Is It Time For Godwin’s Law To Be Repealed?
The Baltimore Sun reports on Ashcroft and his cadre of Federalist ideologues. As with the foreign policy team, the Justice Department is riddled with a bunch of right wing radicals who would be more at home in Pinochet’s Chile that the world’s oldest democracy.
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“In the Justice Department, one of the great tensions is always between the political appointees at the top and the career lawyers in the middle,” said Mark Graber, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. “This seems to be an administration where the political appointees are far more determined to set policies on more matters than usual.”
Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland law school, agrees: “From what I can gather, there is a tight circle around the attorney general. There is not a lot of vetting of ideas beyond that. A lot of career attorneys who have served the attorney general through a lot of different administrations have been shunted aside.”
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I think what you have within the Justice Department is a small group of very bright, federalist society lawyers who are talking to each other and coming up with ideas that have a superficial attraction — military tribunals, detaining enemy combatants — while anybody practiced in the area will tell you this stuff accomplishes absolutely nothing,” Greenberg said. “It’s sort of like counterterrorism by headline rather than counterterrorism by a scientific analysis of what law enforcement is all about.”
Others are concerned about the damage that Ashcroft-sponsored measures, passed under the guise of fighting terrorism, could do to civil liberties. The first Patriot Act, which saw little opposition in the weeks after Sept. 11, lessened restrictions on wiretaps and allowed long-term detention of material witnesses without charges. The draft of the second measure goes further in these areas.
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According to the ACLU’s Nojeim, the act “would encourage police spying on political and religious activities, allow the government to wiretap without first going to court and allow it to more readily strip Americans of their citizenship, rendering them stateless in their own country.”
Said Warnken: “If you take this to its ultimate conclusion — and I am only being slightly flippant here — as long as we are under threat of terrorism you can literally say that the Bill of Rights is de facto repealed until we catch the last terrorist. And that won’t be until your great-grandchildren grow old.”
You know it’s quite difficult to contain the impulse to break Godwin’s Law when I read things like this. There is an aggressive and radical global ambition, a total assumption of power in the hands of the executive, an overhaul of the legal system that blatently abrogates fundamental principles and an unprecedented cronyism between big business and government. All that is left is the internal “threat” who must be eradicated.
Oh wait. There is one.
“There are spooky parallels between the way Hussein and American liberals campaign and try to get support. Saddam Hussein is obviously a student of American liberal Democrat politics and Stalin at the same time.”