America's Nuremberg Laws-
The End of the U.S. as a Civilized Nation
by Ted Rall
SEATTLE - Students of historical hysteria immediately saw 9/11 as
America's version of the Reichstag Fire. Both incidents were organic acts
of
terrorism (contrary to popular misconception, the Nazis didn't set the
1933
fire) seized upon by power-hungry government officials to justify the
cru****ng of political dissent and the rolling back of civil liberties.
Hitler began marching his people into the abyss immediately upon seizing
power in 1933, but Nazi Germany's fate as a rogue nation wasn't sealed
until
two years later, in the late summer of 1935.
Before then there had been heinous violations of human rights. Nazi
authorities detained thousands of socialists and communists in
concentration
camps (death camps weren't built until 1941). Many were tortured; some
died
in custody. Stormtroopers enforced state-sanctioned boycotts of
Jewish-owned
businesses. Brown****rts beat Jews in the streets as the police stood by
and
watched. Ignoring Germany's treaty obligations, Hitler poured millions
into
the armed forces and threatened to use them against Germany's neighbors.
No
one could doubt that Germany was in the hands of militaristic right-wing
thugs.
Until 1935, however, the home of Goethe and Beethoven had not
entirely
abandoned the universal values accepted by civilized states. True, top
German officials and street-level Nazi Party members were breaking all
sorts
of laws, including constitutional protections against racial and religious
discrimination. That's precisely the point: the law endured. Pre-Nazi
legal
infrastructure and laws, including the 1920s-era "Weimar"
Constitution--still the Western world's gold standard for protecting
individual rights and privileges--remained in force. Technically, anyway.
Had there been the political will, Hitler and his goons could have
been arrested and tried under German law. The German government was a lost
cause, but the German nation still had a (slim) chance. Until 1935.
That's when Germany officially codified the Nazis' uncivilized
anti-Semitism by passing the Nuremberg Laws. Jews were stripped of
citizen****p and banned from marrying or dating non-Jews. The laws were a
form of legalized harassment, prohibiting Jews from displaying German
flags
or shopping in stores at certain times. Turning Jews into legal pariahs
paved the way for the Holocaust. More immediately, the barbaric ipso facto
policies of the Nazi government had corrupted Germany's lofty and
admirable
system of legal guarantees. Even though German law hadn't been of much
help
to Jews before--well, there had been the occasional arrest and prosecution
of a brown****rt who had gone "too far"--now there was every reason for
them
to suc***b to hopelessness. Germany was no longer a civilized nation in
the
clutches of gangsters. It had become a gangster nation.
Similarly, the recently passed Military Commissions Act removes the
United States from the ranks of civilized nations. It codifies racial and
political discrimination, legalizes kidnapping and torture of those the
government deems its political enemies, and eliminates habeas corpus--the
ancient precept that prevents the police from arresting and holding you
without cause--a basic protection common to all (other) modern legal
systems, and one that dates to the Magna Carta.
Between 2001 and 2006, George W. Bush worked tirelessly to eliminate
freedoms and liberties Americans have long taken for granted. The Bush
Administration's CIA, mercenary and military state terrorists kidnapped
thousands of innocent people and held them at secret prisons around the
world for months and years at a time. These people were never charged with
a
crime. (There was good reason for that. As the government itself admitted,
fewer than ten had actually done anything wrong.) Yet hundreds, maybe even
thousands, were tortured.
Under American law these despicable acts were illegal. They were, by
definition, un-American. Although it didn't help the dozens of Bush
torture
victims who died from beatings and drowning, the pre-Bush American
judicial
system worked. The Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court handed down
one
decision after another ordering the White House to give its "detainees"
trials or let them go. For a brief, ****ning moment, it looked like there
was
hope for the U.S. to find its way back to the light.
Now, thanks to a gullible passel of Republican senators and an
unhinged leader who is banking that Americans are just as passive as the
Germans of the mid-1930s, we have our own Nuremberg Laws.
Under the terrifying terms of the radical new Military Commissions
Act, Bush can declare anyone--including you--an "unlawful enemy
combatant,"
a term that doesn't exist in U.S. or international law. All he has to do
is
sign a piece of paper claiming that you "purposefully and materially
sup****ted hostilities against the United States." The law's language is
brilliantly vague, allowing the president to imprison--for the rest of his
or her life--anyone, including a U.S. citizen, from someone who makes a
contribution to a group he disapproves of to a journalist who criticizes
the
government.
Although Bush and his top officials ordered and endorsed torture,
the
courts had found that it was illegal under U.S. law and treaty
obligations.
Now torture is, for the first time, legal.
"Over all," re****ts The New York Times, "the legislation reallocates
power among the three branches of government, taking authority away from
the
judiciary and handing it to the president." Bruce Ackerman, professor of
law
and political science at Yale, notes that the MCA trashes the
centuries-old
right of a prisoner to petition to the courts: "If Congress can strip
courts
of jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial
independence is threatened."
How did we get here? Good Germans--and many of them were decent,
moral
people--asked themselves the same thing. The answer is incrementalism, the
tendency of radical change to manifest itself in bits and pieces. People
who
should have known better--journalists, Democrats, and Republicans who are
more loyal to their country than their party--allowed Bush and his
neofascist gangsters to hijack our republic and its values. They weren't
as
bad as Bush. They just couldn't see the big picture.
Just as no single rollback led marked the transition from the Weimar
Republic to the Third Reich, no event is individually responsible for
America's shocking five-year transformation from beacon of freedom to
autocratic torture state. It wasn't just letting Bush get away with his
2000
coup d'état. It wasn't just us standing by as he deliberately allowed his
family friend Osama bin Laden to escape, or as he invaded Afghanistan, or
as
he built the concentration camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere, or even
Iraq.
It was all of those things collectively.
The Military Commissions Act signals that our traditional system of
beliefs and government has irrevocably devolved into moral bankruptcy.
Memo
to Senator McCain: You don't negotiate with terrorists, and you don't
compromise with torturers.
It doesn't matter how much food aid we ****p to the victims of the
next
global natural disaster, or how diplomatic our next president is, or
whether
we come to regret what we have done in the name of law and order. Our laws
permit kidnapping, torture and murder. Our laws deny access to the courts.
The United States has ceded the moral high ground to its enemies.
We are done.
Ted Rall is the author of the new graphic travelogue "Silk Road to
Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?"
© Copyright 2006 Ted Rall
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