This bill that passed the US Senate today is an outrage to fundamental rights established by the Constitution. Some have questioned whether the US is becoming a fascist State from the previous blog on that topic. But is this yet another step in that direction? There are so many elements in this Bill that point to this conclusion, but let’s begin this with the loss of habeas corpus if you are labled an enemy combatant in the US. And only one branch of government gets to determine if you are labled such: The Executive. Here’s the section of the Bill. What do you think?
SEC. 6. HABEAS CORPUS MATTERS.
(a) In General- Section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, is amended–
(1) by striking subsection (e) (as added by section 1005(e)(1) of Public Law 109-148 (119 Stat. 2742)) and by striking subsection (e) (as added by added by section 1405(e)(1) of Public Law 109-163 (119 Stat. 3477)); and
(2) by adding at the end the following new subsection:
`(e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who–
`(A) is currently in United States custody; and
`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.
`(2) Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (10 U.S.C. 801 note), no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien detained by the United States who–
`(A) is currently in United States custody; and
`(B) has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.’.
(b) Effective Date- The amendments made by subsection (a) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act, and shall apply to all cases, without exception, pending on or after the date of the enactment of this Act which relate to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of detention of an alien detained by the United States since September 11, 2001.
This is particulary troubling in light of the partial National Intelligence Estimate that came out recently. This is from our own Administration’s 16 intelligence agencies. And the conclusion is that tactics like torture, humiliation and complete disregard for human rights and dignity fuel the jihadist, anti-American sentiment. Compare the bills passing the conservative House and Senate against the defeated Democratic versions. The latter take into account all of the NIE’s concerns for dealing with terrorism from a variety of strategies and perspectives. But no, we have to chip away at the advances made in our own society with the conservative approach which defeat the very purpose of the legislation: It creates more terrorism AND let’s the terror agenda win by eroding our own freedoms. Come on people, which agenda is closer to what you would call “integral?”
From a NY Times editorial this date:
These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:
Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant†in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.
The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret  there’s no requirement that this list be published.
Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.
Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.
Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable  already a contradiction in terms  and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.
Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.
Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.
There has always been a harsh side to the US. Many states still use the death penalty. The US is seen as hypocritical on many fronts and it’s a peculiarly US phenomenon – people who are violently anti-Abortion, so-called ‘pro-lifers’ who happily accept the death penalty. Christians who ignore ‘turn the other cheek’ and support war. A country that argues for freedom of speech but then goes through the tragic farce of the McCarthy era. A country that says it isn’t imperialist but acts like an empire – a country with so many moralists and which is the largest producer of porn, etc, etc
It’s not fascism, but a certain kind of American moral absolutism.
So, no, I’m not surprised harsh pragmatism has won the day over higher principles. Now, if only the government would allow free enterprise to run the torture regime someone might be able to live the American dream and make a good profit (and buy a house in Miama on the beach).
This does seem to be pretty bad. Well, we’ll certainly get to see what America is made of. -and for the record, the zingy sarcasm doesn’t seem to be helping much.
By the way, did anyone think that my final post on the “Is America becoming a fascist state” thread have any merit whatsoever?
Mathew,
Regarding your last post on the fascism thread, of course we should deal harshly with actual terrorists when confronted with violence, including killing the shit out of them. As I recall though that discussion noted the whole center of gravity of society should not shift down to just a kill the bastards that are different than us. The Democratic security bill I pointed to has a “kill ‘em” clause where appropriate but also maintains a higher, more integrated center of gravity that also understands and deals with all of the other complex factors that create terrorism. (Which by the way reflects the same approach by the NIE.) And these are the type of things missing from the draconian approach of the conservative Executive and Congress. So yes, a part of us has to “shift to red,” as you say, but not every part or the whole of us, as it seems Bush and cronies are doing.
And what, zingy sarcasm, me? Go on!
Ray,
On the hypocrisy of conservative policy, see the following excerpt from wikipedia on Orwell’s notion of doublethink in the novel 1984. Sound familiar?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink
According to the novel, doublethink is:
“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one deniesâ€â€all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”
Another quote from the novel, when Winston starts to think about doublethink as he exercises:
“His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be conradictiory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce uncounsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the art of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved using doublethink.”
As Orwell explains in the book, the Party could not protect its iron grip on power without degrading its people and exposing them to constant propaganda. Yet, knowledge of this brutality and deception, even within the Party itself, could lead to disgusted collapse of the state from within. For this reason, Orwell’s idealized government used a complex system of “reality control”. Though the novel is most famous for its pervasive surveillance of daily life, reality control meant that the population (all of it, including the ruling elite) could be controlled and manipulated merely through the alteration of everyday language and thought. Newspeak was the method for controlling thought through language; Doublethink was the method of controlling thought directly.
Newspeak itself incorporated doublethink, as it contained many words that create assumed associations between contradictory meanings. That is especially true of words of fundamental importance, such as ‘good / evil’, ‘right / wrong’, ‘truth / falsehood’, and ‘justice / injustice’.
Doublethink was a form of trained, willful blindness to contradictions in a system of beliefs. In the case of Winston Smith, Orwell’s protagonist, it meant being able to work at the Ministry of Truth deleting uncomfortable facts from public records, and then believing in the new history which he himself had written.
Additionally, Doublethink’s self-deception allowed the Party to maintain both huge goals and realistic expectations: “If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes” (page 177). Thus, each party member could be a credulous pawn, but would never lack relevant information. The party is both fanatical and well informed, and thus unlikely either to “ossify” or “grow soft” and collapse. “Killing the messenger” disturbed the command-and-control of the Nazi (and later the Iraqi) militaries, but would not present itself in such a system. Doublethink thus functioned as a key tool of self-discipline for the Party, to complement the state-imposed discipline of propaganda and a police state. Together, these tools hid the government’s evil not only from the people, but also from the government itself, but without the confusion and misinformation associated with more primitive totalitarian regimes.
Doublethink was critical in allowing the Party to know what its true goals were without recoiling from them. Previous dictatorships made the mistake of conflating their egalitarian propaganda with their purpose; 1984 demonstrated that the next generation of dictatorship would not be so naïve.
And regarding Newspeak Orwell says this in the appendix to 1984:
http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/books/1984-Appendix.htm
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thoughtâ€â€that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsocâ€â€should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘ politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
“According to the novel, doublethink is:
“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
That sounds like a good description of the integral perspective!
But the integral perspective does not accept both of them in toto without consciously resolving the contradiction in a higher dialectic (at least in theory). What Orwell is talking about, in Wilber Newspeak, is being caught in such contradictions unconsciously, not yet going beyond them because one is not yet able to see the contradiction. And in 1984’s case (and Bushworld), one is deliberately manipulated to remain in such ignorance.
As Ray noted in “Toward an Integral Politcal Economy”:
“Integral theory is itself dialectical and suggests a more complex process of inherent contradictions leading to new evolutionary solutions.”
Now granted the integral perspective itself has its own inherent contradictions that must be integrated into a higher dialectic. But it seems this process goes on ad infinitum, unless of course you’re into the ultimate, causal consciousness (no)thing beyond all dialectic etc. Which I’m not, beause the latter is itself is used as a way to limit further dialectical development by positing some final ground wherein we’ve arrived and hence the dogma and power manipulation follow as sure as night follows day.
But I think Andy is right in that every new dialectical integration, while reconciling the contradictions of the previous “level,” still has its own inherent contradictions. And in that sense the integral movement has its own blinders and power games and manipulation, espeically in the “fusion” phase, where it becomes such an absolute, domatic and “correct” worldview and forgets its temporary status in an infinite, evolving process. In that way Orwell applys to the integral (and every) perspective as well.
To expand on the last comment, I don’t deny causal consciousness. Just that it is the final resting place. While it might be beyond perspective, in the further embrace of nondual awareness we have yet another dialectical resolution between direct perception and perspective. So is nondual awareness the final resting place beyond all contradiction and itself not in need of further dialectical development?
I would say no, if I was trying to resolve the question in a dialectic cosmology. But viewing the the course of philosophy in purely dialectical terms might be a mistake in itself, don’t you think? I haven’t studied Hegel and those after him much, so I don’t really know- But if one of your givens is continuity it would make sense that you butt heads with the concept of a final lack of duality. For my two cents on the matter- I think that the addition of the concept of the holon to phenomonological discourse creates many of the novel elements in Wilber’s work, but the metaphysical underpinnings of the holonic idea can only be talked about meaningfully if the observer remains aware of their own nature as a specific holon (pretty much what you already said). Holons have an active component to them, or a will or something, and where there is a will there is potential for extrapolation. I guess I would have to ask why.