Judiciary Testimony - Quick Thoughts...
At breakfast I watched about 20 minutes of Attorney General Gonzales’ testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. What I saw was very enlightening and helped me see this issue in a very different light. I found the essence (although certainly not always the delivery) of the Attorney General's responses to questions re the legality of the wiretapping program to be surprisingly persuasive (please bear with me!). Specifically, his argument that the Supreme Court held, in the Hamdi case, that the President had the right to detain American citizens, and that wiretapping is allowable because it is certainly less intrusive, was a HUGE light bulb moment for me. Now I finally understand what has been troubling me about the connection between this wiretapping program and the administration's continually increasing assertions of greater executive authority.
On the way to work I found my self thinking, by analogy, that if we were at war with a nation-state where combat operations were ongoing within our borders, all of the disturbing actions that the President has authorized or contemplated (e.g., the detention of American citizens suspected as enemy agents or the intrusive surveillance of Americans suspected of connections with the enemy) would not be so worrying. In fact, we would probably demand it! The question then becomes, are we really in a state of war?
Can a state of war actually (or legally) exist between nations and non-state actors like al Qaeda? If not, then the invocation of the President's war powers (Whether by Rove’s design or serendipitous congressional inattention) would be utterly inappropriate, and likely very dangerous. The extreme right will respond by screaming, “Of course we at war!” But if so, then why has this administration, for example, determined that the Geneva conventions don’t have to apply? Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. They want to have their cake (this is a regular war) and eat it too (create a new class of combatants who do not get Geneva protections), a view whose ultimate implications are now becoming frighteningly clear.
Shouldn’t al Qaeda’s actions more properly be dealt with as criminal acts, similar to how we would deal with organized crime? By allowing the President to prosecute this threat as a regular war, I fear we have unwittingly created an opportunity for the seizure and solidification of unprecedented executive authority. We have to ask ourselves, “Where will this end?” We have to ask ourselves, because our very democracy and our rightly-cherished liberties are at risk like never before.
On the way to work I found my self thinking, by analogy, that if we were at war with a nation-state where combat operations were ongoing within our borders, all of the disturbing actions that the President has authorized or contemplated (e.g., the detention of American citizens suspected as enemy agents or the intrusive surveillance of Americans suspected of connections with the enemy) would not be so worrying. In fact, we would probably demand it! The question then becomes, are we really in a state of war?
Can a state of war actually (or legally) exist between nations and non-state actors like al Qaeda? If not, then the invocation of the President's war powers (Whether by Rove’s design or serendipitous congressional inattention) would be utterly inappropriate, and likely very dangerous. The extreme right will respond by screaming, “Of course we at war!” But if so, then why has this administration, for example, determined that the Geneva conventions don’t have to apply? Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. They want to have their cake (this is a regular war) and eat it too (create a new class of combatants who do not get Geneva protections), a view whose ultimate implications are now becoming frighteningly clear.
Shouldn’t al Qaeda’s actions more properly be dealt with as criminal acts, similar to how we would deal with organized crime? By allowing the President to prosecute this threat as a regular war, I fear we have unwittingly created an opportunity for the seizure and solidification of unprecedented executive authority. We have to ask ourselves, “Where will this end?” We have to ask ourselves, because our very democracy and our rightly-cherished liberties are at risk like never before.
posted by Leroy Loutre at 9:31 AM
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