Speaking Of Zombies

by digby

We’ve recently been informed that Kissinger has been wandering around the white house like the ghost of Christmas in Cambodia. Until last week the Ford administration was ably represented by the Don and Dick Comedy hour. The Second Coming of Jimmah “Divahn the willowthevoters” Baker more than makes up for the previous shunning of Daddy’s boys. But it turns out that with the Iraq Study Group we not only have retread Robert Gates, we also have Ronnie Raygun’s top legal consigliere from his earliest days in California politics, former Attorney General Ed Meese, who is emerging from the primordial conservative slime he went back to after Ronnie left office.

St. Ronnie has taken on all too bright a glow lately, even among liberals who witnessed the atrocity of his administration, because his keepers ran a fairly efficient white house and he didn’t speak like a 6 year old in public (usually.) But it’s important to remember just what a bunch of flaming idiots they all were too, lest someone gets it in his head that those Ronniezombies are somehow superior to any other movement conservative.

In this months issue, Wil S. Hylton of GQ conducts a revealing interview with Meese, one of the popularizers of the wingnut constitutional theory called “original intent” and an inspiration for the “unitary executive.”

Okay, let’s talk about executive power. Do you think it poses a legal problem when the president conducts wiretaps on foreign nationals without a FISA review?

Well, there is no wiretapping of foreign nationals without FISA warrants. There have been interceptions of international communications, but that’s totally different. It’s a very limited category: Number one, they have to be international calls, and number two, they have to be to people who are connected with terrorists.

But doesn’t it require a court to determine whether someone is connected with terrorists?

No, it doesn’t in this case. Courts are not required.

How do you know someone is a terrorist unless they have been found guilty by a court?

Because they are members of Al Qaeda.[oy — ed]

You’re saying that the president can intercept a phone call between any American citizen and anyone overseas.

Providing that it is connected with terrorism.

But it seems circular: You start intercepting calls because the person is a terrorist, and yet the reason you’re intercepting the calls is to find out whether or not they’re a terrorist.

No, no, no. There are key words being used in the communication itself. So you have a combination of, number one, a terrorist on the international end, and key words that lead them to believe it is a terrorist conversation.

How do we know they’re using key words before we start intercepting their calls?

There’s a lot more technical stuff to this, much of which is classified. But it is limited to people known or suspected to be terrorists, and the communications themselves are indicative of that.

Fascinating, isn’t it? It’s a disease that’s not just confined to the Junior Codpiece or the Gingrich crew. They’re all like this.

This man was the Attorney General of the United States and he is trying to pass off fourth grade “I know you are but what am I” logic. Warrants aren’t required to determine whether there is probable cause to believe someone is a terrorist because we are only listening in on the calls of terrorists.

It is obvious that they have some reason for not wanting to submit these names (even after the fact) to the FISA court for a review. They must know that it is clearly illegal or unconstitutional or they would comply. The FISA court is secret, after all. (Yet Ed Meese apparently knows all about this. Why is that? I thought this was such a top secret program that they wanted to hang the entire NY Times editorial staff for treason. What could it possibly have to do with the Iraq Study Group?)

Anyway, Ed goes on:

Let’s move to the Geneva Conventions. A lot of people are concerned that terrorism suspects don’t have any kind of habeas corpus.

In order to be covered by the Geneva Convention, you have to fulfill certain requirements. Number one, you have to be in uniform. Number two, you have to be part of a military unit subject to military discipline. Number three, you have to be engaged in combat with other military units and not primarily striking at civilians. So there are a number of criteria in the Geneva Convention that are not met by everyone on the battlefield. Then there’s another category of people going back to the Revolutionary War—people who were in those days called spies. If they were not in uniform, they were subject to being summarily executed.

You mean they were executed without even a military tribunal?

I think there were some. Also, a “tribunal” could be a military commander ordering the hanging. I think that’s what happened to some of them.

You’re advocating summary execution.

Well, yeah, that happens in the military. Illegal combatants are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

So we call them “illegal combatants,” without using any legal basis to determine whether they’re illegal or not.

Well, we do. We have military tribunals.

But not always, apparently.

My understanding is that illegal combatants are subject to military tribunals. But in any event, they have been captured on the field of battle, and anyone captured on the field of battle is either one of these two categories. And both categories can be detained until the end of hostilities.

When we talk about being detained until the war is over, we’re talking about a war that could go on for half a century.

Absolutely.

Doesn’t detaining someone that long compete with some of the values in the Constitution?

No, it doesn’t.

We value a speedy trial, as a culture. That’s why we put it in the Constitution.
We value a speedy trial for criminals. But a person who’s been apprehended and captured on the field of battle, that status itself identifies them as either a prisoner of war or an illegal combatant.

Unless they live there.

Well, how many people do you have standing around the field of battle?

It depends the battle. Certainly it’s possible.

And of course, that’s why the president has applied the military tribunals. So that people have the ability, if they claim their innocence, to demonstrate it. But the reason why you detain the people is that you don’t want them going back and taking up arms against our soldiers.

Shouldn’t we extend them the right to a public trial for that purpose?

Why would we? Why would you do that to somebody who’s not entitled to it under any law? Why would we extend the laws to people who are trying to kill Americans?

It seems to me that it goes back to original intent.

No, it doesn’t.

Jefferson wrote, “All men are created equal,” not “all Americans.” He said that men are “endowed by their Creator” with these rights, not endowed by “the Constitution.”

But that doesn’t have to do with enemy soldiers.

Well, when I read the Declaration of Independence, I don’t think he’s talking about exclusively American rights. He’s talking about rights that he believes are natural, God-given rights, which had been denied under George III.

They are.

And he’s saying that anybody who tries to keep those rights from a human being is committing a crime against God.

Absolutely, and they believed that.

So if we don’t respect those human rights…

We do give criminals those rights. We just don’t give them to enemy soldiers who are engaged in battle against the United States.

Isn’t that just a semantic difference? These are human beings, and we’re talking about human rights.

The human rights that you’re protecting are the rights of innocent civilians to be free from having enemies try to kill them. The Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to criminals and enemies.

Sure it does. The Fourth Amendment applies to criminals. The Fifth Amendment applies to criminals.

They apply to criminals in this country. People who are in this country, but not to people who are killing Americans.

A great number of criminals in this country are killing Americans. They still have a right to a speedy public trial.

All right. But under our laws, they are not available to those who are either prisoners of war or who are enemy combatants. They are not available to persons who are outside this country, who are killing Americans.

Again, this man was the Attorney General of the United States. He is credited with popularizing the constitutional theory of original intent, which is the admitted judicial philosophy of three members of the United States Supreme Court. And it’s clear that he’s a complete nitwit. Even the Powerline boys or Pamela Atlas could come up with a better argument that that. Really — it’s an embarrassment.

The fact is that Ed Meese has never been anything more than a rightwing political thug going all the way back to the days when he advised Ronnie to crack heads in Berkeley. That he is now an intellectual giant in wingnut legal circles is a testament to just how bankrupt wingnut legal theory really is.

If you don’t believe that he is nothing more than a Tom DeLay style hatchet man, here’s Ed himself to prove it:

Finally, I wanted to touch on partisan rancor in Washington these days. Do you think it’s getting worse?

Oh yeah. I think so. Very definitely.

How would the founding fathers feel about that?

Well, I think they’d be disappointed. Part of the problem today is that you have a very mean-spirited Democratic minority. President Bush has continually tried to refrain from direct personal attacks on leaders of the opposition party. He’s offered the hand of friendship to them, he’s tried to be cooperative, and unfortunately you seem to have leadership on the other side that has been unduly combative and mean-spirited. I can’t think of a situation when the Republicans have ever called the president a liar.

The Republicans certainly called President Clinton a liar.

They said that he lied. But to just say he is a liar, and some of the other vicious attacks on the president—I don’t think we’ve ever had as vicious attacks on a president as we’ve had currently.

Do you think the Democratic resistance to President Bush is greater than the Republican resistance to President Clinton?

Oh, I think so. The Republicans, when they were with Clinton, were very constructive.

There weren’t exactly warm feelings.

Well, I don’t know that there weren’t warm feelings. The Republicans passed virtually all of his judges. They confirmed two of the most liberal candidates that were ever proposed for the Supreme Court. So I think that they were very cooperative with Clinton.

This is the quality of thinking among the “honor and integrity” “grown-ups” for whom everyone in DC circles is still so nostalgic. I frankly don’t see anything in that last comment that wouldn’t have been perfectly natural coming out of Mary Matalin’s or Rush Limbaugh’s gaping gobs. He’s a sub-standard intellect from a bankrupt political movement who worked for a genial dunce and is now being called in to rescue an arrogant idiot. He is, in other words, the best and the brightest the Republican party has to offer.

Do read the whole interview. Those excerpts are just the tip of the ice-berg.

Update: Here’s a great example of what happens when Ed Meese or someone like him says “trust us.”

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