Broken by design (Military Commissions Act)
Concerning passage of yesterday’s U.S. torture legislation, a Friend whom I respect wrote —
You are, so long as this law is on the books, now in a dictatorship.
No deep thought is required to recognize he’s right:
If one person, or a small group of persons, can accuse then torture anyone he or she chooses and/or put the accused person in prison indefinitely without provision for due process under the law, then the result is indistinguishable from a dictatorship.
Think about what’s happened apart from its serious ethical, moral, and Constitutional implications. Look at it practically:
As an engineer, if I build an electrical, mechanical, or process flow system with a glaring single point of failure — as, in this case, hinging everything on the discernment and judgment of one human being, every one of whom is subject to error — then I’ll be drummed out of the engineering profession. And appropriately so: when any system depends on one breakable link to function, that link will eventually break. And when it does, the power grid fails, the bridge falls, the plane is misrouted to Fargo — or falls out of the sky.
Put another way:
In any complex system on which lives depend, wherein failure means fatal, there must always be failsafe upon failsafe upon failsafe. This legislation strips away all the failsafes.
If our democracy is to survive, this legislation cannot stand.
Resources:
- Senate Approves Broad New Rules to Try Detainees
- Rushing Off a Cliff, editorial listing bill’s flaws
- Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill
- U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes on S. 3930
- S. 3930, Military Commissions Act of 2006 (PDF), Senate bill “to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes”
2006-10-19 update:
Mr. Bush signed this act into law on Tuesday, October 17, 2006.
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley reminds of James Madison’s alternative imagery about our system of government to mine about broken engineering design:
OLBERMANN: Does this mean that under this law, ultimately the only thing keeping you, I, or the viewer out of Gitmo is the sanity and honesty of the president of the United States?
TURLEY: It does. And it’s a huge sea change for our democracy. The framers created a system where we did not have to rely on the good graces or good mood of the president. In fact, Madison said that he created a system essentially to be run by devils, where they could not do harm, because we didn’t rely on their good motivations.
Now we must.
I remain surprised at the overlap between Calvin-influenced Protestant Christians for whom “the depravity of man [who is therefore dependent on God’s grace]” is a central doctrine — a doctrine I understand and am significantly influenced by — and those who support the party who supports this notion that the depraved human being — that is, any human being, present or future — occupying the office of President of the United States is immune from error.
Powerhouse commentary. Keith Olbermann delivers a tour de force comment on this loss of habeas corpus on the Wednesday, October 18, 2006 Countdown (alternate Quicktime version here).
I expect this video to achieve historical significance in future years in future classrooms. Well worth seeing now.
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