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Published on Sunday, September 10, 2006 by the Guardian/UK
The President is destroying the constitution and few Americans seem to care or even notice
by Henry Porter
An elaborately turned-out bag-lady of the sort you occasionally see in Manhattan - a former fashion editor, perhaps, or designer who has lost her mind but not her style - stopped in front of all the people sunning themselves in Bryant Park and shouted at me: 'I obey the constitution.' I wish I had had the wit to shout back: 'Which is more than your President.'
What Bush is doing in the run-up to the midterm elections is a disgrace equal to any other scandal of his nasty, incipiently despotic, regime. Using the hallowed anniversary of 9/11, he has demanded Congress pass a law that enables the major terrorist suspects, until now held in CIA secret prisons all over the world, to be transferred and tried at Guantanamo.
The proposed courts would allow evidence obtained by what is politely called in America 'coercive interrogation' as well as hearsay and would deny the suspects' rights to see evidence against them because it is deemed by the government to be classified. Because these courts plainly fly in the face of the rights enshrined by the American constitution and the Geneva Convention, the Supreme Court ruled against them last June.
This was hardly going to deter Bush and Dick Cheney. Last week, the President made a speech to an audience of sympathisers in the White House, many of whom had lost people in the attacks five years ago, to promote this legislation. If enacted, it will set Congress and the executive against the Supreme Court and the United States against international standards of decency and the rule of law.
Whatever Congress decides, nothing can change the court's original opinion that the United States would be in violation of article three of the Geneva Convention, which only allows for trials in regular courts that afford 'the guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilised people'.
The day after his speech, Bush went to Atlanta to address another audience, this time of 'conservative intellectuals' (truly an oxymoron in Bush's America), and told it that he required a law from Congress that would legalise the NSA's eavesdropping programme, which has also been held by the courts to be illegal and against the rights established in the constitution. The strategy of demanding these laws now is actually rather clever. Every member of Congress and some senators are about to go back to their constituencies to fight the November midterm elections and few are willing to stand up for the constitutional rights when security is still the top priority of the vast majority of American voters.
Bush is likely to get what he wants from Congress, at the same time as refocusing attention on the terrorist threat rather than the inferno in Iraq.
Not many Americans appear to understand what is going on. But a few do - the odd bag-lady, dissident, late-night talk shows such as Bill Maher's and the New York Times which, considering it is the leading voice of liberal, law-abiding America, has been a mite too genteel for my tastes these past five years. However its editorial on Thursday did say this: 'Mr Bush wants to re-write American law to create a glaring exception to the Geneva Convention, to give ex post facto approval to abusive interrogation methods and to bar legal challenges to the system.'
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