July 14, 2006
What's It All About, Alfie?
by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
So the Supreme Court issues their decision in Hamdan: the Bush Administration must abide by the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war for they are part of the Constitution (see Article VI). The President cannot decide on the advice of Counsel (now the Attorney General) that those Conventions are "quaint" and choose to ignore them at whim. Nor can Congress draft rather loosely some piece of legislation appearing to give the President the power to do so. Congress must abide by the Constitution too. A victory for progressives and the fight to preserve Constitutional Democracy in our beloved country? Not so fast.
First one should note that this case was very narrowly decided. On paper it was 5-3. But it really was 5-4. The only reason it was not, on paper, was that Chief Justice Roberts recused himself because as an Appellate Court Judge he ruled in the Bush Administration's favor on this one. (It is thought by some that one of the major reasons that "straight-shooter" Roberts got the nomination was precisely because he was called upon to rule on the case at the Appellate level just at the time he was under consideration for the nomination, a fact known both to himself and his interviewers. But hey, if Georgites in the other branches of government have no ethics, why should they when they are members of the judiciary? Alito, by the way, was up to his eyeballs in financial conflicts of interest when he was on the lower Federal courts bench so he fits right in, too.) So if Justice Kennedy hadn't found his cojones or if one of our elderly liberals were no longer with us, Hamdan would have said, yes, the Pres. can amend the Constitution on his own authority any time he wants to, just as long as he says he is doing it to "fight terrorism."
And now to the title of this Comment. What is this all about, Alfie? On July 11, 2006, the Deputy Defense Secretary tells the Senate Judiciary Committee that from now on the DOD is going to comply with both the Supreme Court decision in Hamdan and the Geneva Conventions as written (New York Times, "White House Says Terror Detainees Have Basic Geneva Rights," July 12, 2006, p. A20.) No more of those nasty (and they are nasty) Military Commissions. Ah yes. But then at the same hearing, one Daniel Dell'Orto, the DOD principal deputy general counsel says "We would ask this body to render its approval for the system as currently configured" (same ref.). And on July 13 the Times reported that "Administration Prods Congress To Curb the Rights of Detainees" (NYT, July 13, 2006, p. 1). So once again the Georgites are speaking with a forked tongue. We don't have to ask "who is in charge here?" We already know. It's Chenfeld.
But why, one must ask, are they so intent on getting around the Geneva Conventions? Is it because doing so will help "fight terror" most effectively? There is no evidence of that coming from the Georgites. Is it that they have a bunch of highly dangerous folks, most of whom could be easily proven guilty of high crimes as well as misdemeanors down at Gitmo? Well, no. It has been leaked on more than one occasion from a variety of sources that the majority of the unfortunates being held at Gitmo are guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Is it thus that the Georgites know that if these folks were granted a fair trial most of them would have to be released and the DOD would have egg all over its face? Well, yes. But that is still not the reason, in my view. Their spin machine, lead by the Privatized Ministry of Propaganda, could handle that one, one, two, and three.
No, in my view, it is much more sinister and much more dangerous than that for we the people of the United States. What the Georgites are in the process of doing is confirming their position that as long as the President says that what he is "fighting terrorism" he can do whatever he wants to whomever he wants to whenever he wants to do it. The legislation will be drafted to supposedly meet the Supreme Court's requirements. It will, in classic Georgite fashion, say that it is abiding by the Geneva Conventions while it is violating them. Thus it will confirm the President's claim that he can violate the Constitution whenever he pleases to do so under some totally imaginary "Commander-in-Chief" powers. (In Article II, the Founders were very explicit about what the President's powers were and were not to be. If they had wanted to say that in his role as Commander-in-Chief he could violate any provision of the Constitution he wanted to as long as he deemed it necessary, they would have just given him that power. They didn't. Hey, who is an "Original Constructionist" now?) By the time the matter gets back to the Supreme Court, first of all Roberts will be voting, and second of all it is highly likely that at least one of the liberals will have been replaced, for one reason or another. And then the Georgites will have their equivalent of the Hitlerite Enabling Act of 1933 which gave that person the power to over-ride the German Constitution whenever he pleased to do so.
And why do the Georgites want to be able to do that? To deal with "terrorism?" Well, hardly. And you thought that you weren't labelable as a "terrorist," didn't you? See you in the camps, folks. And that's what it's all about, Alfie.
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) a weekly Contributing Author for The Political Junkies (www.thepoliticaljunkies.net) and a Columnist for BuzzFlash.