Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1984 Editor's Choice: 19
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Respectfully, I disagree
[Read the article: What happened to the Padilla interrogation videos?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn, Sweet Polly,
Nixon was driven from office by a combination of forces, including an irate citizenry that had long since taken to the streets, investigative journalism and prosecutorial investigations, a Congress that had been feeling the heat from street protests and constituents for by that time many years, and, and do not overestimate these, feelings of patriotism and right and wrong by members of Congress and the press, as well as the belief, in the Nixon administration itself, that you could rant all you wanted, but once the Supreme Court had ruled, you had to obey.
Call it, if you will, a bedrock sense in the rule of law. The Nixon people believed in breaking and stretching the law, but they obeyed once the law came down on them, and they viewed a looming impeachment and conviction as an insurmountable obstacle.
The members of Congress and some of the witnesses, like John Dean, believed in the country in a way that seems naive to many cynical people in the Congress and elsewhere now. There has been thirty years of full throttle corporate law in which any and all artifaces are used to do what you want, regardless of the law, and in which we have the ultimate compartmentalization of morality and deed. Ultimately, this culture has seeped into all aspects of society and government until our once bedrock gut feelings about the rule of law have become tinged with the belief that the law is whatever you can get away with.
I challenge those who believe that this administration can be reigned in by courts or threats of Congressional investigation, by international opinion or international law. I challenge you to show me evidence that the Bush Administration has put into practice ANY of the Supreme Court decisions on the war on terror in the spirit in which they were handed down. Not Padilla, Not Hamdi, Not Hamdan. They have either stalled until the story goes out of the news, immediately started innumerable other court cases and argued that they have no need to comply "while the issue is still in the courts", or gone to what has been a compliant Congress to get legislation that is patently unconstitutional put on the books, knowing it will take years to get it thrown out.
The Nixon people ranted, schemed, and broke the law, but when the Court ruled, they complied. These people don't. Unless the court of public opinion makes it absolutely clear that the rule of law means the rule of law, and not what you can get away with, the bedrock under this democracy will continue to erode, chip, dissolve and crumble.
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GlennGreenwald:
[Read the article: What happened to the Padilla interrogation videos?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I agree wholeheartedly that all the investigations, actions, and expositions are needed to turn the tide of public opinion. But something more fundamental is needed. The whole society had become cynical about our Constitutional fundamentals and the rule of law, about elections, about media coverage, long before these guys decided they could use that mood to wreak havoc.
In addition to changing public opinion about the transgressions of the Administration, the country has got to start believing in ideals again. Constitutions don't produce democracy and rule of law, the Soviet Union had one. Adopting these documents, the Constitution, the self-evident truths of the Enlightenment scholars as core beliefs is what created this democracy and stood it apart from others.
It is in grave danger of succumbing to those who think ideals are naive. My belief is that that kind of thinking is a by product of how the modern corporation operates before the law. Others may have other explanations for it. But I do hope it isn't the inevitable decline of nations.
I know we need all the hard legal and congressional work. But I also think a couple of million people in the streets, in every city in the country, a couple of times a year is a powerful stimulus for national reflection and assessment.
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nabalzbbfr is wrong but the MCA of 2006 is retroactive
[Read the article: What happened to the Padilla interrogation videos?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 denies courts the right to hear habeas corpus petitions -- of non-citizens. It doesn't say anything about stripping citizenship, or about habeas corpus rights of citizens.
It is also retroactive: part b) states:
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE.—The amendment made by subsection (a)shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001.
It has been argued that because it prevents detainees from going into court to challenge their imprisonment, it also prevents citizens from going to court to challenge being treated as non-citizens, but this isn't, strictly speaking, part of the law as written.
(Maybe that argument holds water, I'm not a lawyer so I don't know).