Abstract

Empire Without Law

The author argues that the administration of President George W. Bush has shown that it does not respect the human rights of prisoners--foreign or American. On April 28 the subject of torture was discussed in oral arguments before the Supreme Court. The context was not the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in the prison complex at Abu Ghraib. The photos of those events would not be released for another eight hours, by "60 Minutes II." Rather, the context was the detention of two US citizens, Yaser Hamdi and Jos´ Padilla. The Bush Administration, in the person of Paul Clement, Deputy Solicitor General, was asserting the President's right to designate, at his sole discretion, US citizens as" enemy combatants" (a legal neologism), and then imprison them indefinitely without the right to see counsel or to have any other communication with the outside world. Asked by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg whether, in keeping with habeas corpus requirements, a citizen should not "have a right to bring before some tribunal himself, his own words, rather than have a government agent say what was told to him," Clement answered that in the Administration scheme the interrogation of the detainee was itself the opportunity. That very evening, the issues raised in the abstract legal discussion before the Court sprang to shocking life in the pictures from Abu Ghraib, giving everyone a chance to judge just how much due process such interrogations supplied. The Administration's across-the-board hostility to the constraints of law, domestic and international, is not accidental. The constitutional structure that is the backbone of the republic is a stumbling block to the empire.