Presidential Tyranny Untamed by Election Defeat

Chris Floyd begins,
Tr u t h o u t UK Correspondent
Tuesday 12 December 2006

I. Genetic Modification

Like the two entwining strands of the double helix, law and power form the genetic structure of government. Law is nothing but empty verbiage without power to back it up, enforce it, embody it. And power without law is nothing but a mad ape, baring its teeth, thumping its chest, raping and beating where it pleases, taking what it wants: a bestial thing, born in the muddy swamp of our lowest, blindest, rawest biochemical impulses. Disconnect these strands and things fall apart, as Yeats says; the center literally cannot hold, and the blood-dimmed tide is loosed upon the world.

We have seen the proof of this in our time. When law - understood here as agreed-upon principles of justice and commonweal - is treated as a filthy rag or a "quaint" relic or a cynical sham by those in power, the result is an ever-growing suppuration of greed, lies, brutality and violence. Its starkest form is evident in Iraq, where a lawless invasion based on deceit has created a hell beyond imagining, and beyond control. At home, unfettered power has stripped Americans of their essential liberties and human rights, which are now no longer unalienable and inviolable but are instead the gift of the "unitary executive," to bestow - or withhold - as he sees fit.

For those who hoped that November's elections might bring some essential alteration in our degraded estate, some repair of the broken strands, recent events have been dispiriting indeed. Two in particular stand out as exemplary of the ugly reality behind the bright rhetoric of "change" and "moderation" now twinkling in the Beltway air. Although apparently unrelated, they are in fact part of the same malignant process that has been devouring the structure - and substance - of the Republic for years.

One strand of this revealing juxtaposition involves the release of a video showing the nightmarish treatment meted out to Jose Padilla - an American citizen seized on American soil and subjected to torture under indefinite detention without charges or trial, and who was subsequently revealed by the Bush administration itself to have engaged in no conspiracy or act of hostility toward the United States. Now his mind has been broken by years of brutal "interrogation methods," complete isolation and bizarre sensory-deprivation techniques, leaving him incapable of aiding his defense in his trial for the much-reduced - and, according to most legal experts, highly shaky - charges of trying to aid Islamist groups in Chechnya and elsewhere.
The other strand centers on the Senate confirmation of Robert Gates as defense secretary, in which one of the most compromised candidates ever nominated for a major Cabinet post was ushered into power with loving care by a Democratic faction supposedly dedicated to "vigilant oversight" and "asking tough questions" after their triumph at the polls last month.

Taken together, these events represent a kind of photographic negative of the double helix of a healthful state: instead of law and power, we see tyranny and weakness, linked in a destructive downward spiral that shows no sign of ending.


II. A Bulwark Breached >>>cont

Link Here

The ongoing national disgrace of lawless indefinite detentions

Howard Kurtz speaks on Jose Padilla: just some leg shackles for the Dirty Bomber