F Y I - WHAT'S HAPPENING?
Congress’
Shameful Retreat
from
American Values
By
Garrison Keillor
I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were
you. Last week, we suspended
human rights in America, and what goes around comes around.
Ixnay habeas corpus.
The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an
“enemy combatant” is any non-citizen whom the president says is an
enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish
grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as
long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to
examine the matter. If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo,
suspected of “crimes against the state” and held in prison, you’d
assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to
your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore. Be forewarned.
The Senate also decided it’s up to the president to decide
whether it’s OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a
couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators.
This is now purely a bureaucratic matter:
The plenipotentiary stamps the file “enemy combatant” and
throws the poor schnooks into prison and at his leisure he tries them by
any sort of kangaroo court he wishes to assemble and they have no right to
see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal.
This was passed by 65 senators and will now be signed by President
Bush, put into effect, and in due course be thrown out by the courts.
It’s’ good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would
have killed him. Go
back to the Senate of 1964 – Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy,
Javits, Morse, Fulbright – and you won’t find more than 10votes for
it.
None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to
speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral
view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark
their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary
degrees to these people forfeits its honor.
Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns,
Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig,
Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham,
Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyle,
Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar,
Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of
Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar,
Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu,
Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.
To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: Mark their names and mark them
well. For them, no minstrel
raptures swell. High though
their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim,
these wretched figures shall do down to the vile dust from whence they
sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.
Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and
after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly
folded. Why be a hero when
you can be fairly sure that the court will dispose of this piece of
garbage.
If, however, the court does not, then our country has taken a step
toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never
be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States as you
and I always understood it. Our
enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us
become like them.
I
got some insight last week into who supports torture when I went down to
Dallas to speak at Highland Park Methodist Church.
It was spooky. I
walked in, was met by two burly security men with walkie-talkies, and
within 10 minutes was told by three people that this was the Bushes’
church and that it would be better if I didn’t talk about politics. I
was there on a book tour for “Homegrown Democrat,” but they thought it
better if I didn’t mention it. So
I tried to make light of it: I told the audience, “I don’t need to
talk politics. I have no need
even to be interested in politics - I’m a citizen, I have plenty of
money and my grandsons are at least 12 years away from being eligible for
military service.” And the
audience applauded! Those
were their sentiments exactly. We’ve
got ours, and who cares?
The Methodists of Dallas can be fairly sure that none of them will
be snatched off the streets, flown to Guantanamo Bay, stripped naked,
forced to stand for 48 hours in a freezing room with deafening noise.
So why should they worry? It’s
only the Jews who are in danger, and the homosexuals and gypsies.
The Christians are doing fine.
If you can’t trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest
people and not have to say why, when whom can you trust?
Published in The Chicago Tribune, October 4, 2006. © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
