention and additional scrutiny at airports. These are “dangerous” people who are already subject to a form of preventive detention, albeit of an annoying, rather than potentially lethal, variety.

Consider this, as well: Under a July 17 executive order, the Wee Emperor claimed the right to expropriate those individuals that he and his subordinates believe are interfering with the war effort in Iraq. Shocking as this is, it falls well short of the powers Justice Breyer's proposal would confer. But summary expropriation occupies the same continuum as summary imprisonment, and outlawing domestic political opposition by decree is unmistakably akin to the logic of the Law of Suspects.

Bush and Breyer appear to be working from different paragraphs on the same page -- or on different sections of the same totalitarian blueprint. If you want a peek at what their project will look like when it's done, you'd better brush up on your Solzhenitsyn.

Dum spiro, pugno!

The Padilla Precedent

"From this point on, you will enjoy no privileges of rank... no privileges of person. From now on, I will refer to you only as 'human.' You have no other identity."

I have no way of knowing whether that pronouncement, or something very much like it, was uttered by Jose Padilla's captors after he was taken into military custody five years ago. But it certainly summarizes the Bush Regime's view of Padilla, an American citizen (however disreputable) who has been stripped of all legal protection, not only of his due process rights but also of the basic integrity of his person.

Padilla, we were told in 2002, was the key operative in an al-Qaeda plot to detonate a radiological bomb. The "evidence" against him was provided by two identified terrorists -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah -- who implicated him after being tortured. A third "witness," Ethiopian refugee Binyam Mohammed (right), likewise named Padilla after being tortured extensively by CIA-aligned thugs in Morocco. Among the methods used to break Mohammed was the expert use of razor blades to make tiny but exquisitely painful incisions all over his body -- including his genitals.


After the bloody-handed simian who defiles the Oval Office designated Padilla an "unlawful enemy combatant," the Bush Regime consigned this American citizen to a Naval brig in South Carolina and systematically worked to destroy his will through psychological torture. A "Declaration" filed by a political hack named Michael Mobbs was presented as the functional equivalent of a grand jury indictment, and a separate "declaration" by Defense Intelligence Agency head Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby was offered to explain why Padilla could not be permitted due process of any kind, including conventional legal representation.

"Any interruption of the intelligence gathering process, especially from an external source [such as legal counsel], risks mission failure," insisted Jacoby. The key to extracting intelligence from Padilla, he continued, was "creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator.... Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool."

How are we to know that Padilla was a valuable intelligence source about al-Qaeda, rather than, say, a trivial gang-banger from Chicago whose only serious professional training came at Taco Bell? According to Jacoby, it is enough for us to know that the Grand and Glorious Decider -- and let all stand hushed in awe-struck reverence at the mention of his name -- has "determined" that this is so.

Furthermore, according to Jacoby, "Padilla's capture and detention were the direct result of [similar] effective intelligence gathering efforts" -- you know, like the time those greasy perverts in Morocco took a scalpel to Binyam Mohammed's penis, prompting the victim to say that he would sign anything put in front of him, including a statement implicating a U.S. citizen he didn't know.

Until late 2005, the Regime insisted that Padilla had to be held in military custody indefinitely, because permitting him to be tried in our court system would (let's say it all together) undermine national security. But Bush and his comrades eventually released Padilla for trial when it became clear that the matter was headed for the Supreme Court, and it was possible that the administration could lose. This would imperil the asserted presidential power to designate any U.S. citizen an "enemy combatant" and imprison him in perpetuity.

So the Regime condescended to permit Padilla to have a trial -- on charges that had nothing to do with any of the matters supposedly verified by their "effective intelligence gathering efforts" -- you know, waterboarding, sexual mutilation, that kind of wholesome stuff.

Padilla's trial in Miami is winding down. There has been no mention of a "dirty bomb" plot. Prosecutors have made no mention of Padilla's personal involvement in any terrorist plot of any kind. He may be -- should be -- acquitted.

If so, notes the Christian Science Monitor, the Regime may very well "try to return him to the brig"; if that were to happen, armed insurrection for the purpose of extracting Bush and Cheney from power would not be an inappropriate response. After all, what other recourse would remain if our rulers can simply ignore an acquittal, and imprison a citizen found innocent by his peers?

The former -- seizure of Padilla despite an acquittal -- may happen. The latter -- a righteous armed uprising -- will not, precisely because it is the course of action that would be chosen in such circumstances by the patriots who created our republic. With a scant handful of worthy exceptions, we are not worthy heirs to the Founders' legacy. As the Monitor observed: "Although civil libertarians protested Padilla's detention without charge, there was no significant public outcry."

A likelier outcome would be a guilty verdict of some kind, with the jury thereby validating the Imperious Commander Guy's claim that he can declare any of us to be an un-person outside the law's protection.

This is what the entire exercise has been about all along, and it's why the Regime is determined to keep Padilla imprisoned for life. It would be completely horrifying, and utterly typical of our degenerate culture, if this crucial victory for the cause of Fuhrerprinzip were delivered not by a court or by Congress, but by a jury of common Americans.

I have no brief for Jose Padilla as an individual; he appears to be a standard-issue street thug who got the standard prison-upgrade to minor league Muslim fanatic. But there are gravities of loathsomeness, and Padilla is being used by people immeasurably more evil than he is to accomplish unspeakably vile ends.


Video Extra

The lengthy clip below is from the second part of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled "Chain of Command." In it we see Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) captured by the militaristic Cardassians, undergoing "enhanced interrogation techniques" intended to help him develop a sense of "dependency and trust" toward his interrogator, the urbane Cardassian Gul (commander) Muldred (David Warner, doing magnificent work through ridiculous make-up).

Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Picard, has long been active in Amnesty International and other groups working against torture. At the time this episode debuted in 1992, some critics reacted with variations on the theme of: "Oh, torture is evil, you say? Well, duh."

It is a cause for sober reflection that a moral conclusion that seemed numbingly obvious in 1992 is now considered akin to sedition when spoken aloud -- and that the Regime ruling us today brazenly employs methods more barbarous than those used by the "Cardassians," who are among the most savage races ever depicted in science fiction.

Slouching Toward Martial Law

Finally, about five months too late, some “respectable” people are beginning to understand the implications of what happened on October 17, when Bush doodled his signature onto two measures that effectively destroyed our republic.

The first was the Military Commissions Act, which effectively abolished habeas corpus and laid the foundation for a military tribunal system to try those designated “unlawful enemy combatants.” Those provisions apply primarily to non-citizens, but can be applied to U.S. Citizens. Key elements of that act were upheld yesterday by a federal court. And Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has insolently stated that the ancient Anglo-Saxon principle of habeas corpus – which is literally the foundation of the American concept of due process of law – isn't protected by the Constitution.

The second republic-killer signed on October 17 was a provision in the Defense Authorization Act – call it the Martial Law Codicil -- permitting the president to seize control of state National Guard units for use in “natural or man-made disasters” -- the latter referring to disruptions of social order, including insurrection and rebellion or any activity the Regime chooses to describe as such. This measure revised two obscure but indispensable laws, the Insurrection Act of 1807 and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878; those statutes provided a critical bulwark against the centralization and militarization of law enforcement.

In a house editorial a couple of days ago, the New York Times noted that because of what happened on October 17, the president can now “override local control of law enforcement and declare martial law” by using “military troops as a domestic police force.”

Some of us less-than-respectable folks pointed this out months ago.

What makes all of this “fit to print now” is the existence of a measure co-sponsored by Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Christopher Bond of Missouri that would repeal the Martial Law Codicil. Exhausting its annual quota of sensible conclusions, the Times editorial board urges passage of the Leahy-Bond bill, which is the very least that must be done. The MCA should likewise be demolished immediately, and Senator Leahy has co-sponsored another measure – this one with Republican Arlen Specter – entitled the “Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007” that would accomplish this, as well.

But the most important action that could be taken to prevent our descent into full-fledged despotism would be to prevent the war in Iraq from metastasizing into a regional conflict involving Iran. The Martial Law measures enacted last October make perfect sense as preparations for a broader and more painful war that would involve economic hardship, social upheaval, and at least a measure of regimentation.

“Try as I might, I cannot imagine martial law in the US, except as something the population would agree to under threat from...from whom?” writes liberal commentator Jane Smiley. “Correct me if I am wrong (I know you will), but the last time martial law was declared was during the Civil War, and Americans, though the threats to the Union were profound and omnipresent, didn't like it then. I can't even imagine what would happen now.”

Without minimizing the significance of last October's Martial Law provisions, Smiley continues, “I have to wonder who Bush, Cheney [et. al.] think they are governing. Were they planning to spring these things on us? One day, we were supposed to wake up, and martial law would be declared, and we were supposed to actually pay attention to it? Where are they keeping the troops who were going to patrol our neighborhoods? Who was it who was going to disarm the population? Who was their base going to be, when they sought public support for martial law? Who was going to round us up and where were they going to put us?”

These are eminently sensible questions that are relatively easy to answer. Let's take several of them in turn:

*Where are the troops who would patrol our neighborhoods? Well, some of them are already patrolling our neighborhoods. Those particular “troops” are from nominally local police departments that are appendages of the national Homeland Security system. As I pointed out not long ago, many of them are receiving material aid through the Pentagon's Law Enforcement Support Organization (LESO), including combat weaponry, armored personnel carriers, and other assets entirely incompatible with law enforcement operations – but entirely suitable for martial law.

In the event of martial law, militarized “local” police would work in tandem with National Guard units acting under presidential orders, as well as other elements of the Homeland Security apparatus: the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement would likely play a large role, as would federally subsidized mercenary outfits like Blackwater.

*Who will disarm the population? See the answer above. Recall as well that “local” police, backed by National Guard units, confiscated firearms in New Orleans when the city was placed under martial law following Hurricane Katrina.

*Who would support martial law? When examining the antic parade of authoritarian misfits constituting the “conservative” movement, the question becomes: Who among this sorry lot would not support martial law? When neo-Trotskyite fanatics like Frank Gaffney describe criticism of the Regime's escalation strategy (commonly called the “surge”) in Iraq as a literal hanging offense, and GOP-aligned “legal scholars” like Hugh Hewitt endorse assassination of civilians by presidential decree, why does it seem unlikely that martial law would find a constituency?

*Who will round us up, and were would we be put? To answer the first question, see the first bullet item above. The correct answer to the second question is: We would be put anywhere that's convenient for those doing the round-ups. And it should be understood that this has already happened, after a fashion, in any community that has been blighted by a presidential visit in the last several years. The mechanism used to provide “security” for those visits would serve the needs of martial law quite well.

“When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up `free speech zones' or `protest zones,' where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined,” explains the irreplaceable James Bovard. Those who dare to display unapproved sentiments, either on signs or t-shirts, have been arrested and prosecuted.

The Feds command, and “local” police obey in the name of “presidential security.”

Furthermore, notes Bovard, these efforts to suppress protests “become more disturbing in light of the Homeland Security Department's recommendation that local police departments view critics of the war on terrorism as potential terrorists. In a May 9 [2003] terrorist advisory, the Homeland Security Department warned local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who `expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the US government.' If police vigorously followed this advice, millions of Americans could be added to the official lists of terrorist suspects.”

Which is to say: If that view of dissent were taken literally, martial law would be considered a viable policy.

Bear in mind the date of that Homeland Security advisory; it was issued just weeks after the Regime began its war in Iraq. Should the war spread to Iran – as the Bu'ushists intend – it's reasonable to believe that dissenters would once again be viewed as gulag fodder.

This time, however, Bush would have the powers he arrogated to himself on October 17 – the ability to seize control of the National Guard, and to imprison – and torture – anyone he designates an “enemy combatant.”

Repealing the Martial Law measures is imperative, but the immediate task is to stop the Regime's plans for war with Iran.

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