Supreme Court, by default, endorses police state

In a case that highlights the United States government’s ability to detain persons at will, and to hold them incommunicado, for “interrogation,” while denying any semblance of due process, the Supreme Court has dismissed without comment the case of Khaled al-Masri, who “alleges he was tortured during five months in detention, four months of which were spent in a prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, nicknamed the ‘salt pit’.

“On his flight to Afghanistan, he says, he was stripped, beaten, shackled, made to wear ‘diapers’, drugged and chained to the floor of the plane.

“By his account, he was finally released in Albania after the Americans realised they had got the wrong man.”

Lower courts had refused to hear the case on grounds of national security. By this action, the Supreme Court has affirmed that a government claim of “national security” trumps the inalienable rights of human beings. Until now, it has been possible for me to hold out hope that many actions taken by the Bush administration and all too often endorsed by Congress to abridge civil liberties would not survive a court challenge. I can no longer hold that hope. Where before I merely suspected that we live in a police state, I no longer see any room for dispute.

Just Foreign Policy Iraqi Death Estimator Revolution is no longer merely desirable. It has become a necessity. I have worried that violent revolution would simply replace one set of thugs with another. But we already have thugs who have killed over one million people in Iraq, who inherit an unbroken legacy of murderous imperialism dating back even to before the U.S. was even a country. In our name, these thugs are killing people. They are “disappearing” them. And on the mere suspicion that persons may pose a threat to national security they may hold and torture them even after they have concluded that they are not such a threat. And they do all this while continuing to overlook our own domestic terrorist white supremacist organizations and their own legacy of state terrorism against peoples around the world.

This set of thugs must be replaced. We have asked questions for too long. The time has come for action.

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