Re: license to torture?

Only liberal media and politicians give a damn about abortion. Every woman
alive knows exactly what to do it she wants to terminate a pregnancy.


"Arthur Wouk" <awouk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:11l13rints6dd8c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> "A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes
> to the rights of the nation's citizens."
>
> License to Torture
>
> By ANTHONY LEWIS
>
> BOSTON
>
> THE most profound issue that will face the Supreme Court in the coming
> years is not the one animating many of the conservatives angry at
> Harriet Miers's nomination to the court, abortion. It is presidential
> power.
>
> Since Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush and his lawyers have asserted
> again and again that the "war on terror" clothes the president as
> commander in chief with extraordinary, unilateral power - the power,
> for example, to designate an American citizen as an enemy combatant
> and imprison him indefinitely, without trial or a real opportunity to
> demonstrate innocence.
>
> The right to legal abortion is a subject that moves millions of
> Americans, con and pro. But the claim of essentially unchecked
> presidential power goes to the very nature of the American political
> system.
>
> The framers of the Constitution, when they met in Philadelphia in
> 1787, feared concentrated power. In constructing a new federal
> government, they divided its powers among three branches: legislative,
> executive, judicial. The idea, as Madison explained, was that if one
> branch overreached, another would check it.
>
> The Bush administration has often resisted checks on executive branch
> decisions taken under the heading of war power. In memorandums in 2002
> and 2003 on the torture of prisoners, for example, the administration
> argued that the president could order the use of torture even if it
> was forbidden by treaty or by Congressional statute.
>
> When those memorandums leaked out last year, the administration
> withdrew them. But Alberto Gonzales, who as White House counsel
> rejected objections to them, is now attorney general. And one of their
> principal authors, John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of
> California, Berkeley, continues to argue forcefully for dominant
> presidential power. To hear him tell it, the framers constructed a
> political system on the model of King George III.
>
> The administration has also maintained that decisions taken under the
> president's power as commander in chief should not be subject to
> effective review by the courts. Thus, it argued that detaining a
> citizen as an enemy combatant could be justified by a government
> statement of alleged facts, without any meaningful legal process to
> verify them.
>
> Last year the Supreme Court rejected that argument in the case of one
> detained American, Yaser Esam Hamdi. In the prevailing opinion,
> Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said such a detainee must have his case
> decided by a "neutral decision maker."
>
> In another case before the Supreme Court last year, the administration
> said that prisoners detained in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could not go to
> court to challenge their status because the president had
> "conclusively" determined it. The court rejected that position.
>
> In the Senate hearings on the nomination of John Roberts as chief
> justice, one exchange highlighted the historic danger of accepting
> that presidential decisions must be presumed correct because we are
> "at war." Senator Patrick Leahy asked about the internment of
> Japanese-Americans during World War II, which the Supreme Court
> sustained in 1944: Would that be held constitutional now? Judge
> Roberts said he would be "surprised if there were any arguments that
> could support it."
>
> The detention of thousands of Americans because of their race would
> surely be rejected today. But it is worth remembering that the crux of
> the Supreme Court's 1944 decision, Korematsu v. United States, was the
> court's refusal to examine the government's claims that intelligence
> showed the likelihood of Japanese-Americans acting as spies or
> saboteurs - claims that in fact had no basis.
>
> How are Chief Justice Roberts and Harriet Miers, if she is confirmed,
> likely to decide on issues of presidential power? Predictions can only
> be speculative, but there is a possible clue in the case of Chief
> Justice Roberts. As one member of a three-judge panel of the United
> States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Judge Roberts
> joined an opinion that paid great deference to presidential orders in
> ruling that the military could resume war crimes trials of terrorism
> suspects detained at Guantánamo.
>
> Harriet Miers has no public record on these issues. But Professor Yoo,
> writing in The Washington Post after her nomination, said, "She may be
> one of the key supporters in the Bush administration of staying the
> course on legal issues arising from the war on terrorism." He did not
> explain.
>
> When one becomes a Supreme Court justice, the magnitude of the issues
> facing the court and the burden of final decision may change
> previously held views. Justice Robert H. Jackson candidly said so in
> 1950, when as a justice he disavowed a position he had earlier taken
> as attorney general.
>
> Claims of presidential power during wartime have particularly large
> consequences today. In the past, when a president made such claims,
> the war involved lasted a limited time. The war on terrorism has no
> definable end. In passing judgment on these issues, the justices of
> the Supreme Court will be defining American freedom for the future.
> They should guide by the light of Justice O'Connor's statement last
> year in the Hamdi case:
>
> "A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes
> to the rights of the nation's citizens."
>
> Anthony Lewis is a former Times columnist.
>
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/15/opinion/15LEWIS.html?pagewanted=print#top
> --
> getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence
> - jules feifer
> to email me, delete syzygy. from my return address


.

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