 John
Ashcroft's war on those he deems 'enemies' in the US -- that is,
everyone that doesn't share his fiercely reactionary views -- is
brilliantly documented in a new book Enemy
Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the 'War on
Terrorism', by David Cole, professor at Georgetown University
Law Center and a renowned expert on constitutional law. Cole makes it
clear that the current outrageous and arbitrary treatment of at least
5,000 aliens by Ashcroft and his Patriot Act stormtroopers -- including
arbitrary arrest, deprivation of access to a telephone, to legal
counsel, food and water, long periods of solitary confinement,
arbitrary deportation, confiscation and destruction of property, and
indefinite confinement at hell-holes like Guantanamo without charges
and in violation of the Geneva convention -- is just a dress rehearsal
for similar draconian treatment for citizens
who dare question the wisdom of the US Administration. This will be
enabled by new legislation, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, to
be pushed through under the guise of 'fighting terrorism', that will
further strip away the basic rights and freedoms of Americans to expose
anyone who isn't a Bush Patriot, and then deprive them of their citizenship
so they can be treated as -- guess what -- aliens.
Cole shows Ashcroft as a man without moral scruples, engaged in an
all-out pathological war on imagined and trumped-up 'enemies' -- anyone
who doesn't support the Government without question, without condition,
without reservation. He cites case after case where aliens, and now
some American citizens who are either Islamic or have the misfortune to
have MidEastern names, have been treated as 'enemy combatants', with no
rights, no recourse, no appeal, by the one-man McCarthyite
wrecking-crew named Ashcroft. And all hidden under a blanket of secrecy
under the guise of 'national security'.
America has had psychotic extremists like this in power before --
McCarthy, Nixon and others -- but these were people who were bent on
changing the law for their own deranged purposes, not ignoring and
circumventing the law as Ashcroft is doing. What is particularly
disconcerting is the lack of demands -- by Democrats and the media --
to have this man, who shows contempt for everything most Americans hold
dear, immediately removed from office. In a review of Enemy Aliens in The New York Review
of Books (from which the above cartoon by the amazing David Levine is
taken), writer Anthony Lewis says:
"What was not inevitable [after 9/11]—not necessary—was that officials
should act in an arbitrary, even lawless way. Commitment to law has
been the great secret of America's rise to wealth and power, and a main
reason for the world's admiration of our system. Law binds us all,
great and small: so we believed. The Bush administration's abandonment
of legal norms—the disregard of the Geneva Convention in
Guantánamo, the order for trial by military commissions—has cost
us dearly not only in our own values but in the world's estimate of us.
At a moment when we need allies around the world to join us in
resisting terrorism, we have made too many think we are not really
committed to law."
This 'ends justifies the means' contempt for US law is new. But US
government contempt for international
standards of law is a hallmark
of the Bush Administration -- the refusal to support or honour the
decisions of the International Court of Justice, the refusal to sign
the Land Mine Convention, and to ratify dozens of other international agreements endorsed by nearly every
other democracy in the world. It is ironic that this administration,
the most obsessed with law and order since Nixon, so openly disdains
the law. For Bush, Ashcroft and the whole extremist gang, it's all
about power, and law is just
in the way. It's almost as if the first half of the Attorney-General's
title is in parentheses.
(thanks to Subdude for the link)
You know, it is something very strange: You learn to live with things.
For example, something is taken away, like let's say, the freedom of
the press or . . . yeah, let's say that your telephones are tapped, so
you say "Okay, I can live with that," and then the next day something
else, and then you say, "Okay, I will have to live with that, too," and
so forth. And then after a few months, you realize that you have lost
everything.
— Isabel Allende, interview with Buzzflash
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