John Protevi's Blog

Finding Habeas

First, there's a new blog in town on the crisis involving habeas corpus: Find Habeas. Check it out.

Second, here's an exchange in my local newspaper I had in September 2006 on the issue. 

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My initial letter (written 29 September; published 11 October)

I'm not writing today to protest the recent Congressional bills allowing President Bush the power to "interpret" the Geneva Convention's bans on torture. Let others describe what legalizing "waterboarding," "long time standing," "cold room," "stress positions," and other practices means in terms of our self-understanding as a people and our moral standing in the community of nations. Let others explain how this means that the government will now openly treat people in the 21^st century the way slave owners treated their slaves in the 19^th century. Let others explain how this bill fits with the decent respect to the opinions of mankind we once prided ourselves on possessing. Let others explain what use a free press is when it passes on without comment, let alone protest, the Administration's use of Orwellian phrases like "interrogation techniques." Let others explain how we could have defeated the Nazis and the Soviets without such laws.

No, today I'd like to remind us that the Congress has just given away the right to habeas corpus, which is the very heart of English common law since the Magna Carta of 1215. What that means is the President can simply label anyone, anywhere, American citizen or not, an "enemy combatant," and lock them away indefinitely without the ability to have their day in court. What this means is the end of the rule of law and the beginning of the rule of men. What this means is the end of the American experiment in individual rights. What this means is that we no longer live in the country of our ancestors.

He's not "our" Commander in Chief

In the past few months I've published a few letters to the editor of my local newspaper. Here's one of them:

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Strangely enough, the most anti-American thing in C. Ward Bond’s letter (Thursday February 22, 2007) was not his rehearsal of the Weimar Republic’s Dolchstosslegende (“stab in the back story”) applied to Vietnam. No, that was merely insipid, implying that getting us into an unwinnable war in the first place wasn’t the real problem, as is universally acknowledged by the professional military: why do you think Colin Powell, a Vietnam combat officer, insisted on clear victory criteria and a viable exit strategy in his “doctrine” ?

Instead, the most anti-American thing in Mr. Bond’s letter is the following: “I watched them [Bond refers only to Democrats in his letter, ignoring the Republican opposition] last week, one by one standing up on the floor of Congress to denounce (renounce) their president and commander in chief.”

This blatant confusion of basic American principles cannot go unchallenged. Sovereignty rests with the people of the United States. The president of the United States is a public servant, the head of the Executive branch. Among his duties is to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The Legislature is a co-equal branch of government. The president is not, and should never, ever, be called the commander-in-chief of the Congress.

Nor is he “our” commander-in-chief, as we sometimes hear today.

To Mr. Bond’s credit, he did not do so in his letter. But those who do display both a terrible ignorance of the very foundations of our republic, and a truly disturbing desire to see military command structures replace free debate. The polite term for that desire is “authoritarianism,” but the real term is “fascism,” and I call on all freedom-loving Americans to join me in denouncing it whenever it appears.