All of this is good, of course, and shows that some vestiges of a more normative civic society still flicker here and there. But what of the multitude of people in similar situations who don't have these fortuitous connections? They are obviously subject to the same arbitrary power that tried to crush the Trans family. What happens when one of them "steps out of line," in the eyes of the Regime and its apparatchiks? Nobody knows — except for the families that are ripped apart.

Anyone who believes that the kind of abritrary punishment dished out to the Trans family by a lawless and vindictive regime will be confined to immigrants is living in a fool's paradise. Step by step, Americans have been led into a Leader-State, where the "Unitary Executive" can exert his arbitrary and unrestricted power throughout the government — and over the life and liberty of every citizen, indeed every person on the planet. Bush has claimed — and exercised — the power to ignore laws passed by Congress; he has stated quite specifically, over and over, in his signing statements, that he will follow only those laws — or parts of laws — that suit him while disregarding the others. And as the New York Times reports, his nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, is an adherent of this authoritarian philosophy:

He suggested that both the administration's program of eavesdropping without warrants and its use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects, including waterboarding, might be acceptable under the Constitution even if they went beyond what the law technically allowed. Mr. Mukasey said the president's authority as commander in chief might allow him to supersede laws written by Congress.

And this is the man regarded by some, including the usually-astute Scott Horton, as "a light at the end of the tunnel," a straight-shooter who will restore rigorous independence to the degraded Justice Department. To be fair, the estimable Horton, often quoted here, wrote his paean to Mukasey before the latter's second day of Congressional testimony, when, as Sen. Patrick Leahy pointed out, it was obvious that Mukasey had been leaned on by the White House to back the regime's barbaric positions on torture and presidential dictatorship. Mukasey even declined to rule out waterboarding as an interrogation technique; obviously that remains an arrow in the regime's torture quiver. Instead, he merely mouthed the regime's circular logic: we don't torture, therefore if we do something — not matter what it is, even waterboarding — then it can't be torture.

But none of this is surprising. As we've noted here before, Mukasey would not have been nominated unless the regime knew he would toe its authoritarian line. If he had in fact been opposed to torture, tyranny and the subversion of all government into a base, partisan tool of the Leader's arbitrary will, then he would not have accepted the nomination in the first place. We cannot stress this enough: anyone who signs on with the Bush Regime at this point becomes a willing accomplice to evil. No person of honor or integrity would associate themselves with such a criminal enterprise. Whatever moral credit Mukasey has earned in the past (a matter of some dispute, given some of his rulings), however great his admiration for stalwarts of freedom like Justice Robert Jackson and George Orwell, he has forfeited all of that now by not only joining the Bush Regime but publicly defending some of its filthiest practices. And the government is literally crammed with such people now, in every department and agency, appointed by Bush (or picked by Bush appointees) to serve only Bush, and the cut-throats and cranks he represents.

So is this the America you have carried in your heart? No. But it's the one you've got now.

NOTE: Regarding the step-by-step sleepwalk into tyranny, Dave Neiwert has a telling passage in a recent post:

Milton Mayer's remarkable book They Thought They Were Free, built around a series of interviews he conducted with "ordinary Germans" who lived through Nazi society, talked about the mechanism by which this happened:

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, "everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're an alarmist."

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to — to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."

UPDATE: In a new post, Scott Horton says he retains his warm personal view of Mukasey, but is troubled by his second-day testimony on torture. More importantly, Horton provides the unspoken background to yesterday's questioning: the practice of flagrantly illegal torture by the CIA in its secret prison on the island of Diego Garcia, a British possession in the Indian Ocean. As Horton notes, the UK Parliament is about to investigate British collusion in these crimes. He boils the case down thusly (the bolding is in his original):

And that brings us back to yesterday’s questioning of Michael Mukasey. The same question was lurking in the background, and it went unarticulated. So let’s be clear about what that question is: Has the CIA been given the go ahead to use torture and torture-lite techniques in its black sites overseas? The answer which emerges from everything we’ve seen is: Yes. The techniques in question include waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia, sleep deprivation in excess of two days, the use of dogs to terrify detainees, sexual humiliation techniques, and psychotropic drugs. Each of these techniques is very clearly illegal and their use is punishable as a crime.

Yes, exactly. And thus it would seem to me that the important thing now is not whether Mukasey satisfactorily answers Sen. Leahy's written questions on this "critical policy issue." In the extremity of the hour, Mukasey does not matter. He will almost certainly either lie in response to Leahy's questions, or else fudge the issue as he did in his oath-sworn testimony. But even in the highly unlikely event that he gives a satisfactory answer, declaring his firm adherence to the rule of law in every instance, it will not matter. He will simply be overriden by the White House, or ignored, as Congress is, or undercut by the cadre of Bush zealots that now fill the top reaches of the Justice Department.

The important question now is not where Mukasey might or might not stand on this or that policy issue; the important, overwhelmingly urgent question is: When will Congress act to call this blatantly criminal activity to account? When will Congress move to impeach the perpetrators, remove them them from office so they can be prosecuted for their crimes?

And if Congress does not do this — or even try to do it, and thus bring it to the forefront of the nation's attention — then it doesn't really matter what else they do or don't do. The Bush Regime will go on committing crimes and blithely ignoring the law as they have done for almost seven years. 

 

Did you enjoy this article? Please bookmark it onto: