These are good times for those who want unlimited powers for President Bush and his dual role as commander-in-chief. A supine Congress too fearful to confront the White House is leaving civil liberties framed more than 200 years ago in peril.
In seizing unprecedented powers, the Bush administration has dispensed with constitutional rights step by sinister step. The most frightening steps are attacks on the justice system, the very soul of U.S. democracy.
The first audacious move was to ignore habeas corpus—the right of an individual to a court challenge of the government's right to incarcerate.
Imagine this: Claiming world terrorism gave him this power, President Bush enabled federal agents to seize people off the street or from their homes. The federal government has declared—without evidence—that these people are "enemy combatants." It has packed them off to prisons overseas or at Guantanamo Bay, kept them under lock and key, interrogated them with techniques considered torture, refused them lawyers and court hearings, and not charged them with any crime. Shades of Stalin's gulags.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court twice rejected the Bush administration's trashing of habeas corpus (then-Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, "A state of war is not a blank check for the President"), Bush lawyers continue to dodge and delay and disregard the U.S. Constitution.
Now, Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary for Detainee Affairs Charles Stimson has assailed the noblest role of lawyers: to provide legal representation to anyone, particularly the deprived.
Stimson has publicly rebuked attorneys from corporate law firms who are providing pro bono work to Guantanamo detainees. He suggested Wall Street clients should force the attorneys to abandon hapless detainees out of fear of losing fat corporate retainers.
This is the same tactic used on white lawyers who represented black Americans in the South of old and on lawyers who represented Jews in Nazi Germany.
It's repugnant and un-American. Stimson should be fired, and the Bush administration should stop its assault on the Constitution. When civil liberties vanish, it's then that tyranny begins.
