The Day After...The Day of Shame

The most important and proximate dangers of the Bush indefinite detention and torture law will be to those who are swept up in current geopolitical terrorism, which mostly (but not exclusively) affects people from the Middle East or of Middle Eastern extraction, or who look like they might come from Pakistan, India--any place where people have vaguely nonwhite skin and dark hair, including Italy (and I say that with no irony at all, because I know of at least one such person pulled out of an airport line.)

But the future of the Bush indefinite detention and torture law can go well beyond that. And it takes little imagination, let alone paranoia, to see where it might go.

Glenn Greenwald in salon describes the general meaning of the law--and I do mean general, because it applies essentially to everyone in the world. He contends that it "would give the Bush administration the power to imprison people for their entire lives, literally, without so much as charging them with any wrongdoing or giving them any forum in which to contest the accusations against them. It thus vests in the administration the singularly most tyrannical power that exists -- namely, the power unilaterally to decree someone guilty of a crime and to condemn the accused to eternal imprisonment without having even to charge him with a crime, let alone defend the validity of those accusations.

The changes that the administration reportedly secured over the weekend for this "compromise" legislation make an already dangerous bill much worse. Specifically, the changes expand the definition of who can be declared an "enemy combatant" (and therefore permanently detained and tortured) from someone who has "engaged in hostilities against the United States" (meaning actually participated in war on a battlefield) to someone who has merely "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.'

Expanding the definition in that way would authorize, as Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies points out, the administration's "seizure and indefinite detention of people far from the battlefield." The administration would be able to abduct anyone, anywhere in the world, whom George W. Bush secretly decrees has "supported" hostilities against the United States. And then they could imprison any such persons at Guantánamo -- even torture them -- forever, without ever having to prove anything to any tribunal or commission. (The Post story also asserts that the newly worded legislation "does not rule out the possibility of designating a U.S. citizen as an unlawful combatant," although the Supreme Court ruled [in the 2004 case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld] that there are constitutional limits on the government's ability to detain U.S. citizens without due process.)

Greenwald points out that despite what the Court says, there are American citizens already so detained, and he contends that this law will subject all American citizens to the risk of this treatment. And there is nothing in the law that says it applies only to those suspected of connections with Middle Eastern terrorists. Who else could it be used against?

Recall all those reports about Bush or Bush inspired survelliance of domestic peace groups, including Quakers. Even on the day this bill was passed by the Senate, George Bush himself as well as other Republicans were accusing their political opponents of harming America, of being disloyal and making America unsafe by opposing Bush policies. Recall as well the hatefilled anti-gay rhetoric coming from Bush-supporting fundamentalist Christian zealots, the veiled (and unveiled) racism, the intolerance for other points of view, the disregard for facts and reason, and the conscienceless attacks and violent threats made against opponents of reactionary right wing ideologies. These are the people in control of this government.

As for the future, David Roberts reminds us that until Middle Eastern terrorism became the Bushite rhetorical focus, the Bush partisans were redefining at least some aspects of protest and opposition to the environmental policies of Bush and his corporate sponsors as eco-terrorism. That's potentially the first step to a wider application of the term.

Sent to Gitmo for protesting greenhouse gas pollution? Seems incredible. But ask many of the people who supported the Patriot Act in 2001 whether they believed America would be the world's champion of torture a few years later, and hear what they say.