There are old and new Nazis in Germany and Austria who argue that Hitler’s Third Reich never had concentration camps. When confronted with unambiguous evidence to the contrary, they add: Sure, there were concentration camps, but they stood on the territory of what was then called the “Generalgouvernement Poland.”
Ridiculous? Maybe, but more than current when considering a report in the Times about Tuesday’s decision by a Federal Appeal’s Court, which upheld the administration’s practice of detention and extraordinary rendition without habeas corpus and due process. The administration and some of it’s sycophants in Congress were jubilant. After all, this decision enables them to portray themselves as obeying the law even while they are wrecking the constitution and civil liberties and human rights. But all they might have won is a legal battle and not the moral argument.
In Nazi-Germany, the mass detention and, later, murder of non-Aryans, of Jews, of Blacks, of homosexuals and many other groups was also covered by orders and (pseudo-)legal decrees. But when defendants at the Nuremberg trials used this fact as a defensive strategy, they were told--and rightly so--that such legal decisions did not absolve them from the moral responsibility as defined by the declaration of human rights.
History will judge the behavior of the US administration along similar lines. Future students will be shocked to learn that their government, their parliament, and their court system condoned the imprisonment of people without giving them a chance to learn about the charges against them. They will be horrified to find out that the US whisked citizens of foreign countries off the streets of their hometowns and flew them to places which the US president liked to condemn as harbingers of terrorism. And let’s hope that these future students will be disgusted, for if they won’t be, this country will indeed have become a police state.
Ridiculous? Maybe, but more than current when considering a report in the Times about Tuesday’s decision by a Federal Appeal’s Court, which upheld the administration’s practice of detention and extraordinary rendition without habeas corpus and due process. The administration and some of it’s sycophants in Congress were jubilant. After all, this decision enables them to portray themselves as obeying the law even while they are wrecking the constitution and civil liberties and human rights. But all they might have won is a legal battle and not the moral argument.
In Nazi-Germany, the mass detention and, later, murder of non-Aryans, of Jews, of Blacks, of homosexuals and many other groups was also covered by orders and (pseudo-)legal decrees. But when defendants at the Nuremberg trials used this fact as a defensive strategy, they were told--and rightly so--that such legal decisions did not absolve them from the moral responsibility as defined by the declaration of human rights.
History will judge the behavior of the US administration along similar lines. Future students will be shocked to learn that their government, their parliament, and their court system condoned the imprisonment of people without giving them a chance to learn about the charges against them. They will be horrified to find out that the US whisked citizens of foreign countries off the streets of their hometowns and flew them to places which the US president liked to condemn as harbingers of terrorism. And let’s hope that these future students will be disgusted, for if they won’t be, this country will indeed have become a police state.
