Constitutional Crisis?
Cohen, Jean L.
THAT GEORGE W. BUSH 'S administration would pose a danger to basic liberties was clear as soon as we saw the brownshirt methods and state action to disenfranchise voters in Florida and the...
...Nor does it seem unlikely that effects of this imperial adventure will return to haunt our own constitutional democracy...
...The election of 2004 is the most important for this country since the 1930s...
...I focus on three recent events to bring home the seriousness of what we face: the torture outrages in Abu Ghraib, the meaning of the "transfer of sovereignty," and the June 28 Supreme Court decisions in the Rasul and the Odah, Hamdi, and Padilla cases...
...Are we in that kind of danger...
...and co-author, with A. Arato, of Civil Society and Political Theory...
...And the Court failed to decide Rumsfeld v. Padilla, the case most important for Americans because Padilla is an American citizen—"caught" not on a battlefield but in a Chicago airport and held for two years COLLOQUIUM without charges or access to a lawyer...
...JEAN L. COHEN is a professor of political science at Columbia University...
...Subsequent developments, from the passage of the Patriot Act to the denial of habeas corpus to Americans labeled "enemy combatants" and the use of torture as a "technique" of "interrogation" have all been consistent with that beginning...
...What we are seeing is not the "transfer of sovereignty" to an autonomous state, but the creation of a satellite government...
...Yes and no...
...The passage of the Patriot Act, the mass detentions at Guantanamo, the resort to torture, are indeed, as Al Gore bravely said, "a natural consequence of this administration's purposeful dismantling of constraints on its power, its virtual war on our system of checks and balances...
...Instead they are calling for more troops...
...A strong majority on the court agreed that "a state of war is not a blank check for the President...
...author of Regulating Intimacy: A New Legal Paradigm...
...She is at work on a new book, Rethinking State and Popular Sovereignty...
...Don't they show that the checks and balances of our system are still working to protect the rule of law...
...Every Iraqi knows that Abu Ghraib stood for the power of a ruler without constraints...
...WHAT, THEN, of the recent Supreme Court decisions...
...Anyone who thinks that it makes no difference who wins the next election is thus deeply naive and unserious...
...The answer is by no means clear: consider the symbolism of the prison abuses...
...DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 9...
...to fight terror while they create the conditions for new terror...
...It can happen here...
...Let's not," said Brzezinski, "reproduce the Orwellian language of the Bush administration," noting that they claim to free Iraq while they occupy it...
...to build a democracy while they permit a designated puppet to impose martial law...
...to care for the welfare of the Iraqi people while they privatize and buy up the most important public industries...
...If members of the American army command had meant to signal to Iraqis a limited and temporary occupation, they would not have used this place in exactly the way it was used by the tyrant who preceded them...
...Isn't our occupation of Iraq intended to lead the other way—to send democracy to Iraq, rather than bring tyranny to America...
...If Bush is reelected, he and his cronies will go after our civil liberties with renewed force, they will stack the federal bench with compliant judges, they will place their private interests above the good of the whole...
...The language of the decisions granting to the detainees in Guantanamo the legal standing to challenge their status and reaffirming habeas corpus for American citizens labeled "enemy combatants," was indeed reassuring...
...Anyone who watched the performance of Donald Rumsfeld at the Senate hearings will know that the secretary of defense's main regret about the events at Abu Ghraib is that they were made public...
...Hannah Arendt told us in The Origins of Totalitarianism how the empires of the nineteenth century erected a special police/military/bureaucratic apparatus to rule their colonies, an apparatus carefully separated from the republican institutions of the mother country...
...THAT GEORGE W. BUSH 'S administration would pose a danger to basic liberties was clear as soon as we saw the brownshirt methods and state action to disenfranchise voters in Florida and the selection of John Ashcroft as attorney general...
...Arendt's point was that state methods and administrative structures devised for the colonies would eventually infect and destroy republican institutions and freedoms at home...
...It took Zbigniew Brzezinski, an analyst with an 8 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 inside knowledge of Stalinist Newspeak, to provide the appropriate reference and concepts to describe this turn of policy...
...Their arrogance and cynicism will know no bounds, and it will be too late to stop them...
...What about the "transfer of sovereignty...
...Outside the Senate precincts, Rumsfeld is a realist: if you want an empire, this is what it takes...
...they will continue to privatize the res publica, and they will pursue and expand the imperial project...
...Nevertheless, the decisions were minimalist in that they reaffirmed the role of the courts without deciding any of the cases on their merits or suggesting how to vindicate the detainees' rights...
...If the Americans really intend to leave, they would have set up a timetable for their departure at the moment of "transfer" to reassure the Iraqis...
Vol. 51 • September 2004 • No. 4
