Who's your monster?

“…a state of war is not a blank check for the president…”
                     --Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, June 28, 2004

I may come to miss Sandra.  Despite three Supreme Court rulings that the detainees at Guantanamo, foreign citizens and American citizens alike are entitled to a trial, whether or not the Navy Base there is on foreign soil, yet still they are there in wire cages and there they will remain, without a doubt, until there is a régime change in the United States - Habeas Corpus be damned.
Although a de facto state of war may exist, we have of course not declared war. The danger of allowing a President to unilaterally engage in wars, ad libitum, has since Congress made it all too easy, eliminated the intent of the Founding Fathers to make it difficult for any President to hold the nation hostage by starting a war and demanding a blank check.  This President wants more – he has arrogated the right to set aside the Bill of Rights when it suits his cause.  There’s not much difference between the “warpresident” as he defines it, and any other cheap, third world dictator.

In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that citizens held as “enemy combatants” are entitled to a fair trial. In an opinion backed by a four-justice plurality and partly joined by two other justices, the Court ruled that, although Congress authorized the detention, the Fifth Amendment guarantees the right to contest that detention before a neutral decision-maker.  So far, the Court might just as well not have bothered. The administration that can’t stop using the word “freedom” is free to do whatever it wants to whomever it wants. The nation they have spent so much time and money stirring into animal rage simply doesn’t care what goes on unless it affects their taxes and what used to mean “savage” now means “conservative.”

Convicted US soldier Lynndie England tells us in her first post court marshal interview that far worse things were going on at Abu Ghraib than we know about and that military commanders were full aware and supportive.  How many of us really care?

When we were at war with empires that truly had the means to destroy us and our way of life, we treated prisoners as human beings.  Yet we won, and we won with our dignity intact and our respect in the world elevated.  We are now a nation that can give a teenager a life sentence for petty crimes, a nation gleefully eager to execute minors and a Nation obsessed with the idea that we are not savage enough.

"Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.”

“Who fights with monsters should see to it that he doesn’t become a monster in doing so.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche-


Too late!