Some of Us Want Our Country Back

The news late in the day on Friday, November 2, 2007, was the announcement by Democratic senators Charles Schumer (New York) and Diane Feinstein (California) that they will vote for the confirmation of Michael Mukasey, thus assuring that Michael Mukasey becomes the next Attorney General – the matter thus moves from the Senate Judiciary Committee to the Senate floor and that is that.

 

That same evening JUST ABOVE SUNSET sent the following to the office of United States Senator Dianne Feinstein, California –

 

You have decided to vote for the confirmation of Michael Mukasey.  You are fine with him as the next Attorney General.  You have lost my support, and I will never contribute to the California Democratic Party again – and I will urge the readers of my websites to do everything possible to remove you from office.  And, frankly, as I cannot imagine ever voting Republican, I cannot imagine voting again – for anyone.

 

Mukasey espouses the extreme positions of the Bush administration regarding presidential power – as a federal judge, he ruled that the President has the power to detain American citizens on U.S. soil indefinitely without ever having to charge them with a crime – a position he repeated on the first day of his confirmation hearing.  Did you listen?  When he was a judge he expressly embraced that in the Jose Padilla case, only to be reversed by the Second Circuit, but then affirmed by a panel of the Fourth Circuit.  You knew that.  And now Mukasey’s unwillingness to declare waterboarding categorically illegal doesn’t bother you?

 

You and your Party hid when the Military Commissions Act was being decided.  In 2005 the Senate voted overwhelmingly to confirm Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, notwithstanding his role in creating legal theories justifying waterboarding.  Last year, Senate Democrats overwhelmingly voted to confirm Michael Hayden as CIA Director – despite his central role in implementing the illegal NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.  What were you people thinking?

 

One can only assume you have no problem with the nation being run by a dim-witted despot to whom you would grant anything – as if it’s cool to live in a third world banana republic like in the old Woody Allen movie.  It’s not.  Some of us want our country back.  You are a disgrace.

 

Allow me to quote the composer Richard Einhorn who says this –

 

Just to make this clear: When Dershowitz and other moral relativists were making the case for putting bamboo splints under the fingernails of people who are as capable of feeling excruciating pain as themselves, I, along with the entire civilized world, denounced torture under all circumstances. That was long before Bush set up the organized and extensive American torture network that is still working overtime to destroy this country. There was no second-guessing on our part. We saw torture for what it was long before Bush strapped the first prisoner down to be waterboarded.

 

Bush claims that if we don’t give him the right to make people scream out in sheer agony at what American officials physically inflict on them, he will not be able to keep you and me safe. George W. Bush is completely full of shit. I am prepared to accept whatever risk that goes along with living in a country that doesn’t ever torture its enemies. Because I know that there is no such risk, that in fact torturing people places a country at greater risk, morally and existentially, than not. Whatever the reasons he has for torturing people, he is not doing it for the good of ordinary Americans and I reject his insinuation that either my fellow Americans or myself are somehow the reason he feels he must indulge in such perversions.

 

A word about Bush-hating seems appropriate right about now. It is a subject which deeply concerns so many thoughtful members of the cowardly, fainting classes, i.e, Republicans and the mainstream press. When people like me speak out in disgust at what this sick man is doing, it is cause for moral outrage – at the person speaking out! As if hating Bush was in any way morally comparable to the deliberate inflicting of mind-damaging pain on another human being! To those folks, we need to spell it out: What Bush and his henchmen have done, and what they are presently doing is, in fact, truly hateful, if that word has any meaning at all. But not only are Bush’s actions capable of being hated by all reasonable people (and deserve to be). They are also acts which themselves are full of hate and sadism.

 

There’s another thing I hate: Bush will go down in history as the torture president. I hate that this country ever had a president who made the torture of human beings official government policy.

 

Be an American.  Change your mind.

 

Of course there will be no reply.  Senator Feinstein must have received many such letters, and will do doubt refer us all to her editorial in the Los Angeles Times of Saturday, November 3, Judge Mukasey Has My Vote.  The short version of this – she has the “feeling” that Judge Mukasey will grow into the job, and one day, she doesn’t know when, realize he was wrong about torture and absolute presidential power – so trust her.

 

No.

 

This from Andrew Sullivan seems about right –

 

The stakes in this fight therefore could not be higher: the vote on Mukasey is about the rule of law, the honor of the United States and the security of the West. Mukasey is by all accounts an honorable man. He must know that he is going to work for war criminals whose condition for his appointment is that he not prosecute them for their law-breaking. By acquiescing to this, Mukasey is acquiescing to the elevation of the president above the law. If he does that, he is no better than Gonzales, a man who never hesitated to give his political patrons whatever “legal” sanction they wanted for anything they wanted to do.

 

This is not some technical issue with respect to interrogation techniques. In my view, it is much more fundamental than that. Many seem to think that because these techniques are only used on terrorists, they are no threat to American liberty. What this complacent view doesn’t grapple with is that these torture techniques can be used against any terror suspect; that such suspects are not subject to due process under president Bush’s understanding of his powers; that such suspects can be captured within the United States; that they can be citizens; and that the war that justifies this extraordinary power is defined as permanent. That is why combining the power to detain without charge with the power to torture is an effective suspension of the rule of law and the Constitution. And such a suspension is astonishingly broad and open-ended.

 

That is why this has become a fight for the West’s values against the moral relativists, legalistic parsers, and advocates of total executive power. The point is not a subjective judgment about the intentions of the torturers. It is not about whether Cheney and Bush can be trusted. It is about whether any individual can be trusted with such power. In a republic based on the rule of law, the intentions of the torturers – whether good or bad – are utterly irrelevant. In the West, we assume that the intentions of our rulers are likely to be evil. That’s what distinguishes the Anglo-American tradition from those who trust individuals to govern them, rather than those who trust the law to allow us to govern ourselves. The point is that no person in the United States should ever have the power to detain and torture another person without due process. Once you make an exception for one man, the rule of law is over. The Decider may decide out of his own benevolence not to torture again. But he can still torture. And the knowledge that he can, and the knowledge that he was never stopped, and the knowledge that he was able to distort the plain meaning of the law to mean whatever he wants it to mean is a precedent that is staggeringly dangerous.

 

It would be easy to pretend that we haven’t come to this pass. But we have. We have been incredibly naive about what Cheney wants and believes. His decades-long desire to turn the president of the United States into a protectorate, empowered to do anything to anyone, and restrained only by his own benevolence is a profound threat to the rule of law and the Constitution. He must be stopped – clearly, unequivocally. He is not the people’s master. He is the people’s servant. In America, no one is the master of anyone else. And if the Congress cannot stand up for that principle, then the dark days we have gone through are nothing compared to what’s ahead.

 

There are dark days ahead.