Back in the U.S., back in the U.S., back in the U.S.S.A.

I think it will be a photo finish: which will arrive first, the end of the national nightmare known as the Bush Presidency, or the last day of the American Republic as a constitutional democracy? Bush, certainly, is doing his part to outlast our civil liberties. Even as the media focus exclusive attention on the 2008 campaign, the monster babies spawned by earlier Bushian misprision continue their grotesque maturation. Thus, we have Boumediene vs. Bush (yes, that Bush), the case recently decided by the D.C. Court of Appeals, in which the court upheld the jurisdiction-stripping provisions of the Military Commissions Act. That brilliant coup by which Bush & Rumsfeld conspired to confine terrorists (loosely defined) caught on the battlefields of Afghanistan at the far end of Cuba, so as to deprive American courts of jurisdiction -- well, it worked. If you're an Afghan heroin farmer who happened to be near Kandahar near the end of 2001, and someone ratted you out in order to cut a deal with the U.S. military to go free; and if this train of events eventually carried you to Bagram prison, where you were interrogated and probably tortured; and if your pleas of innocence were ignored so that eventually you found yourself chained to the belly of a military transport that carried you to a rabbit warren at the dusty east end of Cuba, at Guantanamo-- well, here's some more bad news. The federal courts cannot hear your case by means of habeas corpus. The MCA says so, and the federal panel agrees.

Perhaps this terrorist was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Several hundred similar "terrorists" have been discharged from Guantanamo for this very reason, after years of unnecessary imprisonment. Maybe the terrorist has a family who depends on him, children whom he has not seen in years, perhaps he was never any kind of threat to the United States at all. All of these things could be tested by habeas corpus, that salutary Latin phrase meaning "you have the body," an ancient writ under the common law which allows one detained by the government to challenge, immediately, the basis of his incarceration. But you, the terrorist, have no such rights. You're a foreigner, Rumsfeld or Bush has said you're an "enemy combatant," and thus you'll have to make your case to a Military Status Review board down there in Cuba, and if they don't like your argument, or you -- well, settle back for a few more years, or forever, in your cage. No court is ever going to listen to you.

The good and decent Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, is working to repair this abomination, one of many such gaping holes blasted in the Constitution by the Bush Administration, often with the unctuous, hypocritical help of that sniveling rat Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina. I think of Leahy as sort of Bush's night soil engineer, the guy who's making his nocturnal rounds emptying all the pots of shit filled up during the dark period when Bush had a compliant Republican Congress to help with his dirty work. If he can get past the 60 vote requirement, and over Bush's probable veto, maybe the foreigners will have a chance to demonstrate their innocence in court someday. It's worth at least starting the process; more likely, many innocent detainees in Guantanamo will have to wait until at least late 2009 before a real chance at freedom appears. By then, probably several hundred men will have spent 8 years in a kind of legal purgatory, casual victims of Bush's destructive approach to due process. For what, after all, is so terrible about allowing anyone, even an alleged terrorist, to make an argument that he's done nothing wrong? Why do we close the doors to the court house to a man who simply wants to say, "I'm innocent"?

As I've said before, Bush's weird small-mindedness pervades his thinking about legal process as it does about every other intellectual discipline, from science to economics. It is proof by declaration: I say this, so it's true. And as a complacent Congress and electorate look on, the grand structure of Constitutional rights falls like a sand castle overwhelmed by a dark tide.