Auguste Maquet

Victor Klemperer's Diary: 16 August 1936

2011-08-24T03:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon – we had just returned very tired and hot from the flower show, I had peeled off and was making coffee – there appeared in cycling clothes, with sandals and shorts, grey with green turn-ups, a yodelling lad, Wengler, and stayed for hours. Everything spoke against him, but he is such a thoroughly decent fellow that one finds him likeable even at the most catastrophic moment. He had spent several weeks on holiday in Italy. He thinks Fascism or rather the Italian fascists more human than the Nazis. He relates as vouched for, that a few weeks before the beginning of the Spanish counter-revolution, General San Jurjo, who was later killed, had discussions in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin and that there are German officers with Franco’s Moroccan troops. He believes the victory or defeat of the Spanish Popular Front decisive for the whole of Europe and says quite seriously, thoughtfully, without any pathos, as with a weighed-down conscience: ‘One really should go there and help them; but I can’t even shoot.’ Later he complained how disagreeable it is for him to start teaching again on Tuesday.

That is Wengler. Johannes Kühn, however, whom I always took to be a man of integrity and a genuine thinker, professor of history Johannes Kühn has written a short article in the Dresdener NN (16th August) on the 150th anniversary of the death of Frederick the Great. In a hundred lines he twice calls him emphatically ‘a Nordic-Germanic man’. His philosophy is out of date and unimportant; behind it stands the Germanic belief in things higher and beyond this world; his inclination toward French culture is the Northern German’s typical longing for form and the South. – If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go, and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene. - Victor Klemperer's Diary, 16th August, 1936

Slavery and the Multiple Self

2007-12-01T16:26:00.000-08:00

Malcolm Bull
Slavery and the Multiple Self

The concept of the self currently plays a significant role within moral philosophy and intellectual history. That this is so is due in some measure to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. [*] Both philosophers treat questions about the morality of actions or agents as secondary to those about the identity of the moral subject. And because it is considered vital to relate moral philosophy to the analysis of personal identity, the historical developments that have fashioned that identity become important as well. For MacIntyre and Taylor, the history of ideas offers a uniquely promising way of reanimating moral philosophy, and Taylor in particular has devoted much energy to tracing the formation of the modern self in the belief that the resulting narrative will reveal the framework within which our moral intuitions are articulated. [1]

It is difficult to dismiss the simple but powerful insight that underlies this project. Since no one is likely to argue that morality involves acting or treating others in ways that are inappropriate to who we and they are, it does seem to suggest that, if we can only gain a full understanding of our identities, we should also start to get a sense of how we ought to live. But even if this basic premiss is accepted, it may still be argued that the project has been formulated in such a way as to prejudge the findings of any historical investigation. In this article, I suggest that Taylor’s and Macintyre’s conception of the self excludes many, perhaps even most, human subjects, and with them a sequence of texts that describe and interpret their position. These texts, it will be argued, constitute a continuous narrative about the type of self ignored by Taylor and MacIntyre, and, as such, offer the schematic outline for a history of the self that is fundamentally different from theirs. Much of what follows is an attempt to articulate the essential features of this narrative in the works of Aristotle, Hegel, and Du Bois. But before turning to this alternative history it is necessary to examine Taylor’s and Macintyre’s arguments in more detail.

Moral Reactions and Gut Reactions
MacIntyre famously remarked that a moral philosophy always presupposes a sociology. [2] This involves two claims: first that all moralities make some assumptions about the identity of moral agents, and, second, that there is no way to define a moral agent without reference to their social and historical context. Taylor defends both at greater length than MacIntyre himself. What differentiates moral reactions from gut reactions like nausea is, he suggests, the fact that the former are open to question, explanation, and correction in a way that the latter are not. Moral intuitions are distinguished by the fact that they have a framework within which they can be articulated and evaluated, a framework that invariably seems ‘to involve claims, implicit or explicit, about the nature and status of human beings’. Moral intuition therefore presupposes what Taylor terms ‘a given ontology of the human’. [3]

The move from ontology to sociology is effected through the consideration of what is involved in personal identity and, in particular, the kind of personal identity presupposed by moral intuition. What Taylor terms the ‘punctual self’, defined solely in terms of the continuity of its self-perception, provides an inadequate framework for the consideration of moral agency because it excludes self-interpretation. As individuals, and especially as moral individuals ‘We are selves only in that certain things matter for us. What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me’. [4] Self-interpretation in this sense is inescapably a linguistic activity, and as languages require linguistic communities, so self-interpretation requires a community, not just to provide a language, but to provide the social meanings of selfhood within which any self-interpretation is articulated. As Taylor puts it

One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it. . .I define who I am by defining where I speak from, in the family tree, in social space, in the geography of social statuses and functions. [5]

In MacIntyre, the same conclusion is stated still more forcefully:

The story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships. The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide. [6]

Unless you want to maintain that it is possible to have a productive conversation about morality without knowing who the conversation is about, or else that all we need to know about moral agents is that they have continuous self-consciousness, these conclusions seem unobjectionable. But even if we accept that moral discourse is always about people in all their social and historical particularity, the next stage of the argument may appear rather more problematic.

Virtue and Unity
According to Taylor, moral selves are not neutral, punctual objects because ‘what counts as an object will be defined by the scope of the concern, by just what is in question’. He then goes on to suggest that since in moral intuition ‘what is in question is, generally and characteristically, the shape of my life as a whole’, the self must be conceived as a unity, and I have to consider ‘my whole past life as that of a single self’. [7] The argument that underlies this progression from wholeness to unity to singleness is largely derived from MacIntyre, who makes the same moves, arguing first that ‘the unity of a virtue in someone’s life is intelligible only as a characteristic of a unitary life, a life that can be conceived and evaluated as a whole’, and later that ‘the unity of an individual life’ consists in ‘the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life’. On this interpretation, personal identity is ‘just that identity presupposed by the unity of the character which the unity of a narrative requires’. [8]

The problem with these arguments is that they can progress only by exploiting the ambiguity of the terminology and moving from a whole/part distinction via the unity/disunity opposition to a single/multiple dichotomy. Because considering something as a whole means considering it in its entirety, Taylor suggests first that it must be considered not just exhaustively but also simultaneously, as a unified totality; and, second, that it must be considered as a unity not just in the sense that it is a totality but that it is a single undivided object. However, this is not necessarily the case. If, at half-time in the World Cup Final, the tv commentator suggests to the panel that they should discuss the game ‘as a whole’, this implies that they should not focus exclusively on the goals, that no player or incident should be omitted from consideration, and it might additionally, although not necessarily, be taken as encouragement for musings about the entirety of the match as a unified entity. However, even thinking about the match in this sense would hardly lead anyone to suppose that subject of the unified narrative was a single unified character. On the contrary, far from being the solitary hero of the narrative, it is only possible to make sense of the match on the assumption that it has dual character, and that there are two competing protagonists. And if the panellists move on to consider the championship as a whole, they will find that this involves numerous simultaneous narratives, most with protagonists who disappear long before the end of the story. When Taylor and MacIntyre refer to human life as a ‘quest’, they have in mind something more like the quest for the Holy Grail than the World Cup, yet there seems no reason why one type of teleological narrative should be considered more representative than the other. The whole story may be the complete story, but it does not necessarily consist of a unified narrative with a single character.

Taylor is tempted to conclude that ‘there is something like an a priori unity of a human life through its whole extent’, but mindful that, on his own account, self-interpretation is constitutive of the self, he has to allow the hypothetical possibility that cultures could exist in which people might legitimately be considered to have two selves. (For example, a society in which it was universally acknowledged that everyone took on a new identity at the age of forty.) However, he concludes that ‘in the absence of such a cultural understanding, e.g., in our world, the supposition that I could be two temporally succeeding selves is either an overdramatized image, or quite false’. [9] Taylor may be right to suppose that there are no cultures in which the kind of thought experiments Parfit performs on the Lockean self actually take place. But although rejecting the punctual self may make it easier to dismiss the claim that there are temporally successive selves, invoking a conception of the self that involves both selfinterpretation and elements of intersubjective experience opens the door to understandings of the self in which the self is not synchronically unified. There is, in other words, a potential tension between treating the self holistically, in all its historical, social and interpretative complexity, and treating the self as a single, coherent unit. Not only does the former not necessarily imply the latter, it may make it more, not less difficult to keep the self intact. If, for any social or historical reason, personal identities are interpreted or constructed in terms that imply duality or multiplicity, then, even if there is continuity of self-consciousness, the self must be understood in correspondingly multiple terms.

Double Consciousness
It is not difficult to find examples of self-interpretation in which the self is understood as simultaneously double or multiple rather than single. The best-known formulation of this idea is probably W.E.B. Du Bois’s account of the double consciousness of the African-American who leads a ‘double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes’, and, in consequence, ‘ever feels this twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body’. [10] Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness is significant for several reasons. As a self-interpretation that locates the subjective experience of twoness within a specific social and historical context, Du Bois’s account of double consciousness meets all the requirements of Taylor’s self. It is, furthermore, not merely a literary trope or piece of academic speculation, but, according to his biographer, an expression of ‘the irreducible fact that Du Bois’s existence. . .was a psychic purgatory’, [11] and an expression in which many members of Du Bois’s community were able to recognize themselves. As the repeated literary deployment of the concept testifies, the idea of double consciousness has seemed like a useful self-interpretation of more than one generation of African-American. [12] What we have, in other words, is just that possibility which Taylor believes never to have been instantiated ‘in our world’, a community in which it proves impossible to locate personal identity within a single social space, a community in which many individuals have found the moral imperative to consider their lives as a whole to be incompatible with defining themselves as single or united beings.

That it should be so easy to find a counter-example to Taylor and MacIntyre’s insistence upon the singleness and unity of the self implies that their histories of the self may be radically incomplete. One way to explore this possibility is to retrace the steps that lead to Du Bois’s anguished expression of psychic duality. In what follows, I will suggest that Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness is the conclusion of an argument that stretches back to the very beginnings of Western philosophy. Ironically, the major figures in this debate are Aristotle and Hegel, philosophers who are of central importance to MacIntyre and Taylor respectively. So by recapitulating the argument in all its sometimes intricate detail, it becomes possible not only to reveal the sources of the multiple self and so illuminate a largely unexplored pathway in intellectual history, but also to indicate more precisely the nature of the exclusions implied by Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s arguments.

Aristotle
Du Bois’s work is grounded in the history of New World slavery. Insofar as that institution had a theory, it was provided by Aristotle’s remarks on slavery in the Politics. Although the precise meaning of the passages in question is not always clear, they underpinned the medieval concept of dominion, and in the Renaissance furnished arguments first for the enslavement of indigenous Americans, and then for the enslavement of Africans instead. When opponents of slavery sought to criticize either the practice or the institution it was to Aristotle that they too referred. [13]

Although no one appears to have advocated the abolition of slavery in the ancient world, the existence of the institution clearly posed something of an intellectual puzzle. Slavery was universally held to be a subhuman condition, and so, if it were justifiable, those held in that condition ought to be subhuman too. However, there was no distinct race of slaves: freemen were liable to become slaves through being taken prisoner in war or some other misfortune, and slaves could become free as a result of manumission. So if, as the comic poet Philemon put it, ‘no one is born to be a slave; only chance enslaved his body’, [14] how could slavery be justified?

Natural Slavery and Legal Slavery
Aristotle’s response was to make a distinction between legal slavery on the one hand and natural slavery on the other. Legal slaves are those who happen, by chance, legally to be slaves, whereas natural slaves are those who are, by nature, fitted for slavery. Against those who would claim that the former condition necessarily implied the latter, Aristotle pointed out that even they would ‘by no means admit that a man that does not deserve slavery can really be a slave—otherwise we shall have the result that persons reputed of the highest nobility are slaves. . .if they happen to be taken prisoners of war and sold’. [15] So if it is conceded ‘that there exist certain persons who are essentially slaves everywhere and certain others who are are so nowhere’, [16] it follows that there must be a less than perfect fit between legal and natural slavery. Thus, Aristotle suggests, the only true slaves are natural slaves legally enslaved; natural citizens who are legally enslaved ought to be freed, and natural slaves who are legally free ought to be enslaved.

The beauty of Aristotle’s solution was that it upheld the institution of slavery while legitimating enslavement and manumission as the processes through which legal slavery accommodated itself to the underlying realities of natural slavery. The implication that slaves and non-slaves belong to two distinct categories of humanity whose existence legal slavery could strive to reflect but never alter is confirmed by Aristotle’s earlier analysis of the meaning of natural slavery and the character of natural slaves. A slave is like a tool in that it is ‘an instrument of action’ separable from its owner, [17] and like a domestic animal in that it is the living property of another person. [18] Being the property of the master means that the slave is in a sense part of the master, [19] not, of course, part of the master’s soul but part of the master’s body. [20]

Given Aristotle’s understanding of the body-soul relation it would seem that those fitted for this arrangement should be distinguished by their bodies, but, as Aristotle acknowledges, this is not the case. [21] Natural slaves are characterized solely by the incompleteness of their souls. What the souls of slaves lack is variously described as deliberation, [22] spirit, [23] and rationality—in the sense of possessing rather than merely apprehending reason. [24] The precise relation between these attributes in Aristotelian psychology is unclear, but in every case it can be claimed that the deficiency of the soul precludes the possibility of proper self-government. Since it is the nature of the body to be governed by the soul, it is therefore appropriate for the bodies of those with souls incapable of governing the body to be governed by other, more complete souls. [25]

The Incomplete Soul
The natural slave in the state of natural slavery is thus an incomplete soul whose body becomes part of the master’s body so that the master’s soul may govern unhindered. [26] According to Aristotle, the type of authority the master exercises over the slave is the same as that of a tyrant over his subjects, [27] or the soul over the body, [28] in that, although there may be some community of interest between ruler and ruled, government is solely in the interest of the ruler. [29] The rule of a master over a slave conforms to this type because, it too is an example of the soul ruling the body. However, although the master rules the slave’s body with the absolute authority with which the master’s soul governs his own body—of which the slave’s body is now merely a separate part—there is no implication that the master’s soul rules the slave’s soul in the same way. On the contrary, the rule of the rational over the appetitive part of a soul is like that of a monarch who rules in the interests of his subjects, or a father who governs in the interests of his children with ‘admonition, reproof, and encouragement’. [30] The master’s soul should rule the slave’s soul in the same way, with admonition and not merely command. [31] It appears that the slave’s incomplete soul is not enslaved by the master’s soul, merely subject to it, and so, whereas friendship between master and slave is impossible insofar as the slave is a tool or body-part of the master, friendship between master and slave is possible insofar as the slave is another soul, albeit incomplete and subject to the master. [32]

Enslavement and Humanity
Aristotle’s analysis of the neat fit between the institution of slavery and the character of the natural slave provides a justification for the enslavement of those whose humanity is somehow incomplete while retaining the awareness that slavery does not obliterate such humanity as they possess. And if he fails to argue the corollary that those who are not natural slaves cannot be accommodated to natural slavery, it is easy to see how the argument might go. If slavery is the rule of the slave’s body by a soul of another, then the very possibility of slavery depends upon the slave’s body not being governed by the slave’s own soul. In the case of natural slaves, of course, the soul is not equipped to rule and so the proper relation of soul to body can only be established through slavery which brings the slave’s body under the rule of the master’s soul. But for a complete human whose soul already rules the body with the despotic rule of a master, the body does not await enslavement, and indeed cannot be enslaved for the simple reason that it is, in a sense, already enslaved.

For a complete human to be enslaved, their body would have to be taken over by the soul of another. But, as Aristotle makes clear in the De Anima, the Pythagorean idea that any soul can find its way into any body is an absurdity. Just as each craft must employ its own tools, so each soul must employ its own body: a soul cannot start using another body any more than a carpenter can suddenly start employing a flute. [33] The idea that someone who is not a natural slave can be enslaved must therefore be similarly absurd: for it suggests that a master can appropriate a body that is already employed by another soul. The possibility that a body could be ruled by two souls at once is also excluded. Not only does every body have ‘its own peculiar shape or form’ and thus the unique soul appropriate to it, but the soul, is, by definition, what provides unity. If the soul were divided according to its functions and yet somehow still the soul of a single person, whatever held the parts of the soul together would be the soul, not the parts themselves. As Aristotle states: ‘If. . .some other thing gives the soul unity, this would really be the soul’. [34] Just as a tyrant is, by definition, unique in the exercise of his tyranny, [35] and a state could not simultaneously be subject to several tyrants—without thereby either being an oligarchy or disintegrating into separate states—so the soul’s rule of the body is also unique and exclusive. Where the soul rules the body, slavery is not just improper but impossible.

Greeks and Barbarians
The difference between natural slavery and non-slaves in legal slavery is therefore analogous to that between natural slaves and freemen under tyrannical government. According to Aristotle, and the Greeks in general, Asiatic peoples were slaves by nature and so acquiesced in the tyrannical nature of their monarchies without resentment, [36] whereas Greeks found tyrannies unendurable, and so were liable to revolt because as freemen they could not tolerate being treated as slaves. [37] Although both barbarians and Greeks might be subjected to the same form of government, it did not make them the same type of people. Similarly, slavery cannot make slaves of those who are not slaves simply by giving them the legal position of slaves.

Aristotle’s theory emphasizes that slaves are born not made, and that freemen and natural slaves are categories as mutually exclusive as those of Greek and barbarian. In consequence, anyone who is really a slave is suited to being one, and anyone who is not a slave by nature can never really be a slave whatever their legal position. On this account, to claim that someone who is really a slave—as opposed to merely being under the legal disadvantages of slavery—should not be a slave is simply a misunderstanding, a contradiction which implies either that the slave’s soul is somehow simultaneously complete and incomplete, or that the slave somehow has two souls, one complete and one incomplete.

Although within Aristotle’s theory the idea that those who are truly slaves are wrongly enslaved becomes unthinkable, his account also created a framework from which that unthinkable conclusion could be reached. Aristotle never bothered to work out how his theory of slavery could be correlated with his theory of the soul, and as a result never resolved the question of how, if the slave’s soul is incomplete and his body ruled by the master’s soul, the two souls are related to the slave’s body. The obvious answer would be to suggest that there was a division of labour with the master’s soul performing only those functions of which the slave’s inadequate soul was incapable, with the result that through slavery the slave gained the complete soul he otherwise lacked. However, in the De Anima, Aristotle explicitly rules out such a division in favour of the unity of the soul. Within the theory of slavery, therefore, was an implicit duplication of the soul which threatened to undermine the very theory of the soul on which Aristotle’s account of slavery depended.

Hegel
Aristotle maintained that the same relationship could exist between people (tyrants and subject) as between the constituent parts of an individual person (soul and body), and implied that the relationship of master and slave was this same relationship expressed between a person (the master) and another being (the slave) who was both a person and part of the other person. For Hegel, who sought simultaneously to describe both the interand the intra-personal aspects of human development, the slave therefore provided a natural focus. Indeed, the originality, and also the confusing complexity, of Hegel’s remarks on mastery and slavery may in large measure be attributed to his attempt to exploit the ambiguous condition of the slave in Aristotle’s account in order to generate precisely that contradiction which Aristotle excluded.

In order to understand Hegel’s argument, it is necessary to appreciate the extent to which his approach to the problem is structured in Aristotelian terms. Although the relevance of Aristotle’s theory to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic has often been noted, [38] its full significance to Hegel has not been appreciated. Indeed, some recent commentators have distanced Hegel’s dialectic from classical and colonial slavery on the basis that Hegel’s terms for master and slave, Herr and Knecht, are more appropriate to the feudal relation of lord and serf, or master and servant. [39] But this is a false distinction. In Christian von Garve’s German translation of Aristotle’s Politics, published posthumously in 1799, Aristotle’s word for the slave, doulos, is translated as both Sklave and Knecht, and occasionally also as Diener; but where the slave is directly juxtaposed with the master—rather than discussed in general—the two are almost invariably described as Knecht and Herr. [40] In the notes to Garve’s text, the equivalence of Aristotle’s despotés and doulos to the German Herr and Knecht is spelt out in the definitions given to the two words: despotés is the Greeks’ ‘particular word for the master (>Herr) who rules over either bonded or bought slaves (Diener)’; doulos, although not the most abject form of enslavement and also a metaphor for other kinds of submissiveness, ‘expresses the special character of this servitude (Knechtschaft)’. [41]

Self-Recognition through Work
Garve’s now almost wholly forgotten translation of the Politics is significant not only because it shows that Herr and Knecht were taken to be the German equivalents of Aristotle’s master and slave, but also because the notes incorporate an unfinished essay by Garve which discusses Aristotle’s theory of slavery from a contemporary perspective. [42] The degree to which Hegel may have been influenced by Garve must await full discussion elsewhere, [43] but one place in which Hegel appears to develop an insight from Garve’s essay is in his account of the slave’s self-recognition through work.

In addressing the question of whether it is possible for a slave to have virtue, Aristotle suggested that slaves participate in virtue only insofar as they need it to perform their masters’ orders, and that free artisans, such as cobblers, are in a similar position—which Aristotle calls ‘limited slavery’—in that their virtue is also derived from carrying out orders. However, Aristotle emphasizes that this does not imply that the master has any special knowledge of the tasks a slave or artisan performs: the master must know how to direct tasks and the slave must know how to execute them, but virtue attaches only to the former activity, which, as the cause of the latter, is also the cause of any virtue in the latter. [44] Garve realized that this argument opened up a significant space within which those in complete or limited slavery could exercise autonomy and so experience freedom, a freedom achieved not without but within their servitude. He articulated the argument first with reference to the contemporary artisan, but then outlined its implications for those in complete rather than limited servitude:

The work of craftsmen produces something which lasts and which serves for the use or pleasure of men. Their efforts are such that they are able to be independent of those for the benefit of whom they execute these tasks. The man who orders a pair of shoes for himself gives orders to the cobbler only to the extent to which he determines how he would like the shoes to be made, but it is not necessary for him to supervise the cobbler while he is preparing the shoes. Once the cobbler has received the order from his customer, in the carrying out of his task he simply observes the rules of his trade rather than the commands of his customer, and yet he produces exactly what is asked of him. The craftsman must to a certain extent submit to others when he accepts the order for his work, and also when he delivers the finished product. . .But he is, by the very nature of the matter, completely free while he works. [45]

From this essentially Aristotelian argument Garve extracts the paradoxical and profoundly un-Aristotelian conclusion that, in submitting to orders, the worker achieves a freedom which means that he ‘can eject from his workshop any customer who tries to lord it over him’ just as Apelles did to Alexander. Within the experience of work, specifically in the process of physically shaping a material object into something of permanent value, there is the potential not just for a liberating freedom, but for an overturning of the normal social hierarchy. It was for this reason, Garve suggests, that in antiquity ‘for those who made clothes or household implements for their masters, slavery became more bearable than for those who had to wait on their masters’, and for this reason too that ‘the work of the craftman was transferted so quickly from the hands of the slave into the hands of the freeman’. [46] Rather than risking the possibility that slaves might experience freedom through work, work of a liberating kind was given to the free.

In Hegel’s master-slave dialectic the insight that even unfree labour might be a route to freedom becomes an integral part of a far more subtle and complex argument, but its basic structure is still clearly discernable. The same anti-Aristotelian paradox lies at its heart for ‘the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own’. [47] Not only this, but there is the same emphasis upon both the formative nature of the work and the permanence of the object thus fashioned:

The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence. This. . .formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence. [48]

What Aristotle had tried to maintain as a virtue-free vacuum becomes in Hegel the site of a transformation.

Africans and Asiatics
Enough has been said to indicate that the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology shares certain continuities of vocabulary and thought with Aristotle’s theory of slavery. But reading the dialectic of the Phenomenology in the context of its later reformulations in the Philosophical Propaedeutic and the Encyclopaedia, and in the light of Hegel’s remarks on African slavery in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, suggests that Hegel’s engagement with Aristotle goes deeper still. That Hegel had the institution of slavery in mind when writing on mastery and slavery is clear from the Zusätze to the third volume of the Encyclopaedia, where the master-slave dialectic is illustrated with reference to the tyrant-subject and master-slave relations of antiquity. According to Hegel, in the ancient world, slavery existed in what were otherwise free states, because the Greeks and Romans had not yet attained the notion of absolute freedom, and believed that a man was free ‘only if he was born free’. [49] To this Aristotelian conception of a world synchronically divided between slave and free, Hegel juxtaposed his belief that the division between slave and free was essentially diachronic. While accepting Aristotle’s idea that individuals and nations who lacked thymos, or, as Hegel put it, the energy and courage—Muth is also Garve’s translation of thymos in the equivalent passages in Aristotle—to will their freedom, deserved to be enslaved by masters or tyrants, he maintained that slavery and tyranny were merely a necessary stage in the history of nations—and individuals—and hence only relatively justified. Citing the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus—one of Aristotle’s stock examples of tyranny in the Politics—he argued that his tyranny had taught the Athenians obedience to the law and so made tyranny in Athens redundant. [50] But since Hegel did not suppose the whole of humanity to have progressed towards freedom at the same rate, the appropriateness of tyranny and slavery was subject to local variation. He was thus able to reinscribe Aristotle’s distinction between barbarian slaves and free Greeks not as an immutable fact of nature but rather as the result of the uneven development of the human race.

Just as for Aristotle Asiatics had all been natural slaves, so for Hegel Africans were all slaves by virtue of their undeveloped consciousness. Since, according to Hegel, ‘the basic principle of all slavery is that man is not yet conscious of his freedom, and consequently sinks to the level of a mere object or worthless article’, [51] and the African had ‘not yet reached an awareness of any substantial objectivity’ such as God, law, or freedom, [52] it followed, as it had mutatis mutandis for Aristotle, both that all Africans were slaves, with the consequence that amongst them ‘the distinction between masters and slaves is a purely arbitrary one’, [53] and that their political order was invariably tyranny, which, being slaves, they considered perfectly legitimate and did not feel to constitute an injustice. [54] However, Hegel, writing in the light of half a century of anti-slavery agitation, [55] accepts both that slavery ought not to exist and that in rational states it does not exist. Colonial slavery, he suggests, is no different from classical slavery or serfdom in medieval and early modern Europe: it is just another ‘phase in man’s education’, a consequence of the general rule that man must ‘first become mature before he can be free’. [56] Just as Pisistratus’s tyranny had allowed the Athenians to mature, so, by implication, the European enslavement of Africans will eventually allow them to become conscious of their freedom as well.

Soul and Body
Since, like Aristotle, Hegel identifies the master-slave relation with that of tyrant and subject it would be natural for him to equate it also with soul and body. It is clear from the discussion of soul and body in the Encyclopaedia that Hegel did conceive of the relation between the two in terms of mastery and slavery. The development of the feeling soul towards consciousness is summarized in a Zusatz as the process through which ‘the soul becomes master (Meister) of its natural individuality, of its bodily nature’. [57] According to Hegel, this is achieved through habit, for in habit, the body is subjected to the domination of the soul and moulded to its particular feelings, while the soul is emancipated from particular feelings, and freed to become the actual soul of consciousness. As the Zusatz to this section of the Encyclopaedia states, to bring about this end the soul must ‘transform its identity with its body into an identity brought about or mediated by mind, must take possession of its body, must form it into a pliant and skilful instrument of its activity, so transform it that in it soul relates itself to itself and its body becomes an accident brought into harmony with its substance, with freedom’. [58] The phrase ‘instrument of activity’ (Werkzeug der Thatigkeit) is the same as that used in Garve’s translation of Aristotle to define the slave, [59] so there can be little doubt that if, as Hegel states, ‘on the one hand, habit makes a man free, on the other hand, it makes him a slave (Sklave)’, it is the body that is enslaved and its master, the soul, that is freed. [60]

From this account of the relation between soul and body it is clear that Hegel conceives habit in terms of the Aristotelian relation of master to slave—and soul to body. But although formulated in these terms, Hegel does not equate the soul-body relation with that of tyrant and subject, nor with historical forms of mastery and slavery, or the possibility of progress beyond such relations. If he had been a materialist or an epiphenomenalist rather than an idealist, he might perhaps have done so; instead, he seems to have shifted the dialectic to another level, with the result that it became not the dialectic of soul and body, but the dialectic of self-consciousness in all its inevitable duality. So although Hegel’s account of soul and body retains its Aristotelian form, the role of the soul-body relation in Aristotle’s account of natural slavery, and its function in providing an intrapersonal analogue to the interpersonal relation of tyrant and subject appears to have been transferred to another level of self awareness, that of self-consciousness.

That this is the case is shown by the fact that Hegel not only uses tyranny and slavery to illustrate the development of self-consciousness, but uses the development of consciousness to explicate the condition of slavery. According to the Encyclopaedia, it is universal self-consciousness, attained as a result of the master-slave dialectic, that gives rise to the virtues and institutions of civil society. [61] It is these virtues and institutions that Hegel supposes Africans to lack. The precise level of self-consciousness Hegel attributes to them can be gauged from the comment that Africans lack familial affection because such ‘philanthropic sentiments of love etc. entail a consciousness of the self which is no longer confined to the individual person’. [62] The problem, in other words, is that ‘The African, in his undifferentiated and concentrated unity, has not yet succeeded in making this distinction between himself as an individual and his essential universality’. [63] He is therefore ‘as yet unconscious of himself’, not in the sense that has not attained selfconsciousness but in the sense that he has not progressed beyond immediate self-consciousness which ‘has not as yet for its object the I=I, but only the “I”. . .[and] is not as yet aware of its freedom’. [64]

The Promise of Freedom
It is, of course, through the master-slave dialectic, that self-consciousness is brought ‘to the consciousness of. . .real universality, of the freedom belonging to all’. [65] Similarly, it is through the development of consciousness that emancipation from the actual historical experience of slavery becomes possible. Just as slavery existed in the classical world because the Greeks and Romans ‘did not know that man as such, man as this universal “I”, as rational self-consciousness, is entitled to freedom’, [66] so it exists in Africa where consciousness as immediate self-consciousness is unaware of its freedom. However, just as the ancients developed through this experience of servitude to masters and tyrants, so Africans may be expected to attain a universal self-consciousness through the experience of enslavement by Europeans. As Hegel noted in the Encyclopaedia, some Africans having acquired freedom ‘through Christianity after a long spiritual servitude’ had in Haiti actually formed a state on Christian principles. [67] Since Hegel held universal self-consciousness to be the root of freedom, the state, and other civil virtues, the fact that colonial slavery had allowed some Africans to attain this universality meant that their consciousness had developed through the experience of slavery.

Whereas Aristotle had suggested that the explanation and justification for slavery lay in the existence of people with incomplete souls, Hegel argued that the explanation for slavery was undeveloped selfconsciousness. However, the shift from soul to consciousness does not appear to have disrupted the essential Aristotelian trinity of relationships in which master-slave and tyrant-subject relations are both analogous to one another, and simultaneously analogous to and sustained by a third type of relationship, internal to the person. In Aristotle, the interpersonal relation of master and slave worked through being an internal relation between soul and body—the master’s soul and the slave’s body. Is there anything comparable in Hegel?

The Master-Slave Dialectic
Since Hegel’s account of slavery is so clearly conceived within Aristotelian terms, and since he differs from Aristotle chiefly in considering the transcendence of slavery to be a function of human progress in history, it is appropriate to read the master-slave dialectic as an account of how that progress is achieved. [68] However, it is important to remember that in the Phenomenology the master-slave dialectic functions chiefly as a means of illustrating a particular phase in the development of self-consciousness. As such, it is not always clear when Hegel is referring to events that are intrapersonal, in the sense that they take place within a single individual, and when he is referring to events that are interpersonal and so require the involvement of more than one individual. Most commentators have concentrated on the interpersonal aspect to the exclusion of the intrapersonal; however, as Josiah Royce and G.A. Kelly both emphasized, the dialectic also seems to articulate an internal division, ‘the shifting pattern of psychological domination and servitude within the individual ego’. [69]

Intrapersonal and Interpersonal
In the Phenomenology, there are repeated references to the splitting of self-consciousness into opposing extremes, and to the inescapable mirroring of one by the other. Both metaphors suggest that we are dealing, not with the activities of separate human beings, but with component parts of the individual psyche. In order to understand how this might be the case it is necessary to consider why we might think of there being two self-consciousnesses within a single person. According to Hegel, self-consciousness becomes self-consciousness rather than consciousness by differentiating itself from the content of consciousness, between an ‘I’ that is conscious and what that ‘I’ is conscious of. However, insofar as that ‘I’ is self-conscious what it is conscious of should be another ‘I’ and not a self-less object. So self-consciousness moves towards positing its content as another selfconsciousness, a double of itself.

In self-consciousness, therefore, we have a division and duplication which can be thought of as two selves. However, as Hegel makes clear, these two self-consciousnesses are inevitably also one and the same, and so they mirror each other: ‘Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same’. [70] This is where the problem starts, because both self-consciousnesses seek to establish their own selfhood, and selfhood has to be recognized by the other. (To think of yourself as a self, you have to think of yourself thinking of yourself as a self, but that makes the self you think of thinking of yourself as a self rather less of a self than you.) As a result, the two self-consciousnesses embark on the struggle for priority that initiates the dialectic.

It is possible to conceive of the dialectic taking place internally between two self-consciousnesses, one of which masters the other and uses it as the medium through which it is conscious of material reality. But Hegel’s account also employs several concepts such as recognition, fighting, and work—not to mention mastery and slavery themselves—that are extremely difficult to understand in anything other than interpersonal terms. And in the dialectic’s first formulation, in the System of Ethical Life, Hegel states that it is where there is ‘a plurality of individuals’ and their power of life is unequal, that the relation between them, as ‘person to person’, is that of lordship and bondage. [71] Thereafter, although the Phenomenology cast the dialectic primarily as the relation of self-consciousness with itself, there remained a tendency, evident in the Propaedeutic and especially in the Encyclopaedia, for Hegel to describe the master self-consciousness and servile self-consciousness as separate people.

If the master-slave dialectic is read as an inter-personal relationship, then the fact there is already more than one distinct self-consciousness can be assumed. In this context, recognition becomes more than just the acknowledgement of the integrity and independence of one’s own consciousness as an object; it now involves acknowledging another individual as free and giving him the respect due to someone in that state. Similarly, the fight is now a literal struggle in which one of the combatants, faced with the prospect of biological death, gives up his freedom and yields recognition to the other in return for his life.

Soul and History
What is unclear, however, is how Hegel thinks the intrapersonal development of self-consciousness, through what is only metaphorically a master-slave dialectic, is related to the interpersonal relations of actual masters and slaves in history. Since each implies the other—undeveloped consciousness is the cause of slavery and slavery causes the consciousness to develop—there must be some relationship, but what is it? Hegel does not give a direct answer, but it is nevertheless possible to argue that a particular type of relationship is implied both by the internal structure of the argument, and by the Aristotelian framework within which it is conceived. For Aristotle, the concept of slavery applied equally to the relation of the soul to the body and the master and to the slave—or tyrant to subject. For Hegel, the concept of slavery applied equally to the relation of the master self-consciousness to the servile self-consciousness and to the relations of actual masters and slaves—or tyrants and subjects. For Aristotle, the external relationship of master and slave is dependent upon and effected through the internal relationship between soul and body. Specifically, slaves are distinguished by a deficiency in their internal constitution which makes their souls incapable of mastering their bodies, and so makes their bodies properly subject to the souls of those who are capable of such mastery.

For Hegel, too, the external relation of master and slave depends on an internal one, namely that of self-consciousness to itself. If Hegel’s argument follows Aristotle—as it does up to this point, save that the role of soul and body has been transferred to master self-consciousness and servile self-consciousness—then slaves would be distinguished by some deficiency in self-consciousness such that of the duplicated self-consciousnesses, one could not master and enslave the other and so required another self-consciousness to do so. In which case, the external relation of master to slave would be effected through the master self-consciousness of one individual enslaving the self-consciousness of another, with the result that the master-slave dialectic would be simultaneously interand intrapersonal, being between different persons related as a single individual.

The plausibility of the above interpretation is suggested not only by its congruity with the Aristotelian framework within which Hegel’s argument is constructed, but by the fact that it is difficult to make sense of Hegel’s oscillation between the interand the intrapersonal without assuming that the master-slave dialectic is not just a case of self-consciousness relating to itself as though it were two persons, but also of two persons relating as though they were one self-consciousness. Evidence that this is so is provided by Hegel’s first tentative account of the relation of master and slave in the System of Ethical Life. Although Hegel is thinking of mastery and slavery in terms of interpersonal relations, he nevertheless maintains that within the relation of master and slave ‘the former is related to the latter as cause; indifferent itself, it is the latter’s life and soul or spirit’. [72] This definition, which recalls Aristotle’s account of slavery where the master is to the slave as soul to body, and so causes the action of which the slave is the instrument just as ‘the soul is the cause. . .of the living body’, [73] is restated still more explicitly in the Propaedeutic, where it is said that the slave ‘lacks a self and has another self [the master’s] in place of his own’. [74]

Sleepwalking and Slavery
However, it was not only Aristotle who offered a model of how two persons might function as one. Hegel’s description of one person being the soul of another also looks forward to his account of the relation of magnetizer and somnambulist in the Philosophy of Mind. The practice of animal magnetism, or mesmerism, in which the magnetist would place the patient into a magnetic sleep or trance so that they were subject to the magnetizer’s will was described by Kluge, one of Hegel’s sources, in terms of the mastery (Herrschaft) which the magnetizer exercised over the patient, [75] and Hegel’s remarks on the topic are significant both because they echo his first definition of the master-slave relation, and because in describing two persons as related so that one becomes the consciousness of the other they constitute a direct parallel to his other accounts of master and slave. According to Hegel,

The patient in this condition is accordingly made, and continues to be, subject to the power of another person, the magnetizer; so that when the two are thus in psychical rapport, the selfless individual, not really a ‘person’, has for his subjective consciousness the consciousness of the other. This latter self-possessed individual is thus the effective subjective soul of the former, and the genius which may even supply him with a train of ideas. [76]

In animal magnetism, therefore, we have an example of the way in which two separate individuals may come to function as one when one forfeits the freedom rooted in consciousness and the other becomes his consciousness, soul, and genius. [77] The relationship between them is then what Hegel calls a magical relationship, [78] i.e. a relationship in which one mind exercises unmediated influence over another, as does man over the animals, and the soul over the body when, in habit, it makes the body ‘a subservient, unresisting instrument of its will’. [79] Since the relations of soul to body and man to animal were standard Aristotelian analogues of the master-slave relation, this strongly suggests that Hegel thought of the relation of magnetizer to somnambulist in terms equivalent not only to his own account of master and slave but to Aristotle’s as well.

But unlike Aristotle’s theory of slavery, the theory of animal magnetism offered an account of how the selfless individual might gain from this loss of individual identity. According to Walther’s Physiologie des Menschen, a German medical textbook contemporary with Hegel’s Phenomenology, when two individuals are in magnetic rapport they experience an ‘intimate community of action such that one soul is in both of them’ except that ‘on one side there is an active and on the other a passive rapport’. However, Walther continues, ‘this relation can also be reversed in an instant and the somnambulist magnetize the magnetizer’. [80] So although the structure of the magnetic relation might be identical to that of Aristotle’s master and slave in that one person became part of another and one soul governed two bodies, it held within it the potential for that relationship to be overturned, and the positions reversed. [81] This possibility was implicit in the ambiguous position of the somnambulist: although, the somnambulist might be a selfless individual possessed by the soul, or consciousness, of the magnetizer, his individual soul was not so much annihilated as dissolved in the universal soul of the world. As Walther observed, ‘in magnetic sleep the soul is in intimate communion with the universal world soul’. [82] So although the somnambulist’s individual soul is functionally replaced by that of the magnetizer, it also participates in the universal soul which is shared with that of the magnetizer, with the result that, as Walther put it, ‘that which separates and divides them no longer exists’, and, by implication, the question of which of the two is dominant and which subordinate becomes secondary.

Pure Universality
Hegel rehearses the commonplace distinction between the individual and universal conceptions of the soul in his account of magnetism. [83] But for him, there is no straightforward exchange of individuality for universality in magnetic sleep, because the somnambulist loses full consciousness only to achieve a limited form of universality at a lower psychic level. [84] Despite this shift, it is not difficult to see the parallel with the master-slave dialectic where the slave exchanges individuality for universality at the same psychic level, namely that of self-consciousness. Just as the consciousness of the somnambulist becomes ‘an inward consciousness’ so, after the fight, the slave is ‘a consciousness forced back into itself’. [85] However, for the slave, unlike the somnambulist whose consciousness is reduced to the level of genius, there is no real loss: it is still a self-consciousness because, according to Hegel, the condition of self-consciousness without a self-object, ‘this pure universal movement, the absolute melting away of everything stable, is the essential nature of self-consciousness’. [86] So just as in the magnetic state the selfless somnambulist was thought to participate in what Hegel termed ‘the wholly universal being in which all differences are only ideal and which does not one-sidedly stand over against its Other’, [87] so in the master-slave dialectic the slave gains ‘the intuition of itself not as a particular existence distinct from others but as the implicit universal self’. [88]

Animal magnetism provided a model for an interpersonal relation that took the form an intrapersonal one, and in which the resulting loss of individuality for one party led to their participation in universality. Given that Hegel himself conceived the magnetic relation in terms parallel to that of the Aristotelian master and slave, and describes it in terms strongly reminiscent of the master-slave dialectic, it is difficult to believe that the dynamics of animal magnetism are not reflected in the dialectic itself. If so—and here, for the first time, it is necessary to go a little beyond what is explicitly stated by Hegel—it would suggest that master and slave are related as follows: the self-consciousness of the slave is the immediate self-consciousness of one whose self-consciousness, although perhaps duplicated has not progressed to one-sided, let alone mutual recognition. This self-consciousness is shattered in the fight with the result that the object of the slave’s self-consciousness becomes the consciousness of another individual—the master—without the object of the master’s self-consciousness thereby becoming the slave’s consciousness. From this position of one-sided recognition, in which the slave’s self-consciousness has as its object not itself but the consciousness of his master, the slave is emancipated first by the fact that not having an individual self-consciousness is the experience of universal self-consciousness, and secondly, by the fact that, through work, he once again becomes the object of his own self-consciousness—that is, universal self-consciousness. His self-consciousness then has as a double object itself and the master. Being thus doubly and universally self-conscious, the slave can no longer be a slave, because slavery is having for the object of self-consciousness the consciousness of another, and although the slave does have as its object of self-consciousness the consciousness of another he also has his own consciousness. The result of the dialectic is therefore that the servile self-consciousness is no longer merely servile: it has become ‘a being which thinks or is a free self-consciousness’, and the individual whose self-consciousness became merely servile is no longer a slave.

Double Consciousness
In the Phenomenology, the result of the dialectic is that the servile consciousness recognizes its own being-for-self and the being-for-self of the master consciousness without grasping the identity of the two. For the servile consciousness, therefore, the outcome is that instead of having a single object—as was the case when self-consciousnesses were merely duplicated—it now has a double object: the self-consciousness of the master and the self-consciousness of itself. In reality, these are the same because both are universal self-consciousness, but their identity remains unperceived by the servile self-consciousness. [89] The situation is therefore the same as that of the unhappy consciousness where ‘the duplication which formerly was divided between two individuals, the lord and the bondsman, is now lodged in one. . .[but] it is not as yet explicitly aware that this is its essential nature, or that it is the unity of both’. [90]

The Violent Diremption of Spirit
In the Propaedeutic, this transition is implicitly interpreted at an interpersonal level and invested with greater significance: it is ‘the transition to Positive Freedom’, in which the former servile self-consciousness attains universal self-consciousness and so ‘recognizes itself and the other Self-Consciousnesses within it, and is, in turn, recognized by them’. [91] This conclusion is restated in the Encyclopaedia where Hegel avers that ‘universal self-consciousness is the affirmative awareness of self in an other self’. The appended Zusatz gives a fuller explanation of what this means: [92]

In this state of universal freedom, in being reflected into myself, I am immediately reflected into the other person, and, conversely, in relating myself to the other I am immediately self related. Here, therefore, we have the violent diremption of mind or spirit into different selves which are both in and for themselves and for one another, are independent, absolutely impenetrable, resistant, and yet at the same time identical with one another, hence not independent, not impenetrable, but, as it were, fused with one another. [93]

The contradictory nature of the dialectic at an interpersonal level is here stated as unambiguously as it can be. Just as the slave, in recognizing himself to be free, comes to recognize himself in the master, so, when the slave is free, the master comes to see himself in the slave. This development is then the model for the mutual recognition of all by all which characterizes universal self-consciousness. Each recognizes himself in the other, so everyone is simultaneously different and yet the same.

Read in the context of the Aristotelian framework within which it is constructed, the outcome of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic proves to be pointedly anti-Aristotelian. Aristotle had argued that there was a clear and unalterable division between slave and free, and that the institution of slavery, in its natural rather than its legal form, depended upon that division. But by Hegel’s time, this theory was clearly incompatible with the development of slavery in world history. That there had been slavery in many societies was indisputable, but so was the fact that slavery had disappeared from many of those societies and was moving towards abolition in the Americas. Aristotle had made no allowance for wholesale emancipation; in terms of his theory, it would mean either that none of those emancipated had ever really been slaves or else that all were still slaves and so incapable of self-government or of forming a state. [94] However, it was a matter of history that in Haiti slaves had formed a state. If, as Hegel appears to have done, one still thought of slavery in essentially Aristotelian terms, then the simplest way to interpret the evolution of slavery into freedom was to allow that contradiction which Aristotle had excluded: the idea that freemen might really be slaves, and that true slaves might not just be slaves but become free as well.

In both Hegel and Aristotle, the master-slave dyad is an interpersonal relation constructed as an intrapersonal one. In both cases this is made possible through the homology between mastery and slavery at an interpersonal level and some internal relationship constitutive of the individual person. In Aristotle, this is the relation of soul to body; in Hegel it is the relationship of self-consciousness to itself. For both philosophers, the condition of slavery is one in which the dominant internal pole of the master is related to the subordinated internal pole of the slave in the same way as it would be related to its own internal subordinate. One consequence of conceiving slavery in this way is that the potentially dominant pole of the subordinated individual remains, not of course fulfilling a dominant role, but as an unfulfilled potential or ineffectual residuum. According to Hegel, the irony of the master-slave relation lies in the fact that this potentially dominant pole is developed through the condition of slavery itself; that is, as a direct result of the subordinate pole’s subordination to another. It is because the servile selfconsciousness of the slave is dissolved and then used as a mere instrument that it gains recognition from itself, and so develops its own dominant pole—a recognized self-consciousness—alongside that of the master. If Hegel’s dialectic were translated back into Aristotelian terms, it would mean that because his body functioned as an instrument of action the slave’s soul became complete and so gained the same control of the body as that exercised by the master. The result would therefore be two complete souls in one body rather than two recognized self-consciousnesses in one person, and not just any two souls but the souls of master and slave—in Aristotelian terms a double impossibility, for the soul of a master could govern a slave’s body if, and only if, the slave’s soul were incapable of doing so.

One Body, Two Souls
Two souls in one body might have seemed like an impossibility to Aristotle, but in animal magnetism there was new, seemingly scientific, evidence to suggest not only that one soul might govern two bodies but that one body might contain two souls. From Puységur’s first experiments with magnetic sleep it was apparent that the difference between the waking and magnetic states of one individual were such that they had to be regarded as ‘two different existences’. [95] As one German contemporary of Hegel put it, the somnambulist ‘has a double being, one in the waking state, one in the magnetic crisis’, with the result that his ‘self-consciousness in the waking and the magnetic states appears to be truly double’. [96] In most accounts, this double consciousness is understood to take the form of an alternation between magnetic and waking states. However, insofar as the somnambulist retained some form of selfhood, the doubling in the magnetic state could be simultaneous. In Hegel’s account, the somnambulist loses its ‘adult, formed, and developed consciousness’ but ‘retains along with its content a certain nominal self-hood’. [97] In this condition, therefore, the individual is not self-consciousness but rather ‘a genius which beholds itself, with the consequence that in relation to the magnetizer,

When the substance of both is thus made one, there is only one subjectivity of consciousness: the patient has a sort of individuality, but it is empty, not on the spot, not actual. . .the somnambulist is thus brought into rapport with two genii and a twofold set of ideas, his own and that of the magnetizer. [98]
So although the somnambulist has only one consciousness, that of the magnetizer, he nevertheless retains his own genius alongside that of the magnetizer with whom he is in rapport. The doubling that takes place in the master-slave dialectic would seem to conform to this pattern except that the double self-consciousness that results is not the product of the conjunction of the master/magnetizer’s consciousness and the slave/somnambulist’s normal consciousness, but the conjunction of the master’s consciousness with the slave’s universal consciousness gained through slavery.

Mesmerism and the Dialectic
Hegel discussed animal magnetism at length only after he had formulated master-slave dialectic, but the close parallels between the two suggest not only that Hegel’s account of somnambulism may reflect the structure of the dialectic, but that the dialectic may itself draw on magnetic theory. It is impossible to prove this hypothesis beyond doubt, but given that Hegel’s account of animal magnetism is by no means unusual and that all the relevant ideas were in circulation long before Hegel formulated the dialectic, the parallels are unlikely to be fortuitous. As Robert Darnton has demonstrated, mesmerism provided a stimulus to radical political ideas before the French Revolution, and its emphasis upon the magnetic interconnectedness of all individuals lent support to theories of human equality and fraternity. [99] For Hegel, trying to square an essentially static Aristotelian conception of slavery with the historical dynamic of emancipation, the theory of animal magnetism may therefore have offered two vital insights into how slavery was transformed into freedom. It undermined the belief in the unity of the soul upon which Aristotle had insisted, and provided a way of describing how being enslaved, like being magnetized, might paradoxically be a step towards universality and freedom. [100]

Du Bois
The close analogy between Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and the practice of animal magnetism may not have attracted much attention from Hegel scholars, but it was nevertheless intuited by Du Bois, who fused the two in his famous description of the double consciousness of the African American:

After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others. . . One ever feels this twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body. [101]

Although it has been noted that the idea of double consciousness reflects contemporary psychological theories derived from early nineteenth-century experiments in magnetism, and that it echoes Hegel’s account of the unhappy consciousness in the Phenomenology, the intimate connection between the two remains unexplored and the depth of Du Bois’s Hegelian insight unfathomed. [102] What has not been fully recognized is not only that for Du Bois double consciousness and the veil are two ways of describing the same condition, but that the imagery of veiling and second sight is just as much part of the vocabulary, of animal magnetism as double consciousness, and as such is used by Hegel himself. The attribution of double consciousness to emancipated slaves is therefore not just a literary appropriation of an Hegelian trope, [103] but a redeployment of the vocabulary of magnetism to elaborate the outcome of emancipation within the same terms as those used in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.

The Functions of the Veil
For Du Bois, the veil has three related functions. Sometimes it is the veil of the readers’ ignorance which the author promises to throw aside in order to reveal a truth that is hidden from view. More often it is the veil that divides black from white within American society, preventing members of each group from understanding the other. In drawing aside the veil, Du Bois is therefore not just uncovering any truth but specifically the truth about the black world that is hidden from his white readers. On other occasions, however, it appears that the veil lies not between black and white but rather within black American consciousness, dividing one consciousness from the other within a single individual. Insofar as this is the case, unveiling the truth about black people means not just revealing that something is veiled but revealing something veiled, something that continues to be partially hidden even as it is uncovered.

It is the veil within consciousness that is movingly evoked by Du Bois in his description of his own son in ‘Of the Passing of the FirstBorn’:

How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown. . .Why was his hair tinted with gold?. . .Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue?. . .And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil. [104]

And just as the mixed ancestry of Du Bois’s child contributed to the double coding of his features, so the double lives of American Negroes create a comparable doubling within:

From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American. . .must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence. The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals [105]

According to Du Bois, the interpersonal veil that divides black from white in America is internalized with the result that the black American develops not merely the two consciousnesses appropriate to being a (white) American on the one hand and a black (nonAmerican) but also the veil between them. And because white and black are veiled from one another, the American Negro is veiled from himself, able to see himself either as an American or as a Negro but not as both at the same time.

Century of Human Sympathy
Although Du Bois regards the double consciousness and the veil as a partially negative state of affairs, there can be little doubt that it only exists as a result of the growing rapport between white and black. It is never explicitly stated by Du Bois, but of the social changes that formed double consciousness the most important was the slow, painful dawning of mutual recognition between slave and master which Hegel called ‘the affirmative awareness of self in an other self’. [106] Du Bois gives a lyrical description of this process in his essay on Alexander Crummell:

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhopper and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, ‘Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?’ And then all helplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, ‘O World of Worlds, how shall man make you one?’ [107]

This diffusion of human sympathy meant that white Americans were able to see that blacks were Americans too. On the other side, it meant not only that blacks saw the dependency of the whites but that they also began to recognize self in other. For the young Alexander Crummell, the effect of this spreading recognition was a new ability to picture himself within the world of the master, to see as Du Bois puts it, ‘the blue and gold of life’. For black Americans whose consciousness was formed in this period, it might therefore be said that they were born with the psychic equivalent of the division that Du Bois saw physically inscribed on his own son: with only the shadow of the veil separating the blue and gold from the brown and the olive.

Being born with a veil is therefore not quite the same as being born within the veil. It is not just a matter of being born black in a white man’s world; it is rather the condition of being born black in a world that is divided but, thanks to the diffusion of human sympathy and the ending of slavery, also imaginatively interconnected and practically interdependent. [108] It is the conjunction of the two which ensures that the external veil becomes an internal one, and that the post-bellum generation of African-Americans are not so much unknown as partially known, both visible and invisible at the same time.

Gift of Second Sight
The corollary of this is, as Du Bois puts it, that the American black is both ‘born with a veil, and gifted with a second sight’. The imagery is again drawn from the vocabulary of magnetism. According to the nineteenth-century British magnetist William Gregory, when the magnetist, or operator, puts the patient into a trance ‘there is in many cases a veil, as it were, drawn before the [patient’s] eyes, concealing the operator’s face and other objects’. [109] The result, as Hegel had put it, was that when the soul is sunk in magnetic sleep ‘all that occupies the waking consciousness, the world outside it and its relationship to that world, is under a veil’. [110]

In the Philosophy of Mind, the relationship between veiling and second sight is spelt out in a Zusatz dealing with the possibility of the somnambulist’s clairvoyant foreknowledge of future events, which Hegel, using the English phrase, terms ‘second sight’. According to Hegel, when magnetized,

The clairvoyant is in a state of concentration and contemplates this veiled life of his with all its content in a concentrated manner. In the determinateness of this concentrated state, the determinations of space and time are also veiled. . .But since the clairvoyant is, at the same time, an ideational being he must make outwardly apparent these determinations veiled in his concentrated life. [111]

In other words, although the feeling soul of the somnambulist may apprehend something without the mediation of time, it is nevertheless expressed through the mediation of time, with the result that it effectively—although not metaphysically—constitutes foreknowledge of a future event. Hegel is unwilling to allow that this ability extends very far, but nevertheless asserts that ‘Especially among Highlanders, the faculty of so-called ‘second sight’ is even now not uncommon. Persons with this gift see themselves double, see themselves in situations and circumstances in which they will find themselves only subsequently’. [112]

Although Hegel applies ‘second sight’ only to premonitions of the future, in most accounts of magnetism the term was used to describe all forms of clairvoyant ability in the magnetic state. So although a somnambulist might be veiled in the sense that she was unable to see what was immediately in front of her, she could nevertheless simultaneously acquire a second sight, a clairvoyant ability to see things that she would not normally be able to see, such as events that had not yet taken place, the contents of rooms she has not visited etc. Being veiled and clairvoyant are therefore two aspects of the same condition, and the result is potentially a form of double vision in that if—as Hegel forgetfully suggests—the ordinary waking consciousness were not under a veil, the somnambulist would see both what she would ordinarily see and what they see with her second sight.

Clairvoyance and Somnambulism
How then does this pattern of veiling and second sight relate to the condition of double consciousness—or as Hegel, put it, twofold genius? Since a somnambulist is veiled, in that she is unable to see what would be seen by her usual consciousness, and clairvoyant insofar as she sees what is visible to her second consciousness, if that consciousness is that of the magnetizer, she sees what he sees, but if she is open to other influences, she may see what they see. Veiling and clairvoyance are, in other words, ways of describing the condition of double consciousness from the perspective of the single consciousness: what is veiled is simply the content of the first consciousness, what is seen with second sight is what is seen with the second consciousness. (However, if one conceives of two consciousnesses with equal claims to priority, there is no reason why one should not reverse the terms and think of the second consciousness as veiled whenever the first consciousness is operating, and of ‘first sight’ as a kind of clairvoyance.)

There is, in other words, a deep coherence in Du Bois’s imagery of veiling, double consciousness, and second sight, not only in that they can all be traced to Hegel, but in that they are all recognisably descriptions of the same magnetic condition. But in applying these terms to the emancipated slave, Du Bois is clearly not just appropriating the vocabulary of magnetic theory for his own purposes, for Hegel had himself suggested that the outcome of the master-slave dialectic, and, by implication, the struggle for emancipation in the Americas, was a form of double consciousness. Du Bois is, in other words drawing on the magnetic parallel to the master-slave dialectic to explicate the outcome of the dialectic itself. And although Du Bois does not deploy the full version of argument from the Phenomenology—with its emphasis on fear and work—the Aristotelian assumption that slavery is an interpersonal relationship that has the form of an intrapersonal one is retained. The basic reason for double consciousness is that those who possess it have been possessed by others. They see themselves through the eyes of another because their minds have been taken over by others. But the fundamental Hegelian move which Du Bois preserves is that emancipation does not take the form of throwing off this parasitic consciousness but of gaining one’s own sense of self in addition to it, and as a result not only seeing the other in oneself, but seeing one’s self not only in one’s self but in the other as well.

Slavery and the Self
Aristotle, Hegel, and Du Bois each offers a description of slavery at a particular historical moment. Aristotle describes the position of the slave in a world where slave labour is an essential and unquestioned part of the economy; Hegel tries to articulate the dynamic of emancipation at a time when colonial slavery is slowly beginning to dissolve; Du Bois describes the condition of the emancipated slave in the aftermath of the American Civil War. But although each account broadly endorses the situation it describes, at a deeper level all are mutually compatible, for Du Bois is using Hegel’s account of the master-slave relation, which in turn is based on the Aristotelian theory of slavery.

The suggestion that Du Bois thinks of slavery in the same terms as Atistotle may appear surprising, but if Du Bois’s account of double consciousness is taken seriously, we have to accept that Aristotle offers a description of the condition of the slave that may, at one level, be largely accurate. On this view, what Aristotle uncovered was not a metaphysical truth that justified the institution of slavery, but something of the duality inherent in the condition of the slave. As many commentators have noted, slavery is liable to generate conceptual difficulties for anyone trying to give a systematic account of the institution in terms of standard binary oppositions. [113] The slave is alive, but socially dead; a being who can be called upon to perform any human function without thereby acquiring the status associated with it; a personality without personhood. Aristotle recognized these contradictions and tried to accommodate them within his theory. In so doing he highlighted two features of slavery crucial to subsequent interpretations. The first was that the easiest way to express the contradictions of slavery was by assuming that slaves had a dual identity: one qua slave and one qua human being; one in which they functioned like a soulless body or tool, and one in which they had a soul like, but not quite the same as, the free. The second was that insofar as the slave was a slave, the master’s humanity took the place of the slave’s. As a result the slave became part of the master: a body governed by the master’s soul.

In Aristotle, these two features of slavery were not, and indeed could not be, brought together. However, his account of how the master used a slave as a soul used a body suggested that slavery might be seen as something akin to spirit possession in which the body of one individual was possessed by the spirit or soul of another. Animal magnetism provided a seemingly scientific example of this relation, and offered an example of how the psychic duality implied by Aristotle might be realized. In Hegel, this model is used to argue that emancipation works not, as might be supposed, by the consciousness of the slave ejecting the psychic parasite but by developing a full consciousness alongside it. Hegel’s argument reflects the Aristotelian assumption that natural slaves, being incomplete, do not cease to be slaves if they no longer have masters, and suggests that slaves can only become truly free by developing what they lack. But the argument can nevertheless be used by those who do not suppose slavery to have any such metaphysical foundation. Insofar as Aristotle merely inscribed the social contradictions of slavery within the soul(s) of slaves, the Hegelian account of emancipation can be understood in terms of social identity as well, and it was on this level that Du Bois found Hegel’s argument applicable to his own situation. What we find in Du Bois is a tacit acceptance both of the idea that slavery involves some kind of fracture or division of the self, and of the Hegelian point that freedom does not reunite the self so much as allow the fractured self to realize its implicit duality.

Slavery and Tyranny
This progression from Aristotle to Hegel to Du Bois is not just a curious piece of intellectual history, a genealogy of ideas about slavery and selfhood that has no bearing on the history of actual selves or on the social realities of life during and after slavery. On the contrary, each account is a description of the relationship between slavery and the self at a particular point of time. Of course, it can be argued that each writer misconstrued the situation he described, but even if this could be shown, there is no gainsaying the fact that each account seems to have been accepted by many of those subsequently involved on both sides of the relationship. Aristotle’s theory of slavery was found to be serviceable account of the master-slave relation by generations of European slaveholders; Hegel’s master-slave dialectic seems to have struck a chord not only with Du Bois, but also with many of those engaged in struggles for liberation of other kinds; Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness has served as a paradigm for the interpretation of the African-American experience for almost a century. Given that all of these accounts rely on the same basic model of how that relation operates, the fact that so many of those involved on both sides seem to have found one or another version of that model applicable to their own situation indicates that the model reflects the lived experience not just of slavery but—as Aristotle and Hegel implied—of forms of tyranny as well.

One consequence of this argument is that it suggests that the double and multiple selves of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and psychology may reflect the multiple social emancipations that have occurred in the same period. [114] However, the point I want to make here is not so much that Aristotle, Hegel and Du Bois have collectively articulated the essential truth of domination and emancipation, as that the adoption of the same underlying model will have made that model constitutive of the relationship between slavery and selfhood, and that insofar as the model has provided the partern for other discourses of emancipation—whether of gender, race, or class—the selves formed through these liberations are liable to have the same characteristics. This would be irrelevant if what we understand as the self is what Taylor calls the punctual self of continuous self-perception. But if we share Taylor and MacInryre’s understanding of what selves are within the framework of moral enquiry, then the model of master-slave relations outlined above must be taken as offering a valid insight into the self and its history. As Taylor argued in his influential paper ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’, ‘As men we are self-defining beings, and we are partly what we are in virtue of the self-definitions which we have accepted, however we have come by them’. [115] So if people find it helpful to think of themselves or of others as double or multipIe selves, then this interpretation cannot easily be dismissed as ‘an overdramatized image’. On the contrary, we may have to accept—as Taylor argues we do of virtue terms—that ‘if we cannot deliberate effectively, or understand and explain people’s action illuminatingly, without such terms. . .then these are real fearures of our world’. [116]

Multiplication through History
If so, the implications for Taylor and MacIntyre’s projects are considerable. Both philosophers offer a sharply drawn contrast between the self as a single character embedded within historical and social narratives, and what MacIntyre terms the emotivist or unencumbered self, and Taylor the neutral or punctual self, which has no history, belongs to no community, and imagines itself free to assume or reject any identity or moral orientation. But if we take seriously the picture of the double or multiple self formed through the process of enslavement and emancipation, then this suggests there is another alternative: a self that has no single identity or orientation not because it lacks a place in history but rather because it cannot escape it. Such selves pose a problem for both MacIntyre and Taylor. For although slavery offers just the sort of historical narrative which both consider morally relevant—MacIntyre actually cites being a descendant or beneficiary of slaveholders as something constitutive of the identity of a modern American [117]—insofar as it involves a duplication of the self it can hardly be accommodated within theories that rely upon the idea of having a single location in moral space as the foundation of objective moral judgement. If, as MacIntyre claims, ‘What is better or worse for X depends upon the character of that intelligible narrative which provides X’s life with its unity’, [118] then what can be said about those whose communal narratives have given their lives disunity, and whose personal quests seem to lead in opposite directions?

That MacIntyre and Taylor’s understanding of the moral self seems inapplicable to the duplicated selves formed through slavery is probably no accident, for the emphasis upon the unity of virtues and the corresponding unity of the life that embodies those virtues is taken directly from Aristotle. Aristotle, of course, denied that slaves exercised virtue except performing actions commanded by the master, and claimed that any virtue associated with those actions was the master’s rather than the slave’s. MacIntyre is naturally affronted by this, but nevertheless maintains that rejecting Aristotle’s view on this point ‘need not carry any large implications for our attitudes to his overall theory’. [119] However, things may not be so easy. Indeed, the possibility that Aristotle may have had a more accurate view of the limitations of his own theory is suggested by Taylor in ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’. Not only are we partly constituted through self-definition, but

What definitions we understand and what ones we don’t understand, is closely linked to the self-definitions which help to constitute what we are. . .[and] we have great difficulty grasping definitions whose terms structure the world in ways which are utterly different from, incompatible with our own. [120]

If this is true, anyone who defines themselves as a united, single self will find it extraordinarily difficult to understand the world from the perspective of those who define themselves otherwise. And the inevitable result of building a moral theory around an understanding of the self that is less than universal will be that any selves that do not fit will be excluded from consideration as moral subjects. The possible consequences may be illustrated by Nietzsche, a philosopher with whose project MacIntyre and Taylor have rather more in common than they care to acknowledge.

Nietzsche or Du Bois?
Du Bois was not the only late nineteenth-century writer to describe the doubling that resulted from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, or to see a parallel between this psychological multiplication and racial mixture. Nietzsche made the same point in Beyond Good and Evil:

The German soul is above all manifold. . .A German who would make bold to say ‘two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast’ would violate the truth rather grossly, or, more precisely, would fall short of the truth by a good many souls. As a people of the most monstrous mixture and medley of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element. . .the Germans are more incomprehensible, comprehensive, contradictory, unknown, incalculable, surprising, even frightening than other people are to themselves. [121]
That this multiplication of souls is in part the consequence of a master-slave dialectic becomes evident later in the same section where Nietzsche not only claims that ‘the contradictory nature at the bottom of the German soul’ was ‘brought into a system by Hegel’, but cites the fusion of noble and slavish moralities in a single individual:

There are master morality and slave morality—I add immediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities, and yet more often the interpenetration and mutual misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur directly alongside each other—even in the same human being, within a single soul. [122]

The ‘intermarriage of master and slave’ that has created democracy is just another form of the racial mixture that has created the German race, because, according to Nietzsche, those who exhibit the oppressive and vindictive instincts of slave morality are ‘the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, of all pre-Aryan population in particular’. [123]

The German Soul
At a descriptive level, Nietzsche’s claim about the manifold nature of the German soul echoes the model of slavery found in Aristotle, Hegel, and Du Bois. The noble, he claims in Beyond Good and Evil, is a ‘whole human being’; [124] the slave is an ‘incomplete human being’, [125] and the emancipatory mingling of the two, which he termed ‘the slave revolt in morals’, results in both types being found in one person who then becomes ‘a battleground for these oppositions’. [126] However, despite his reputation as a celebrant of psychic multiplicity, Nietzsche’s response to this situation is not that of Du Bois who envisages a merger or truce in which neither self is lost or even adulterated, but in which the moral climate changes to accommodate this doubling and so ‘make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows’. [127] On the contrary, Nietzsche, who was, as Graham Parkes observes ‘as against democracy intrapsychically as he is in politics’ [128]—wants to redefine morality in order to avoid the possibility that Du Bois’s hope might be realized. [129]

The moves through which he seeks to accomplish this will be familiar to any reader of MacIntyre or Taylor. He first shifts the focus of moral enquiry from actions to human subjects because ‘It is obvious that moral designations were everywhere first applied to human beings and only later, derivatively, to actions’. [130] He then moves from ontology to sociology by arguing that we should think of human subjects not as isolated individuals but in their historical and social particularity because ‘One cannot erase from the soul of a human being what his ancestors most liked to do and did most constantly’. [131] He finally argues that moral reasoning itself, the ‘orientation to the good’ as Taylor calls it, presupposes a particular type of human selfhood, namely that of nobles, the ‘whole human beings’ whose descriptions of the good are ‘a triumphant affirmation of itself’, [132] as opposed to slaves, who being weak and incomplete, inevitably orient their morality outwards, and say ‘no to an ‘outside’, to an ‘other’, to a ‘non-self’. [133]

The implication of this is, as Nietzsche puts it, that ‘Today. . .when only the herd animal receives and dispenses honour in Europe. . .today the concept of greatness entails being noble’ [134]—not, in other words, being incomplete like a slave, or even divided against oneself like those in whom master and slave coexist and in whom the slave treats the master as not-self, but having an inclusive wholeness. Nietzsche is not naive enough to suppose that any return to simple unity is possible, but his response to the manifold nature of the soul is nevertheless to call for its realization from within wholeness, for what he terms ‘wholeness in manifoldness’. This move is precisely the opposite of that envisaged by Du Bois. Nietzsche is not contemplating the acceptance of divided selves nor even the synthesis of many in one. For him, multiplicity is essentially negative. As he put it in a note of 1888:

The antagonism of the passions—the double, treble, and multiple soul in one breast: this is very unhealthy, it is a sign of inner ruin and disintegration, betraying and promoting internal duality and anarchy—unless of course one passion becomes master. [135]

What Nietzsche recommends is an internal tyranny in which one dominating passion enslaves the others, [136] and so allows the soul to attain universality, the expansion of one into many achieved by Goethe who ‘aspired to. . .totality. . .[and] disciplined himself to a whole’. Such a person would then have ‘universality in understanding and affirmation’, and become ‘a man to whom nothing is forbidden, except it be a weakness’. [137]

Nietzschean Man
The fact that MacIntyre and Taylor are treading in Nietzsche’s footprints is hardly surprising given that both paths lead to the same destination. Aristotle is the source of Nietzsche’s ‘great-souled man’, who although ‘capable of being as manifold as whole’ is a being in whom all virtues are one, [138] and Aristotle too provides the model for the unitary moral subject of MacIntyre and, at one remove, of Taylor. In this respect, MacIntyre’s famous question ‘Nietzsche or Aristotle?’ could not be more misleading. Nietzschean man may not appear within Taylor and MacIntyre’s work in all his sociopathic glory, but it is nevertheless the unified moral self of the master, and not the doubled, divided, or multiplied self of the (former) slave, that is the focus and bearer of moral discourse.

The suspicion that the ethics of the unified moral subject is simply another name for the morality of the masters is hardly dispelled when, at the very end of After Virtue, MacIntyre tries to avoid this implication and distance himself from Nietzsche by pointing out that

. . .if the conception of a good has to be expounded in terms of. . .the narrative unity of a human life and of a moral tradition, then goods, and with them the only grounds for the authority of laws and virtues, can be discovered only by entering into those relationships which constitute communities whose central vision is a shared vision of and understanding of goods. [139]

The problem is, Nietzsche got there before him. He too noted that ‘as a good man, one belongs to the ‘good’, a community that has a communal feeling’. [140] But he had no hesitation in specifying the type of community in which such a shared vision of the good would be found:

The profound reverence for age and tradition—all law rests on this double reverence—the faith and prejudice in favour of ancestors and disfavour of those yet to come are typical of the morality of the powerful. [141]

Small wonder that some empirical researchers have found it difficult to locate individuals who exhibit a strong sense of a unified self save amongst the most powerful groups within contemporary society. [142] From Aristotle onwards, having a unified moral self has been seen as a privilege confined to a social elite. When challenged by the multiple emancipations of modernity, the reactionary response, exemplified by Nietzsche, has been to reassert the unified self of the master morality in order to exclude the multiple selves engendered by the success of slave morality. It is this response that is echoed by the leading moral philosophers of our time.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[*] I am grateful to Marcus Wood and Michael Inwood who read an earlier version of this text and made many helpful comments.
[1] C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, ma 1989.
[2] A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London 1981, p. 22.
[3] Taylor, Sources, p. 5.
[4] Ibid., p. 34.
[5] Ibid., p. 35.
[6] MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 205.
[7] Taylor, Sources, p. 50.
[8] MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 191 and p. 203.
[9] Taylor, Sources, p. 51.
[10] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, New York 1989, p. 165 and p. 5.
[11] David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1863–1919, New York 1993, p. 96.
[12] Ibid., p. 199. See also E.J. Sundquist, To Wake The Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, Cambridge, ma 1993, and P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London 1993.
[13] See L. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, London 1959.
[14] Quoted in P.A. Brunt, ‘Aristotle and Slavery’ in Studies in Greek History and Thought, Oxford 1993, p. 351.
[15] Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge, ma 1932, p. 27 (1255a, 25–8).
[16] Aristotle, Politics, p. 27 (1255a, 31–2).
[17] Ibid., p. 17 (1253b, 23–1254a, 8).
[18] Ibid., p. 23 (1254b, 25–6).
[19] Ibid., p. 17 (1254a, 8–13).
[20] Ibid., p. 29 (1255b, 11–2).
[21] Ibid., p. 23 (1254b, 27ff.).
[22] Ibid., p. 63 (1260a, 12).
[23] Ibid., p. 567 (1327b, 27–9).
[24] Ibid., p. 23 (1254b, 22–3).
[25] Ibid., pp. 21–3 (1254b, 15–20).
[26] My analysis here follows that in R. Schlaifer, ‘Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer to Aristotle’, in M.I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge 1960, p. 195f.
[27] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thompson, Harmondsworth 1976, p. 276 (1160b, 29–30).
[28] Aristotle, Politics, p. 21 (1254b, 4–5).
[29] Ibid., p. 203 (1278b, 33ff).
[30] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, p. 90 (1102b, 34–5).
[31] Aristotle, Politics, p. 67 (1260b, 5–7).
[32] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, p. 278 (1161a, 32-1161b, 6).
[33] Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. W.S. Hett, Cambridge, ma 1936, p. 43 (407b, 20ff.).
[34] Ibid., p. 63 (411b, 10).
[35] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, p. 275 (1160a, 36–1160b, 1).
[36] Aristotle, Politics, p. 249 (1285a, 20f.).
[37] Ibid., p. 327 (1295a, 23).
[38] Most recently by Steven B. Smith in ‘Hegel on Slavery and Domination’, Review of Metaphysics 46, 1992, pp. 97–124.
[39] For example, C. Arthur, ‘Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology’, nlr 142, November–December 1983, pp. 67–75; P. Osborne, The Politics of Time, Verso, London 1995, p. 72.
[40] Die Politik des Aristotles, 2 vols, trans. C. von Garve, edited with notes by G.G. Fülleborn, Bteslau 1799–1802, 1, pp. 14, 18, 58.
[41] Ibid., II, p. 69.
[42] ‘Eigene Gedanken über Sclaverei und Despotie’, Ibid., II, pp. 135–165.
[43] On Hegel’s earlier use of Garve’s works see H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770-1801, Oxford 1972, pp. 35–8, and L. Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807, Cambridge 1987, pp. 188–94.
[44] Aristotle, Politics, p. 65 (1260a, 34–1260b, 5).
[45] Die Politik, 11, pp. 142–3. (The translation is by John Baildam).
[46] Ibid., p. 143.
[47] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford 1977. p. 119 (196). In references to Hegel the page number in the translation quoted is given first, followed by the section number.
[48] Ibid., p. 118 (195).
[49] G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, (Part iii of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences) trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Millar, Oxford 1971, p. 174 (434Z). Hereafter abbreviated as Enc. iii. The Zusätze are based on lecture notes used by Hegel or taken by his students in courses for which the Encyclopaedia was the textbook. Although not prepared for publication by Hegel himself, they provide a good indication of the overall structure of his thinking and the analogies he perceived between it and other historical developments.
[50] Ibid., p. 175 (435Z).
[51] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge 1975, p. 183.
[52] Ibid., p. 177.
[53] Ibid., p. 183; cf. Aristotle, Politics, p. 7 (1252b, 5f.).
[54] Ibid., p. 182; cf. Aristotle, Politics, p. 249 (1285a, 20f.).
[55] For the historical background see R. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848, Verso, London 1988.
[56] Hegel, LPWH., p. 184.
[57] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 92 (402Z).
[58] Ibid., p. 146 (410Z).
[59] Die Politik, 1, p. 19.
[60] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 144 (410Z).
[61] Ibid., p. 176 (436).
[62] Hegel, LPWH, p. 184.
[63] Ibid., p. 177.
[64] Ibid., p. 178; Enc. iii, p. 165 (424Z).
[65] Ibid., p. 176 (436Z).
[66] Ibid., p. 174 (433Z).
[67] Ibid., p. 43 (393Z). D.B. Davis relates this event to the master-slave dialectic in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, Ithaca 1975, pp. 557–64.
[68] There is an extensive secondary literature on the dialectic, some of the best known readings are gathered in J. O’Neill, ed., Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition, Albany 1996.
[69] G.A. Kelly, ‘Notes on Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage”’, Review of Metaphysics, 19, 1966, p. 784. See also J. Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, Boston 1892, pp. 209ff.
[70] Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 112 (182).
[71] G.W.F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox, Albany 1979, p. 125.
[72] Hegel, System, p. 125.
[73] Aristotle, On the Soul, p. 87 (415b, 9).
[74] Hegel, Propaedeutic, p. 62 (35).
[75] C.A.F. Kluge, Versuch einer Darstellung des animalischen Magnetismus, als Heilmittel, Berlin 1815. A list of references is given in the index, p. 475.
[76] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 104 (406).
[77] Ibid., p. 116 (406Z).
[78] Ibid., p. 95 (405).
[79] Ibid., p. 97 (405Z).
[80] P. F. von Walther, Physiologie des Menschen, 2 vols., Landshut 1807–8, ii, p. 363.
[81] Hegel discusses this possibility in the Encyclopaedia, p. 121 (406Z).
[82] Walther, Physiologie, ii, p. 363.
[83] Ibid., pp. 109–110 (406z).
[84] Ibid., p. 110 (406z).
[85] Hegel, ibid., p. 103 (406); Phenomenology, p. 117 (193).
[86] Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 117 (194).
[87] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 109 (406Z); cf. p. 105 (406).
[88] Hegel, Propaedeutic, p. 63 (38).
[89] Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 120 (197).
[90] Ibid., p. 126 (206 and 207).
[91] Hegel, Propaedeutic, p. 63 (38).
[92] Jegel, Enc. iii,p. 176 (436).
[93] Ibid., p. 177 (436Z).
[94] Aristotle, Politics, p. 213 (1280a, 32).
[95] Quoted in A. Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing, New Haven 1993, p. 42. Although it pays little attention to the early nineteenth century German sources, Crabtree’s is the best available history of animal magnetism and its relationship to double consciousness and multiple personality.
[96] C.A. von Eschenmayer, Versuch die scheinbare Magie des thierischen Magnetismus, Vienna 1816, p. 57 and p. 56.
[97] Hegel, Enc.iii, p. 103 (406);
[98] Ibid., p. 104 (406).
[99] R. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, Cambridge, ma 1968.
[100] For an account of George Eliot’s independent but parallel use of animal magnetism to create a master-slave dialectic see M. Bull, ‘Mastery and Slavery in The Lifted Veil’, Essays in Criticism, 48, 1998, pp. 244–61.
[101] Du Bois, Souls, p. 5.
[102] The best and most recent study, which contains references to all the earlier literature, is S. Zamir, Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903, Chicago 1995.
[103] This is Zamir’s approach in Dark Voices, pp. 113 ff. Zamir provides much valuable information on Du Bois’s interest in Hegel (he studied with Royce and Santayana at Harvard) and on nineteenth-century American Hegelianism, but ignores the Encyclopaedia and so does not note the parallels between Hegel and Du Bois discussed below.
[104] Du Bois. Souls, p. 170.
[105] Ibid., pp. 164–5.
[106] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 176 (436).
[107] Du Bois, Souls, p. 178. On Du Bois’s identification of Crummell’s personal odyssey with emancipation from slavery see Sundquist, To Wake, p. 518.
[108] Although it may therefore be true that the condition of double consciousness is experienced more acutely in proportion to the extent of integration into white society, there seems little basis for Zamir’s claim that double consciousness is confined to a black middle-class elite (Dark Voices, p. 116).
[109] W. Gregory, Letters to a Candid Enquirer on Animal Magnetism, London 1851, p. 78.
[110] Hegel, Enc. iii, p. 103 (406). Wallace’s translation was first published in 1894 and would therefore have been available to Du Bois.
[111] Ibid., p. 112. (406Z). The Zusätze were not translated by Wallace, but were included in the collected German edition of 1845 which Du Bois, who spent two years in Berlin, would have been quite capable of reading.
[112] Ibid., p. 113 (406Z).
[113] O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Cambridge, ma 1982, pp. 35–76. See also D.B. David, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Ithaca 1966.
[114] See K. Miller, Doubles, Oxford 1985, and I. Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple, Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Princeton 1995.
[115] C. Taylor, ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’, Review of Metaphysics, 25, 1971, p. 47.
[116] Taylor, Sources, p. 69.
[117] MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 205.
[118] Ibid., p. 209.
[119] Ibid., p. 152.
[120] Taylor, ‘Interpretation’, p. 47.
[121] F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York 1956, 244 (references to Nietzsche’s works are to sections not page numbers). The quoration ‘two souls. . .’ is from Goethe’s Faust.
[122] Ibid., 260.
[123] F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. D. Smith, Oxford 1996, i. 11.
[124] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 257.
[125] Ibid., 258.
[126] Nietzsche, Genealogy, I.16.
[127] Du Bois, Souls, p. 5.
[128] G. Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology, Chicago 1995, p. 348.
[129] Despite the fact that both are independently recognised to have been responding to Hegel, the comparison between Nietzsche and Du Bois awaits serious exploration. However, the contrast should not be overstated: Nietzsche acknowledges the creativity of slave morality; Du Bois idealizes aristocracy within his own racial community.
[130] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 260.
[131] Ibid., 264.
[132] Nietzsche, Genealogy, I.10; Beyond Good and Evil, 260.
[133] Nietzsche, Genealogy, I.10.
[134] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 212.
[135] F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York 1967, 778.
[136] Ibid., 384.
[137] F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth 1968, 49
[138] See W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 4th ed., Princeton 1974, pp. 382–4.
[139] MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 240.
[140] F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann, Harmondsworth 1995, 45.
[141] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 260.
[142] See C. Lemert, ‘Dark Thoughts about the Self, in C. Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Oxford 1994, pp. 100–29.

Modernism

2007-06-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

MALCOLM BULL
BETWEEN THE CULTURES OF CAPITAL
Modernism in its various forms has generated a body of critical and historical writing that is without equal. Within this field, the work of T. J. Clark—on Courbet, on Manet, and now in a sequence of essays on painters from David to Pollock—is as exciting as it gets, indeed, as exciting as art history has any reason to be. What makes his achievement unique is not his sensitivity to the nuances of the primary sources, or his almost physical engagement with the surfaces of paintings, but the conjunction of these qualities with a revolutionary’s instinct for the limitless potential of particular historical moments. And if he sometimes writes (as he says Pissarro paints) ‘on a knife-edge, between simplicity and portentiousness, or strong expression and souped-up emotion’, so much the better. No one else would dare. [1]
Farewell to an Idea is based on the premiss that ‘modernism is our antiquity’, already ‘a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp’. The historian of modernism is like an archaeologist who has unearthed ‘a handful of disconnected pieces left over from a holocaust that had wiped out the pieces’ context’. That holocaust was the continuation of modernity, the triumph of capitalism, the disenchantment of the world. Recovering the context of modernism involves the recognition that it was ‘a desperate, and probably futile struggle to imagine modernity otherwise’, a struggle shared, ‘in a century-long co-dependency’, with socialism. Modernism and socialism may both now seem impossible, but impossibility is also the condition of their survival: they are the art and politics of ‘the time that is not yet ripe’. [2]
Let’s stop there. We need to look at some of these terms. Modernism is not a lost civilization; it was never a civilization in the first place. What we are talking about is a series of cultural experiments that took place in capitalist countries around the start of the twentieth century. In other parts of the world (save Latin America) modernism is little more than a footnote in the history of colonialism. Even in the West, modernism had only a limited audience. Exclusively metropolitan, subsidized by eccentric millionaires and made by bohemians, it left most of the population untouched. Neither a style (uniform and diffused) nor a culture (multiform and organic), modernism always looked different and rarely appeared in the same place twice. The episodes that Clark discusses (David in 1793, Pissarro in 1891, Cubism in 1912, El Lissitzky and Malevich in 1920, Pollock in the late 1940s) may not be representative of modernism as a whole, but their disconnexion is an accurate reflection of its scattered distribution.
There were, of course, several modernisms, each with a different trajectory. Architectural modernism and theological modernism were both attempts to make the ornate structures of the past more functional. People were meant to inhabit these modernisms, and they often did not care to. Fundamentalism and architectural postmodernism were the reaction. The type of modernism with which Clark is concerned was always different. In literature, music and the visual arts, the rationalization of existing forms was rarely an end in itself. These modernisms addressed themselves only to those with disposable incomes; they did not have to cut their costs to accommodate the masses. But in all except the visual arts, modernism has had little lasting success. Literary modernism is kept alive only as a canon of set texts. Programmes of modernist music still cannot be relied upon to fill concert halls. Yet visual art is now more widely appreciated than at any time in its history. One thing that histories of modernism need (but usually fail) to do is explain why modernism in the visual arts had a lasting influence in a way that other modernisms did not.
Whereas modernism was local, sporadic and exclusive, modernity, characterized by the erosion of traditional ways and the rationalization of social life, has been global, continuous and inescapable. Establishing a context for artistic modernism within modernity usually requires a double manoeuvre. First extract the modernist seam from the visual culture in which it is embedded, and then argue that this thin seam is so semantically rich that it reflects, metamorphized, the entire stratum of social life from which it comes. This has to be a dubious procedure. When we juxtapose modernism and modernity we are not comparing phenomena of similar type or extent. Despite appearances, modernism was never the culture of modernity in the way that postmodernism has become the culture of postmodernity; there were too many places, too many media and too many people that modernism never reached. This makes it difficult to maintain that modernism is expressive of modernity as a totality, even of modernity’s revulsion at itself; and it carries the implication that modernity found its expression elsewhere. If modernism was not the culture of modernity, something else was.
I will come back to this in a moment. But what about the third term in the argument—socialism? Clark sometimes seems to picture socialism as being, like modernism, simultaneously an expression and a negation of modernity, a parallel counter-culture, modernism’s separated, non-identical twin. This is, at least, tacit recognition of the fact that modernism was even less the culture of socialism than it was of modernity as whole. Neither in Communist states nor in the social-democratic parties and labour movements of the West did modernism ever establish itself as the accepted form of expression or communication. In many cases, it was only briefly tolerated. But it would be equally wrong to suggest that modernism and socialism were separated because, as parallel critiques of modernity, they were in competition for the same space. If modernism was often against modernity it was only intermittently and obliquely opposed to capitalism; the captions to the illustrations in Farewell to an Idea (Private Collection; X Museum, gift of . . .) tell the story (untold in the text) of its total and painless assimilation. In contrast, socialism’s opposition to capitalism was undertaken in the name of modernity; and for many people in the world socialism has been the only modernity there is, not the struggle to imagine it otherwise. To argue, as does Clark, that since both were opposed to capitalist modernity they share the same utopian impulse is misleading; modernism and socialism were rarely opposed to the same things.
What Clark means by socialism is perhaps something slightly different, an ideal never realized. If so, it underscores the divergence of socialism and modernism in his argument. He suggests that modernism had two great wishes, ‘a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism)’ and the dream of ‘turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity’. [3] But the failure to achieve those goals is constitutive of modernism’s meaning and identity in a way that the failure of socialism is not. Both modernism and socialism had their utopian side, yet nobody ever says that actually existing modernism was a disappointing travesty of what modernism should have been. Although individual movements may have had crazy ideas that came to nothing, modernism as a whole does not have an ideal form: the failure of its projects is what makes it interesting. Would anyone, even a cynic, make the same claim about socialism?
One problem with Marxist criticism is that it has always been written at the end of capitalism at a time when capitalism has not been coming to an end. Whether writing a brutal epitaph or (as is more often the case) an extended elegy, the Marxist critic always stands with his back to the future, surveying the wreckage. He rarely sees what is coming. According to Clark, modernity is ‘tied to, and propelled by, one central process: the accumulation of capital, and the spread of capitalist markets into more and more of the world and the texture of human dealings’. At the same time, there can be ‘no modernism without the practical possibility of an end to capitalism existing’. [4] Capitalism goes on and on but, for modernism and its critics, it is always ‘late’. This positioning creates a blind spot. During the twentieth century the culture of capitalism has renewed itself entirely, yet for many critics every sign of that renewal has been a symptom of its decadence. In consequence, they have missed something that is, I think, now clear, namely that capitalism has had two cultures, not one, and that the second is something other than the senescence of the first.
Classicism and commodity culture
The first culture of capitalism is the one that everyone knows about. It developed in the secular culture of the Renaissance, used the visual forms and literary narratives of antiquity as its raw material, and had naturalistic illusionism as its goal. If it tended to swing between the poles of neo-classicism and anecdotal realism, that was also the source of its enduring strength. It survived not just the transition to industrial capitalism, but also the convulsive politics of industrialism in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe. This last claim needs some justification, for this is the point at which the first culture is often said to have broken down. But the period from 1850 to 1950 conforms, in significant respects, to the pre-existing pattern: nineteenth-century realism was the last, and perhaps also the fullest expression of the classical aesthetic of mimesis; the first half of the twentieth century saw the final flourishing of the classical style.
The suggestion that classicism was the dominant form of high art until the mid-twentieth century is not as outrageous as it sounds. Not only did it remain institutionally entrenched until the 1950s—the basis of the curriculum, the preferred model for public art—it was also the form to which almost all the great modernists—Picasso, Eliot, Stravinsky—reverted after their most daring experiments. In Art Deco, classicism found one of its most flexible and widely diffused manifestations; in surrealist painting, a new syntax for the old forms. Both socialist realism and fascist art were variants of classicism (the former, despite its name, more neo-classical than realist) and between them they dominated the visual culture of Europe east of the Rhine. But classicism was not a reactionary style, it was hegemonic: the official culture of every state, the unconscious of every would-be revolutionary. It can only be made to appear otherwise by separating and discounting official, totalitarian and decorative art, and by downplaying the classical tendencies within modernism. The classical tradition petered out in the early 1960s, not the 1860s. Pop received the surrender.
The second culture of capitalism is equally familiar, but not everyone thinks it is a civilization. Before the 1970s it was called mass culture or kitsch; since then it has been known, misleadingly, as postmodernism. It can be argued that the continuity between kitsch and postmodernism is such that they constitute a single culture; and that this culture replaced not, as the word ‘postmodernism’ implies, modernism, but classicism. The differences between the first and second cultures of capitalism might be enumerated as follows: 1) the shift from mimesis to the meme; from the imitation of the world to the reproduction of the unit of reproduction—or, to put it another way, from iconocity to indexicality; and, following from this, 2) the acceptance of stylistic eclecticism (classical models enjoyed their unique prestige on account of their supposed naturalism, their occasional use as ornament in architectural postmodernism was deeply anti-classical), 3) the reliance on large numbers of consumers to distribute/create the product, and 4) the erasure of the social rather than the technical traces of facture.
The preconditions of commodity culture (as I shall call it) were the expansion of the market and the development of new media. What poetry and painting were for classical culture, the periodical, the photograph and their progeny (film, radio, TV, video, other electronic media) were for the culture of commodities. The sources of commodity culture were various: sometimes (as with popular music) drawing almost exclusively on folk traditions; at others using the classical, sometimes viewed through the prism of modernism. The so-called postmodern era has been characterized not by any fundamental change in commodity culture, but by its colonization of the institutions and media of classicism.
For most people, the culture of modernity has been the culture of commodities; or, to put it more bluntly, ‘postmodernism’ was the culture of modernity all along. This is true not just for the huge numbers of people in the twentieth century whose first experience of anything other than folk traditions has been American-style TV; but also for their predecessors who moved straight from agrarian communities to the world of the newspaper and the wireless (in neither of which classicism or modernism ever took root). Only for those steeped in the classical tradition did postmodernism require new forms of attention.
The relationship between the two cultures was antagonistic. They co-existed for the best part of a century, the second growing in the enormous condescension of the first. Few educated people could believe that commodity culture was really a culture at all, let alone that it would supersede the culture of classicism. On this point, Marxists took their stand with the reactionaries. But the argument has proved unsustainable. There was, and is, every indication that people of all educational levels (now perhaps especially the more educated, who can afford to make fuller use of it) find the endless inventiveness of commodity culture to be pleasurable, plausible and spiritually satisfying. Its hegemony may only just have begun.
Artists of the fold
What is said above has all been said before, much of it by Perry Anderson and Fredric Jameson, but classical culture and commodity culture are rarely juxtaposed like this because each is usually compared not with the other, but with modernism. In histories of modernism, one or other of these cultures usually provides the ground on which modernism figures. Indeed, modernism’s heroic opposition to its cultural context is one of its defining characteristics. For Clark
There is a line of art . . . that makes no sense—that would not have existed—without its practitioners believing what they did was resist or exceed the normal understandings of the culture, and that those understandings were their enemy. This is the line of art we call modernist. [5]
But it was never as simple as that. The modernists appear to be the major players in twentieth-century art only because classical culture is written out of the script too early, and popular culture arrives on the scene too late. In fact, both the cultures of capitalism were there the whole time, and modernism did not stand out against either so much as exist in the space between them. That space was narrow.
Clement Greenberg, who had an acute sense of modernism’s vulnerability, always tried to argue that commodity culture and classicism were manifestations of the same thing, the former merely a debased version of the latter. But for this to be true there would have had to be more similarity in appearance or function than there ever actually was. Not only was kitsch often fabricated in different media and used in different ways, but those differences were visible to the naked eye. The invention of taste allowed every haut bourgeois to tell them apart. Modernism, in its repeated attempts to offend bourgeois sensibility, did not so much oppose itself to classicism and commodity culture as undermine the attempt to keep them separate. If modernism had been straightforwardly opposed to both the cultures of capitalism, we would expect to find it wherever one or the other was strong. But modernism only came into being where and when the two overlapped. Modernism was strongest in France, the site of their most awkward imbrication. Where classicism was weak, as in England and the United States, modernism was slow to develop; where popular culture was weak, as in Italy, modernism struggled to found itself on a technological version of modernity. Where no such overlap existed within their own culture, the modernists often generated the experience through migration—American expatriate modernism in Europe is the obvious example.
Certain features of modernism become more salient when viewed in this context. One is its sense of being squeezed. You can feel it in the bombast of modernist rhetoric, the calls for autonomy, the gestures toward utopian space. Another is its inveterate doubleness. Clark thinks that modernism’s ‘continual two-facedness . . . has to do with the fact that art, in our culture, finds itself more and more at the limits, on the verge of emptiness and silence’, but this picture of modernism trapped between modernity and the void is poetry, not history. [6] Modernists were not partisans resisting the present and pressing on eternity, they were negotiating the equally tricky but rather more mundane path between the two cultures of capitalism. Working between two antithetical cultures meant that resistance to the one almost always involved some degree of complicity with the other. More often than not the doubleness of modernism is the helpless duplicity of the double-agent.
That makes modernism sound more dishonest than it usually was. But we need some way of demystifying modernism’s relation to the cultures of capitalism. It did not just happen to exist between the two cultures; it must also have had some role in their functioning (if not, why did it survive there and nowhere else?). The first question that needs to be asked about the relation of modernism and capitalism is not ‘How did modernism resist capitalism?’ but ‘What did modernism do for capitalism?’. One answer might go something like this. By simultaneously resisting and mediating the two cultures modernism created a space between them, a distinct zone where their transgressive intermingling did not instantly compromise their separation. This liminal space facilitated the long overlap between the two cultures; it was also the route through which one culture turned into the other. If the space of modernism is the space between the cultures of capitalism, and the time of modernism is that of their overlapping, the trajectory of modernism is that which leads from the first to the second.
We can picture this trajectory as a double fold. Modernism begins where classicism turns back on itself, and ends where it turns back into commodity culture. But both classicism and commodity culture are there all the time, and the route from one to the other is also the layer between them. There is no need to rehearse the arguments to the effect that modernism is the passage from the classical tradition to postmodernism—how materiality of the sign leads to the commodity, aestheticism to consumerism, the signature to the logo, the genius to the celebrity—these are common to all who see the origins of the latter in the negation of the former. My point is rather that this passage is not just a route but also the space between the two cultures and the condition of their long imbrication.
Revolution and modernism
If we think of modernism as a fold in and between the cultures of capitalism, it becomes easier to see where it stands in relation to revolution. For although revolution has also frequently proved to be a fold rather than a cut, it is not to be found in the same places. In Western Europe, revolution was defeated in 1848, almost before modernism began; the subsequent success of revolution in ever more distant parts of the globe has no modernist parallel. Whereas modernism is a feature of capitalist societies, socially and technically able to sustain the overlap of two cultures, revolution has only ever been successful in countries at a much earlier stage of social and industrial development, societies that are ‘imagining having industry’. Russian modernism is not necessarily an exception. The brief conjunction of revolution and modernism after 1917 gives the misleading impression that the one fostered the other in social conditions that were equally conducive to both. But Russia was a divided society. The characteristic forms of modernism (Malevich’s Black Square, Tatlin’s Reliefs) were produced in pre-revolutionary Moscow, where the two cultures of capitalism were starting to overlap. Bolshevism, which killed off modernism along with capitalism, owed its lasting success to the fact that Russia as a whole was not like that.
Revolution has remained central to the mythology of modernism, and Clark’s book is an attempt to restate its importance. He concedes that ‘perhaps “the age of revolutions” has come to an end’, but retains the hope that ‘a space may emerge for resistance on the other side’. [7] It is worth dwelling on this distinction. Where political revolution was successful, it overthrew the ancien régime; and where the modernist revolution ultimately proved successful was in helping to undermine the culture of classicism (which long outlived the absolutist states where it had flourished). In bourgeois capitalist societies, revolutionary activity has only ever succeeded in offering resistance; similarly, although modernism has never effected a revolution against the culture of commodities, it has, according to many critics, offered some resistance to it. If modernism’s revolution was against classicism, it was only ever a resistance movement against commodity culture. The central thesis of Farewell to an Idea is that the former dynamic produced the latter. Inspired by the utopian dream of revolution, modernism has repeatedly succeeded in creating hubs of resistance in capitalism’s circulating economy of signs.
The way in which Clark chooses to argue his case is determined by his longstanding reliance on two critics whose judgements about modern culture are harsher and simpler than his own—Clement Greenberg and Guy Debord. From Greenberg, Clark derives the belief that modernist painting is ‘an ability to lay hold . . . of the fact of flatness—the object’s empirical limits and resistance—and have it be interesting’. [8] From Debord, he gets the conviction that art and politics are inseparable, and that the one can be pursued through the other. Being a ‘Greenbergian Situationist’ commits Clark to arguing (contrary to Greenberg, who saw flatness as modernism’s route out of politics) that flatness and revolution go together. If socialism is modernism’s utopia, and modernism socialism’s praxis, formalism is modernism’s telos. As Clark recently wrote in these pages: ‘transcendence in modernism can only be achieved—is not this central to our whole sense of the movement’s wager?—by way of absolute immanence and contingency, through a deep and ruthless materialism, by a secularization (a “realization”) of transcendence—an absorption in the logic of form’. [9]
If it is true that modernism had only one Other, then Clark’s argument ought to work. But if modernism was a fold between the cultures of capitalism, we are likely to reach the opposite conclusion, namely that it was modernism’s revolutionary qualities that weakened its resistance to commodity culture, and that insofar as modernism did resist commodification it was not all that revolutionary.
Pissarro: anarchism’s art
Within Farewell to an Idea, the test case for Clark’s coupling of revolutionary politics and modernism is the long essay on Camille Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women (Metropolitan Museum, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman) painted in 1891–2. Here, Clark suggests, ‘socialism put Pissarro’s normal skills—his sense of decorum and self-effacing arrogance of technique—under extreme pressure’. [10] The controversial aspect of this claim is not the idea that Pissarro’s work was somehow informed by his anarchism. (The artist himself stated that ‘our ideas, impregnated with anarchist philosophy, give colour to the works we do’, and all the recent literature on the artist deals with the question to some degree. [11]) Its novelty derives from the equation of anarchism with socialism; the suggestion that Pissarro’s politics actively determined the appearance of individual paintings, and the implication that it pushed his work further along the path to modernism (‘decorum’ and ‘self-effacing arrogance of technique’ are the very qualities that modernism negates) and thus away from the market.
Aside from the tricky question of how to map anarchism and socialism at a time when their strategies were diverging, all discussion of Pissarro’s anarchism confronts two difficulties. The first, which Clark acknowledges, is that Pissarro came to anarchism only in middle age, at a time when his subject-matter and technique were already established. Thereafter, his political interests and his working practices both continued to develop, but without obvious links between them. Discerning the influence of the one on the other at any particular point is therefore something of an occult science. Even ‘extreme pressure’ results in nothing more than ‘a slight shifting of boundaries between expressiveness and surface integrity, or drawing and colour, or pastoral and monumentality.’ [12] The second problem is that by 1891, anarchism had been taken up by writers and artists of many persuasions. Anarchists close to Pissarro were associated with neo-impressionism, naturalism and symbolism. In this situation, there was no one way in which anarchism inflected the language of its supporters. No easy generalizations (for example, that anarchism made representation more/less naturalistic) are possible; there is nothing against which to measure that ‘slight shifting of the boundaries’.
Perhaps because of these difficulties, Clark focuses on a single painting and the circumstances of its execution. He places Two Young Peasant Women between the Fourmies massacre of 1891 in which ten people were killed in a May Day demonstration, and the Paris bombings of 1892 for which an anarchist known as Ravachol was eventually convicted. It was a turning point in anarchist tactics: a moment of profound revulsion at the violence of the state, a brief interlude before the arrival of the assassin and the lone bomber. Pissarro shared the anarchist reaction to Fourmies and had some sympathy for Ravachol; for Clark, therefore, it is not just the anarchist tradition but the unstable anarchist mood of 1891, ‘vengeful, self-doubting and serene’, out of which Two Young Peasant Women comes. [13]
The painting shows two women on the edge of a field. The one on the left is in reverie, her chin resting on her hand; the other kneels in front of her. Perhaps they are taking a break from work and having a chat (the painting is also known as La Causette). The scene is not obviously political, but for anarchists like Kropotkin, peasant life provided the model for an alternative politics that would be decentralized, agrarian and mutual. Maybe these women—at rest in the fields, rather prettier than they might be—offer an idealized glimpse of what such a society would be like. But by 1891, Pissarro was already aware, ‘acutely at just this moment, of the razor’s edge on which such imagining stood’; hence the indeterminacy ‘conveyed by pose, by spatial set-up, even by facial expression’. This is a painting about sociability, and yet, Clark states, ‘The to-and-fro of feeling between the picture’s protagonists strikes me finally as lopsided.’ The genre may be anarchist pastoral, but in the uncertainty of the moment Pissarro has painted a moment of uncertainty: neither of the women is quite sure of the other, ‘of their feelings, or whether what one had said expressed them properly, or what the other would make of them’. [14]
It is a delicate reading of the painting, brilliantly conjured from the messy and violent politics of the Third Republic. But the heightened sense of precariousness on which it relies is contrived. Let us go back to the peasant woman on the left. When first introduced, she is ‘sitting on the ground, or on a grass bank, with knees splayed wide—maybe squatting’. The suggestion that she is seated hardly seems to need qualification: Pissarro depicted several peasant women sitting like this, including the Peasant Woman Sitting: Sunset of 1892; the grass bank is implied under the line of trees behind her, and the angle between her back and her left knee is too wide for any other explanation. In fact, Pissarro only ever depicted women squatting when they were doing backbreaking work, picking things off the ground. Yet hereafter the figure on the left is always ‘the squatting woman’, no longer sitting on the ground but perched ‘on her heels, or her hams, or her haunches’; eventually she is even ‘the crouching woman’. [15]
The shift is far from trivial. By removing her comfortable seat on the grass, Clark gives the figure an awkwardness and tension quite unlike that of her companion; the lop-sidedness and uncertainty of the composition start here. At the same time, Clark’s insistence that she is squatting is his way of signalling that she is more than a tree (some contemporary critics liked to think of Pissarro’s peasants as literally rooted in the landscape, ‘fruits of the soil that supports them’ [16]); that Pissarro has uprooted her and given her a stake in the utopian future described by Kropotkin. But, deprived of her seat, the woman’s centre of gravity falls so far forward that she can only be supported by the canvas itself: she is ‘leaning on the frame with solid certainty, spreading her body out and out across the surface’. The less she is grounded in the earth, the more she becomes paint: she ‘folds out laterally across the picture plane, claiming more and more flat room’. [17]
The redescription of the woman’s pose does a lot of work in the argument. It effects the shift from anecdotalism to indecipherability; from organicist antipastoral to anarchist pastoral, and from self-effacing technique to painterly materiality. But that is not all. It also helps to conceal a potentially relevant source. The clearest statement of Pissarro’s anarchism, and his most explicit attempt to give it visual expression, was a series of pen-and-ink drawings with accompanying texts which he sent at the end of 1889, under the title Les Turpitudes sociales, to some young relatives in England. On the title page, Father Time sits patiently watching the rising sun of ‘ANARCHIE’ coming up behind the Eiffel Tower, the despised symbol of modern beauty. Seen from the back, his pose—seated on a flat stone with both knees drawn up in front of him and his right hand supporting his head—is probably as close to that of the left-hand woman as anything else in Pissarro’s work at this point.
Les Turpitudes sociales does not get a mention in Clark’s 80-page discussion of Pissarro’s anarchism around 1890. If it did, it is hard to see how it would fit with the argument that Pissarro’s political convictions pushed his artistic practice in a modernist direction. Pissarro’s little anarchist primer depicts contemporary urban social evils in a visual language derived from Daumier and Cruikshank. Anarchism may have affected different artists in different ways, but Les Turpitudes sociales suggests that for Pissarro in 1889 it meant heightened tonal contrast and expressive line—naturalism forced towards caricature. If the pose of one of the Two Young Peasant Women is a reworking of that of Time, it is one in which the symbolic content of the posture has been erased, and where all the visual indicators of Pissarro’s political passion are absent as well.
I do not wish to deny that there may be a homeopathic infusion of anarchism in this painting (Pissarro also believed in homeopathy); the point is simply that Clark’s struggle to pin it down and claim it for modernism involves rather more sleight of hand than it should. The painting was given by Pissarro to his wife, so it is difficult to tell whether it spoke ‘a language that the market would not be able to convert—or convert entirely—into its preferred (individualistic) terms’. [18] But the show for which it was finished was a financial success. Indeed, the period of Pissarro’s most active political involvement was almost the only time he received solid support from a commercial gallery. If socialism and modernism did have the long and uneasy partnership that Clark imagines, it ought to be possible to point to times when they were working together against the market. Pissarro is one of the most committed leftists in the modernist canon. It should be easier than this.
Pollock: failures of resistance?
Writing to his father in 1900, Lucien Pissarro floated an idea that the old man could not quite follow. Perhaps commercialism was the true modernism, and all the fin-de-siècle movements in art merely reactions to it. His father responded that although ‘chromos for grocers’ could be made out of any type of art, that did not make commercialism anything special. [19] Almost half a century later, Greenberg was less confident. Kitsch, he now recognized, was on the way to becoming ‘a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld’. [20] The avant garde was in a last-ditch battle against it.
Half a century on again, many art historians have come to doubt whether even Greenberg’s champion, Jackson Pollock, was fighting on his side. One piece of evidence is a set of photographs taken by Cecil Beaton for Vogue in 1951. They show models in party frocks posing in front of Pollock’s recent drip paintings. Here, it seems, is visual proof that the most revolutionary art of its time (painted in defiance of all the conventions of the classical tradition) offered no resistance at all to the culture of commodities. Those photographs say: ‘Negation is stylish. For stylish . . . read fashionable’. They suggest that modernism served as a ‘cultural softening-up process’ in which art prepared the ground for the market’s exploitation of marginal states. In the case of Pollock, those states were ‘the wordless, the somatic, the wild, the self-risking, the spontaneous, the uncontrolled, the “existential”, the beyond or before our conscious activities of mind’. [21]
To his credit, Clark takes the silent accusation contained in the photographs very seriously. He accepts that ‘the process these photos glamorize is not glamorous, and not incidental: it is one that the practice of modernism knows lies in wait for it, and may prove its truth.’ His response, like that of a good defence counsel, is partly to try to outperform the prosecution. But amongst the many diversions (William IX of Aquitaine, Bakhtin, the Unhappy Consciousness, three different endings) there is an argument. It goes something like this. There is a danger that ‘the Other to modernism—the normal understandings it is supposed to be resisting and refusing—will come to seem a dead formula.’ Whatever else they do, those photographs show what Pollock was up against. They help to remind us that ‘the future that works of art envisage is very often one of misuse and misunderstanding’. The possibility of appropriation by commodity culture is therefore something that has been ‘internalized by modernism and built into its operations’. It is for this reason that ‘the test of art was held to be some form of intransigence or difficulty in the object produced’. For Pollock, the attempt ‘to annihilate the very ground of misreading’ means that his work must resist abstraction as much as it does illusionism. This is ‘why “abstract” and “figurative” go together in Pollock’s practice’, why his work ‘lives on its contradictions’, why Pollock’s painting ‘turns back to the root conditions of its own abstractness, and tries to give them form’. The form it chooses is ‘refusal of aesthetic closure: cutting out, interruption, efforts at infantile metonymy; dissonance meaning mimesis, meaning sensuousness as well as “Gothic-ness, paranoia, and resentment”—the one set of qualities in the form of the other.’ [22]
The argument here is the inverse of the one Clark offered in the case of Pissarro. Whereas he read Pissarro’s revolutionary politics into his painting of Two Young Peasant Women by suggesting that the flatness of the left-hand figure made the subject unreadable, he takes the reintroduction of figurative elements into Pollock’s paintings as evidence of resistance to commodification—a resistance that bespeaks an underlying continuity with modernism’s revolutionary project. Arguments like this can get a bit slippery (resistance is everywhere if you look hard enough), and what you make of them often depends on how convinced you are that the canonical works of modernism are the ones that put up the best fight against the market. (Clark is confident: ‘no work of real concentration’, or with ‘real complexity’ etc. can fail to do so.) Taken together, however, the two arguments give modernism a different role to that which either posits independently. The problem is not that resistance is signified by flatness in one painting and figuration in the other (no one wants to reduce mark-making to univalence), but that if the same ambiguity can function as a sign of resistance in opposing contexts, the resistance it provides must be ambiguous as well.
Clark suggests that modernism’s ambiguities are generated through a combination of negation of the Other and self-negation, but by reusing the argument with opposing terms he makes the negation of the Other and self-negation interchangeable. (The most straightforward example is his defence of abstract expressionism in which ‘vulgarity’ [i.e. kitsch] becomes the means through which abstraction liberates itself from kitsch.) When aggregated, Clark’s episodes therefore provide abundant evidence not of modernism’s intransigence, but of its pliability. By repeatedly blurring the distinction between modernism’s refusal of the Other and its refusal of itself, and arguing that the one refusal may appear in the form of the other, Clark draws attention both to modernism’s doubleness and to the doubleness of its Other. No wonder that, as Clark observes, modernism’s defeats were its victories and its victories Pyrrhic; it often did not know which side it was on.
Degrees of disenchantment
For Clark, as for Weber, modernity’s great uncompleted project is the disenchantment of the world, the process through which society ‘has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of the projected future’ and the accompanying ‘emptying and sanitizing of the imagination’. [23] This analysis of modernity as a social process may be fundamentally right, but it is easy to overstate, or at least to oversimplify, the accompanying disenchantment. It would not take an alien anthropologist very long to locate the idols of our tribe. In Western societies they are housed in the two museums. One (e.g. the National Gallery, the Met—you could probably guess the function of these buildings even before the spacecraft landed), a shrine to the first culture of capitalism; the other (Tate Modern, MoMA), a celebration of the second. Once upon a time, we supposed that the second museum was a sort of negation of the first, but the rehangs have given the lie to that.
The two museums do not house objects of the same type. The first is a relentless paean to the charisma of technique; it includes only objects in a very narrow range of media, produced in accordance with specific craft traditions, all arranged in sequence according to a single narrative. The second, by contrast, works on the principle of plenitude mediated through the institutions of art. The greater the variety the better: everything in the world belongs here, you just cannot show it all at once. Nobody knows what sample of commodity culture artists and curators will buy in next, or how the museum will have to be re-arranged to accommodate it. (Although the second museum started out with abstract paintings, they are unlikely to predominate for long.) Where the first museum represents a culture that is fixed and timeless, the second museum works on a different temporality and a different theory of art. At present, our society seems to need them both: the first museum stakes capitalism’s claim to be grounded in nature and history, and to possess a universal rationality that can transmute the one into the other; the second celebrates capitalism’s limitless fecundity in the manufacture of pleasures, its mysterious ability to work without foundations, to turn anything, for no reason, into an exchangeable object of value.
To many people the disenchantment of the world is the difference between the enchantment of the first and the relative disenchantment of the second. But, in fact, both museums are the site of the disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world. The first museum houses many objects whose enchantment was once of a wholly different kind. The enchantment of all those crucifixes, altarpieces and reliquaries is not their original magic. The first museum is the place where the sacred becomes the aesthetic, a lesser enchantment, but still a potent one. In the second museum, art becomes fashion. This is the true significance of Beaton’s photographs. The ‘bad dream of modernism’ turned out to be worse than Clark lets on. Art did not just become ‘fashionable’, it became fashion, i.e. a fully commodified practice, without foundation or meta-narrative. The institutional theory of art on which the second museum is built is essentially a theory of fashion, the theory that the fashion-industry never needed to articulate for itself. Again, a disenchantment perhaps, but also a re-enchantment: ‘merely fashion’ is an oxymoron.
Within this pseudo-Hegelian triad, art as a whole mediates between religion and fashion, between the Papacy and Prada. Modernism is just the hinge on the door that leads from one museum to the other, its role in the disenchantment of the world roughly parallel to that of the Renaissance in the transition from religion to art. Just as Renaissance art, by accentuating the aesthetic properties of cultic objects, helped people to see the natural in the supernatural (and vice versa), so modernism, by emphasizing the contingent properties of aesthetic objects, has allowed people to see the commodity in the masterpiece (and vice versa). If the visual arts did this more effectively than any other, it was partly because (and this was the advantage of working for collectors rather than audiences) they could be more daringly and doggedly insistent on the contingency of their language, and partly because visual artworks—with their minimal demands on our attention (compare the time it takes to walk round a major retrospective with the time you need to read Ulysses), their materiality and marketability—approximate most closely to the commodity form.
The historical position this gives to modernism is not a negligible one. Indeed, it is hard to see how the transition between the two cultures of capitalism would have happened so smoothly without it. But it corresponds in many respects to Clark’s nightmare that
Not only will it [art] forego its role in the disenchantment of the world, but it will accept the role that has constantly been foisted upon it by its false friends: it will become one of the forms, maybe the form, in which the world is re-enchanted. With a magic no more and no less powerful (here is my real fear) than that of the general conjuror of depth and desirability back into the world we presently inhabit—that is, the commodity form. [24]
All that is missing here is an acknowledgement that modernism’s role in the disenchantment of the old world was the enchantment of the new, and the realization that this dreadful premonition is a repressed memory. The account of modernism I have given above is, I suspect, more or less the one against which Farewell to an Idea was written.
For socialism, the disenchantment of the world has always held a utopian promise. If modernism was just a late stage in the history of fetishism as it progressed from religion to fashion, its role in that disenchantment does not amount to much. Yet it did have some effect. The commodity fetish is a weaker fetish than the religious fetish. Today, however, we must look elsewhere for the preservation of whatever living politics we have.
[1] T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, New Haven and London 1999, p. 61. Hereafter FI.
[2] FI, pp. 1–3, 8–9 and 160.
[3] FI, p. 9.
[4] FI, pp. 7–9.
[5] FI, p. 364.
[6] FI, p. 407.
[7] FI, p. 297.
[8] FI, p. 235.
[9] ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, NLR 2, March–April 2000, p. 95.
[10] FI, p. 62.
[11] Letter to Lucien Pissarro, 13 May 1891, quoted in FI, p. 104.
[12] FI, p. 99.
[13] FI, p. 104.
[14] FI, pp. 90 and 121–2.
[15] FI, pp. 62, 87 and 90.
[16] Clément-Janin, quoted in FI, p. 115.
[17] FI, pp. 90 and 68.
[18] FI, p. 114.
[19] Camille Pissarro, Letters to his son Lucien, New York 1943, p. 341.
[20] Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Boston 1961, p. 12.
[21] FI, pp. 302 and 308.
[22] FI, pp. 305–8 and 364–6.
[23] FI, p. 7.
[24] FI, p. 374.

Joel Leon On Stanley Lucas

2006-11-17T03:53:00.000-08:00

Stanley Lucas, l’homme des occupants.

Pour comprendre le comportement arrogant de Stanley Lucas, l’homme qui a fait débarque les forces étrangères en Haïti, il faut considérer l’environnement politique dans lequel il évolue.
On se souvient du rapport mensonger de la centrale intelligence américaine, CIA, sur l’état psychotique du président Jean B. Aristide, alors en exil en 1992 sous l’administration de George Bush père. Le dit rapport avait fait mention que le président était souffrant de problèmes mentaux d ‘après des sources médicales canadiennes. Rapport qui s’est revele faux, en fait qui n’a jamais existe d’après les responsables canadiens. A cette époque le département d’état section amerique latine et caraïbes était dirige par une équipe de conservateurs composes d’Elliott Abrams (reconnu coupable par le congres américain dans l’affaire Iran-gate et gracie par George Bush Père), Otto Reich ( Le promoteur du coup d’état de 2002 au Venezuela d’après plusieurs analystes)…avec l’appui du Sénateur Jesse Helms ( Ultra-conservateur n’ayant pour Haïti que mépris et haine).
Les huit ans de Bill Clinton étaient durs pour eux, mais en 2001,avec le retour des conservateurs ,ils reviennent a la charge. Ainsi, Roger Noriega, Otto Reich et Elliott Abrams se sont mis ensemble pour punir le peuple haïtien. Mais il fallait trouver un aventurier sanguinaire de la trempe de Toto Constant, qui est prêt a tout faire pour une poignée de dollars. Ainsi est apparu sur la scène politique haïtienne, Mr Stanley Lucas.

En Haïti ce qu’on sait de Stanley Lucas, c’est que ces deux proches cousins et oncles ont participe aux massacres de Jean-rabel de 1987, qui ont coûte la vie a plusieurs dizaines de paysans sans terres. Par contre, nul n’a prévu que le champion de judo, le Playboy de Port-au-Prince, l’homme bien vêtu, allait catapulter le pays pour une deuxième fois dans les griffes affûtées des occupants.
L’ancien ambassadeur américain, Bryan Dean Curran, a déclare dans le New York Times que Stanley Lucas est un menteur naturel, lorsqu’il a déclare et je cite : « Quand Stanley vous dit quelque chose, il est très difficile de déterminer laquelle partie qui est vraie ». Ainsi il a marche sur les pas de ces maîtres de Washington qui ont créé des accusations mensongères contre des dirigeants progressistes et indépendants haïtiens. Il est intéressant de savoir pourquoi on a fait choix de lui comme agresseur d’Haïti. Max Blumenthal, journaliste independant, est intéresse aussi a ce sujet, et dit : « quand je demande au directeur de communication d’IRI pourquoi on a enrolle Stanley, il a refuse de répondre (…) ».
L’IRI, institut international républicain est fonde très tôt dans les années 80 a Washington, avec objectif de promouvoir la démocratie sous la présidence de Ronald Reagan. Mais nous savons pertinemment que cette organisation existe pour renverser les régimes juges trop indépendants par les conservateurs. Ainsi on a vu l’IRI très actif particulièrement en Haïti, au Venezuela et au Cambodge en même temps au début du siècle. Haïti est le seul pays dans lequel IRI a eu plus de succès d’après un officiel américain. Le coup d’état du mois d’avril 2002 au Venezuela a permis au monde entier de voir la main de l’IRI qui a publiquement supporte le coup des grands patrons vénézuéliens. Je dois rappeler aussi que pendant cette période, Stanley Lucas a fait 7 voyages au Venezuela en mission pour l’organisation dont il représentait en Haïti ,toutefois il n’était pas présent au moment du coup.
Les connections de Mr Lucas aux chefs rebels du mouvement arme qui a secoue le pays jusqu’au départ d’Aristide et l’arrivée des troupes d’occupation sont clairement déterminées. L’officier d’IRI en Haïti a déclare qu’il n’avait jamais rencontre Guy Philippe, chef de la rébellion armée, et pourtant ce dernier l’a décrit comme un ami qui l’a initie au jeu de pinpong, et d’autres sources ont affirme qu’ils se sont rencontres en équateur au cours de l’année 2001. Dans une interview accordée a Times magazine, Mr Guy Philippe a dit que les sessions d’éducation politique organisées en république dominicaine pour les leaders politiques haïtiens se sont tenus a l’hôtel même ou il a été hébergé. Il a parle a Mr Lucas en maintes occasions, Paul Arcelin un autre vendu, a repris les mêmes propos de celui-ci. La connection entre la soi-disant opposition pacifique et les groupes armes s’étaient loges a la même adresse.

Nelson Mandela, le sage, a déclare dans son discours jubilée du 10 mai 2004, que : « Nous voyons comment que les puissants états, qui se disent démocratiques, manipulent les institutions multilatérales aux désavantages et souffrances des états sous-développés ».. C’était d’Haïti qu’il parlait sans le mentionner. Stanley Lucas est l’expression même du complot international contre les petits états comme Haïti.

Depuis le retour de René Preval ce Mr Stanley Lucas, est subitement devenu un journaliste politique très prolifique, émettant des idées sur Haïti, sans aucune gêne ni remords. Aujourd’hui, son ambition principale après avoir entraîne les forces d’occupation dans le pays est de mettre Haïti sur la fameuse liste noire du terrorisme international. Il a écrit dans l’un de ces textes que : « The U.S. should reexamine these groups and include them on the overall terrorist watch list. Currently, no Haitian extremist groups are on that List” ( Le gouvernement américain devrait réexaminer ces groupes (lavalas) et les inclut sur la liste du terrorisme international. Actuellement, aucun d’entre eux n’est sur cette liste.) Voilà les déclarations de l’ancien représentant de l’institut républicain (IRI) en Haïti et tuteur de l’opposition, qui a domine la scène politique haïtienne pendant plusieurs années. Il implore les dirigeants américains a place son pays natal sur la terrible liste noire du terrorisme et semble s’énerver du retard que prennent les autorités du département d’état a le faire. On ne fait pas ces demandes punitives contre un pays qu’on prétend aimer et qui est innocent, nous sommes un peuple révolutionnaire et Rebel, mais terroriste, non. Dans certains milieux, ce comportement est surtout perçu comme un raz le bol, mais en fait il reflète les opinions d’un groupe de déconnectes vivant dans un rêve irréel et parlant avec arrogance et autorité d’une réalité qu’ils ne saisissent pas. Ils avaient souhaite l’occupation d’Haïti, chose faite, mais la main mise espérée n’est pas complète parce qu’il y a eu une conjoncture incompatible a l’idée initiale de contrôle total du pouvoir politique. Actuellement dans la diaspora, ils promotent l’idée d’envoyer plus de marines américains en Haïti, comme si la situation n’est pas assez meurtrière et desesperee. Mouche Stanley kisa peyi a fe w.
En 1893, Frederick Douglas, alors envoye américain en Haïti a réfléchi aux multiples entraves que confrontaient le pays, et a cru qu’Haïti peut sortir de cette ambiance d’élégie « sans être réduite en miettes morceaux et sans tomber dans la barbarie »,fin de citation. Contrairement a ce que croit Mr Lucas et compagnie, Haïti ne périra pas.

NYTimes Readers Respond

2006-09-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

...creating some odd effects somehow; the medium contains the outrage and turns it into filler product:

Readers' Comments

Senate Approves Broad New Rules to Try Detainees

The Senate approved far-reaching rules yesterday on the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects that would make illegal several broadly defined abuses and strip detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court.

Republicans have described the new rules as necessary in the war against terrorism, and argued that they do not alter American obligations under the Geneva Conventions.

Democrats, in contrast, have painted the measure as a fundamental threat to the foundations of the American legal system.

What is your view of the detainee bill headed to the president’s desk?

Related Article | Text of the Senate Bill

368 comments
Candy Clarke:

This measure is yet another cynical maneuver by a shamelessly greedy, sadistic administration that only cares about enriching its already rich buddies. These are people who would hold up babies to protect themselved from gunfire, then blame the Democrats for putting babies in their hands.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:29 am
Craig S. Armstrong:

The detainee bill is not only an afront to the American legal system, which is infair by many measures, but more importantly, the detainee bill is an affront to the principles of any nation, especially the U.S.A. How can any civilized country be engaged in such activity. It is evidence of the further deterioriation of what made the U.S.A. a beacon for human principles and a good indicator of how lost our moral compass has become. And what’s really scary is how complacent the vast majority of the population is about this tragic development.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:48 am
Brian:

We glad to see this rule to deal with the trials of terrorism suspects efficiently under the Geneva Conventions.
Maybe some guys would say the measure is a threat to the foundations of the American legal system.However it is an evolution yet.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:53 am
Carol Hamitlon:

The bill in question demonstrates an ignorance not only of American history but also of the British history that preceded the founding of this country. 17th and 18th century political discourse–including The Federalist #84–is full of arguments against “arbitrary” power–i.e., the power of a king to toss someone in the Tower of London without explanation, evidence, or trial (”due process”). The opposite to “arbitrary rule” is “the rule of law,” which sets standards for everyone involved, regardless of rank. It took over a hundred years for habeas corpus to become an accepted right, yet in one presidential term, an ignorant, self-righteous group of men is recklessly discarding it.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:58 am
ADOLFO:

I never thought that I would see the day when USA reach the bottom of No Rights for no one under Law for Torture of Mr GWBush is just amazing that August PINOCHET was torturing withoput Law in Chile but now USA has a called President who will have the Right to Torture who ever is suspect of Terrorism or be against Him. Salute to the New Emperor !! And after that Not even GOD will save America from Dictatorship ready to roll now. Greetings.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:09 am
Earl:

There are few legal rights here in lawyer run USA and one of the issues the press needs to address is not so much how the war against the terrorists is fought but why is the U.S. talking about “democracy” so much when all 3 branches of U.S. gov’t are dominated and run by lawyers and this is know as the legal caste. A caste can be a family thing like in India but it can also be a professional thing such as one professional group dominating and running the government. Late American newspaper publisher and editor, Edward W. Scripps, wrote: “If there is such a thing as true freedom and democracy then the road to that goal lies over and through the ruin and annihilation of the legal caste.”

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:15 am
Jo MacClelland:

We stand condemned before the world as unprincipled hypocrites, liars, and bullies of the worst kind. Never again will we be able to claim the high moral ground on any world issue. We have thrown away what made us great. It will be a long time, if ever, before we can hold up our heads and claim pride in being American.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:16 am
Kelli:

How many egregious breaches of our Constitution can one administration commit?

I’ll give Bush his due, though: With this one bill, he has scared the hell out of me.

God save us, because our rubber-stamp Congress will not.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:17 am
Richard Yarnell:

In the year 1984,… I’m sorry, in the year 2006, the remedy can be found in 1776.

Not a single person in the House or the Senate who voted for this bill has executed his obligation under the oath he took to defend the Constitution of the United States.

This is not an anti-terrorism bill, it is anti-democracy. If I were a cartoonist, I would draw bin Laden and Bush toasting marshmallows, not on bayonets or swords, but on pens, over a fire consuming the Bill of Rights.

We should be very, very afraid.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:22 am
Virj:

So what now, we fight terror using terror (on our own citizens)? What does that makes the government, legal terrorists?

There was a time, when people understood that there is a price for democracy. That price was, among others, that people were innocent until proven guilty (this is NOT the case anymore). That price was, among others, that people were not to be detained unless they were charged with a crime (this is NOT the case anymore). That price was, among others, that people have a right to a speedy trial (the government has taken away this right ALREADY). The republicans are always giving this sweet talk about protecting our constitution, well, what they are doing ti twisting it and reinterpreting it to fit their political and religious agenda.

Hey, this is was Osama bin Laden is also doing with his politics and religion. The republicans are truely no better.

For those republicans who are so blind, Osama bin Laden has effectively already won, thanks to the republicans. We are now living in a police state and we are no better, as a country, than any banana repressive republic on this planet. It is just that we are too blind to see it because too many republicans are willing to support their party for religious reasons rather than reasons that are good for America. And if we don’t save America now, it may be too late when our eyes finally do open.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:29 am
bart:

Absolutely required! We need to take these guys off the street as long as terrorist attacks remain a threat. Let them go … bang!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:31 am
Sternberg:

We have already played nice too often while Terrorsits have systematically murdered our citezens and allies. The Constitution extends the right of Habeus Corpus “except in the case of invasion or rebellion”. We need to take preventative measures against those who have been doing us harm for 40+ years just as surely as we nedd to practice preventative medecine.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:32 am
Donald L Reid:

Sadly, in the eyes of many people elsewhere in this small world of ours, a great country like the USA is losing considerable credibility because of the way in which it treats people who are “suspects.” Some of the horrendous happenings in what appear to be “illegal” detention centres, firth of American soil, is very worrying indeed for people who value freedom and fairplay. The problem with global terrorism is very real, but the situation can only be made much worse of we treat people in places like Iraq with great disrespect. Any country which is occupied by a foreign power will ultimately rebel. The question which needs to be asked is why is USA and UK now up to their ears in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? There will doubtless be many more lives lost as we interfere in countries where our presence is unwanted. The watchword of countries such as USA and UK, wherever we go in search of bringing stability, must be FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:35 am
Thomas Guzman:

I am saddened to say that we will not have the benefit of living under THE Constitution and THE democracy which so many have died to preserve.

The issue of how to handle combatants is just the tip of the iceberg. The real matter comes down to unimpeded executive power. This agreement grants the president to define who are suspects and what can be done to them, without habeas corpus guarantees for the accused.

This administration has been adamant to do anything, regardless of the cost to our democracy in order to provide them with “legal” cover to do what they want, to whomever they want, anywhere in the world.

I swear that our President and his cabinet must have come to the conclusion that groups like the Taliban must have gotten it right except that they were praising the wrong God.

How did our government become so radicalized that we are taking on the same narrow view of human rights and religious zeal as the people that flew those planes into our towers?

To show how far we have slipped from the norm, this legislation provides for Soviet Union era-treatment of political prisoners. Instead of a Gulag we have legal black holes which allow secret detainee bases around the world.

Our president must have believed our pre-9/11-democracy was not up to the task of fighting the people who attacked us that September day.

He constantly advocates and legislates that he and a handful of his advisors are more up to the task; so they slowly and methodically began to erode our Constitution, our rights and freedoms so many people have died for, to give him a free hand.

Sometimes I feel as though I am in the middle of a Twilight Zone movie marathon. If the terrorists wanted to truly destroy America, they couldn’t have asked for a better unwitting accomplice than George W. Bush.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:43 am
Jeanne M. Storm:

I am proud of my Vermont representatives who refused to be bulied by our unprincipled President.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:45 am
Paul Grimsrud:

“He who fights monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” Nietzsche
I’m afraid it might be to late for the current administration.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:51 am
Peter Kowalsky:

This is the end of our Constiirution and our Bill of Rights. It is a further consolidation of power in the hands of a unitary executive who came to power in a Coup d’etat in 2000 . If Hillary becomes president can she declare Arnold an enemy combatant?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:00 am
disgusted:

Now, you can relax Mr. Bush. The courts will not be able to touch you for your war crimes.

Enjoy your retirement in Crawford.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:18 am
GWB:

Since when is water boarding torture?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:25 am
Rosemary Molloy:

Where in the hell are the democrats, the independents, the socialists, and the unaffiliated in this mess? The three republicans who “stood up” to the fascists easily folded (I’m not convinced the whole thing wasn’t a carefully orchestrated setup) and there doesn’t seem to be anybody else to step up to the plate. Oh, I forgot–hordes of ordinary citizens are espressing their outrage at this rape of our constitutional protections, but who gives a damn about them? Not the politicians, that’s a cinch.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:28 am
Teresa Birchard:

After 9/11 I remember a surge a patriotism as Americans came together in grief and in support of principles that made our country proud. This detainee bill is a betrayal of our country”s stand on freedom and individual rights.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:41 am
Peter Kowalsky:

It is a further consolidation of power into the hands of an incompetent tyrannical unitary executive that came to power in a Coup d’etat in 2000.Habeas Corpus r.i.p.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:58 am
mike burnash:

this bill show that the people who hate us are already winning. shame, shame, shame

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:04 am
Grammy:

Three cheers for the brave politicians who stood up to that little Hitler-in-training and his crew!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:05 am
Jody P.:

Beautifully written Mr Guzman, no. 12.
I wonder if this forum will receive as much attention as a new Paris Hilton sex tape might.
Reading Toqueville recently, I was reminded what a beautiful and just system our forefathers laid out for us. We have perverted it some throughout our history and it’s not perfect, but it is the most exceptional example of what a democracy can offer its people: remember “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”
Some govt 101 for those who have forgotten : We have three branches of government. These branches have the power to check and balance each other. Secret prisons were set up outside of the US by the administration in order to avoid America’s judicial system. They didn’t want the court butting into their business. Now, with this new legislation, we have an executive power deciding what interrogation techniques are permissible, which smugly scoffs at the Geneva Conventions, and a judicial power, hands tied, unable to contest. We will also see prisoners refused the most basic rights given to a defendant in a trial.
If you think, America, that this is good for us, that this is necessary for the war on terror, you don’t understand the basic principles of the most fundamental idea of our form of democracy and the reason why we have been so strong throughout history. Justice is not only what makes our enemies weaker than us, but it is what makes us strong and civil together within our own communities. It is the reason why our country has been so admired by the world in the past.
We are shooting ourselves in the foot. Not only are our basic principles being spit upon by our own President (see: torture), but his administration is messing with the most important part of our government: three branches of power to check and balance each other.
We must realize that this is an important moment in our history. My grandfather fought in WWII for these principles. I know he would be ashamed today to see us being so extremely blinded by fear that we would compromise our most basic beliefs.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:23 am
MaryAnne:

This bill shows that the Republican party and members of congress are totally willing to uncheck President Bush’s power. Single party government is destroying our democracy.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:24 am
Deborah Schultz:

The so-called detainee bill is not simply a threat to American legal principles; it effectively undoes those principles and leaves us with little safeguard from the government. It is a huge blot on our history. It will do nothing to stop terrorism while, at the same time, vastly expanding the definition of terrorism and obscuring the actions the government takes to quell the rising tide it has created. This bill is hysteria made law. It is shameful.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:27 am
Robert E. DiNardo:

Anyone who thinks this bill is not a threat to legal principles isn’t playing with a full deck. The Bush administration has proven time and time again that power and total control is all that matters, and they will do anything to maintain their status quo. And now they’re trying to frighten us into giving them all the latitude they need to completely take over our lives. In my entire sixty-seven years I have never felt so unsafe. And not from terrorists but from the people who claim to be protecting us.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:28 am
Gerry Briels:

In his political testament,written in 1644, Johan Maurits, governor of the West Indian Company in North East Brasil, declared his opposition to the use of torture because it produces false and geniune confessions alike and destroys the innocent.
This 362 years old opinion has been confirmed by the main stream of scientific, medical and even intelligence professions. Maurits was not known to be a softy but apparently saw no purpose in obtaining useless information by hurting enemies.
Gerry Briels

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:33 am
Thomas Doremus:

What do the Republicans have planned next? With all these powers they want to grant the president perhaps they’ll try to give him a crown. Would that make him King George IV?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:36 am
Marilynn Murray:

How many American’s being held as a detainees will it take for people to wake up to this fascist regime? If you aren’t afraid, you should be.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:37 am
Carl Ian Schwartz:

Unfortunately, the new bill on terrorism suspects is another nail in the coffin of our Constitution. The trouble is that very few people see it. I am grossly disapppointed in the votes of my own state’s senators (Lautenberg and Menendez), who should know better.
At this point, there is no fixed, legal definition of a “terrorist.” It can be ANYBODY, and once so labelled, you lose your rights in these United States–now worse than ever because rather than being simply administrative law, it’s an act of Congress, and as such less subject to challenge in the courts.
Never before in our history has the Executive Branch manipulated fear as skillfully to maintain political power. Unfortunately, the results–both short- and long-term–will be devastating. For the past twenty-five years, the party in power has made the word “tax” a four-letter one, and has created a political culture where taxation is toxic. It is not–it is the basis for civilized living. By enacting giveaways to the richest 1% of Americans at the expense of the rest, the Republicans have weakened public education, infrastructure, and now defense. They refuse to enact a draft, and our armed forces are stretched too thin in Iraq. Their supplies are inadequate–and Administration cronies are in on the skim in armed forces logistics.
How do you close the gap and prevent public scrutiny? By manipulating FEAR. Since taxes have been demonized, their collection/enforcement starved, our infrastructure weakened, and our armed forces inadequate, the public (increasingly less informed) is given scapegoats.
This new act of Congress will give rise to a game of social musical chairs, where some people become outcasts to feed the greedy. We have seen such games played before in outright dictatorships, where a certain group is demonized, victimized, robbed, and killed. It doesn’t work in the long term–another group has to be demonized, victimized, robbed, and killed.
Now that anyone can be a “terrorist,” this is happening in these United States.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:39 am
androo:

The Detainee Bill is a tool to wage a ” war OF terror ” on humanity including Citizens of United States. By enacting this law the Senate has upgraded Mr Bush from President to Emperor

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:47 am
Marwan Kasih:

I am Syrian American &have been living In ths great country for the past 42 years I came here for the freedom &democracey this country has ,but I am sorry to say this administration is taken It away.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:51 am
Tom Gibson:

Let’s see how all the brave and patriotic hypocrites stand up to be accounted for when other countries apply the exact same treatment to US soldiers. The rest of the world looks at the USA and wonders how it ever came to be in such a cloud-cuckoo-land state of existence. Make no mistake about it, this generation’s grandchildren will curse their grandparents for the poisonous and shameful legacy they knowingly passed on.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:55 am
Kurt Strahm:

The bill fits (their political scheme) perfectly, as Bush and his henchmen do their best to make each of us complicit, first asking:
.
- Did 9/11 make you want to kill someone? -> Let’s invade Iraq.
.
… and now asking:
.
- Does our failure make you nervous? Are you starting to get the feeling we’ve suckered you down the wrong road and it’s making us all look vulnerable? -> Let’s make pointless torture legal, to show we’re serious as Hitler!
.
The only good thing to come out of this whole Bush / GOP Era is the chance (like in early Nazi Germany) to see who takes which side, and how easily people accept lies that serve their bitterness and greed.
.
I just hope (counter to the bill’s intent) people are held responsible for their actions.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:58 am
Don Meegan:

this is not an anti-terrorism bill; it is an anti-American bill. fascism is fast creeping into our country.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:05 am
Ed March:

Chill out, everybody! As with most other hot political “issues” these days, this bill probably will not do what either side says it will.
I’d be willing to bet the interrogation techniques approved in this bill will produce no additional reliable information on the plans of any terrorist anywhere. And I’d be willing to bet that the detentions approved by the bill will produce no more terrorsts’ convictions in court, ours or anybody else’s.
Our rights have not been denied us. Habeas corpus has been suspended before, most notably in Abe Lincoln’s efforts to reunite the nation divided by a real Civil War. We survived that “erosion,” and I’m sure we will survive this one. The pendulum will swing again.
Relax, everybody.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:07 am
Council Mattoon:

I thought these were suspects, but the sponsors of this bill speak as if they have been convicted. Our bill of rights and constitution are the things that make us better than the others. If we give those up, why are the “terrorists” any worse than we.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:07 am
Javier:

I think it is necessary to fight these criminals. Nietzsche was an idiot.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:09 am
Paulboy:

Clearly a threat to our legal system and sense of fairness, our American tradition. I believe it was Josef Goebbels who said something to the effect that if government officials tell the public that something is for their safety and security, they can get away with anything. We saw where that led.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:12 am
Barry Wiedenkeller:

I find this very distressing. I live in Thailand and we recently had a coup which replaced a potential dictator, Thaksin.

This is a small well received revolution. That is it is well received in Thailand. Of course the GW Bush administration has cut some aid. to Thailand.

they must feel that this kind of popular revolution may be possible in our country, I hope so.

I hate to think all that good English tea went into Boston harbor for nothing. Come on guys get out on hte streets remember Vietnam?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:12 am
Frank Avila:

“These are bad men!” How can this be said accurately unless it is proven , on a case by case basis, in a court of law?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:12 am
Kevin Beane:

This action, along with many others that this administration and congress have taken, sets a danderous precedent for our country. It appears that in the name of defense we are willing to violate not only our own laws and principles but those that we have agreed upon in the Geneva Convention. Discarding freedom in the name of freedom is hypocrital and dangerous. I love my country but am ashamed of how we are acting and what we have become. I hope we can recognize what we are doing and demand that our elected officials abide by the values that we claim to believe in.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:14 am
John Chuckman:

You need to ask this? The people associated with this legislation are cowards, true moral cowards who swagger and abuse the powerless. It is no surprise that Bush would be the Torture President, but my God there must be a special place in hell for John McCain after his role in this legislation.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:15 am
Gordon Ashworth:

This bill is damaging to the people of this country is three ways.

It is an expression of the hopeless fear of the lawmakers who voted for it.

It sends a clear message to the rest of the world that here is a country whose brand of democracy is not to be trusted. Our citizens will suffer as a result of the world’s response to this bill.

Lastly, it takes away fundamental legal rights that should never be taken away from our people, not here and not in any country.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:20 am
Marcus Taylor:

This is a black day for America. For the first time in my life I am arranging my affairs so that I my leave this fascist leaning country (remember Germany prior to WWII) before the constitution is totally shredded. Everything we have stood for for over 200 years has been trashed by these idiots in the White House and Congress. 65 men have condemed our children and grandchildren to world wide scorn. Osama has won, he knows it and now I know it too. Lord help us the destruction of America is now complete. History repeats itself time and time again. Does anyone remember the “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:24 am
Michele:

It’s a dark, sad day in American history when two bills are passed–one suspending habeas corpus and codifying into law many of the abuses that shocked the world at Abu Graib, the other legalizing warrantless wiretapping. I’m afraid and ashamed of this president and the congress.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:26 am
Brett Lindenbach:

Mr. Bush, it is shameful that you find the internationally accepted definition of torture to be unclear, and seek to conveniently redefine it. Frankly, it is time you stepped down!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:27 am
J. Russell:

The passage of S.3930 by 12 Democrat and 53 Republican Senators is a disgrace. A WashingtonPost.com article, reporting on the Senate action Friday, included the following: “University of Texas constitutional law professor, Sanford V. Levinson, described the bill, in an Internet posting, as the mark of a ‘banana republic.’ Yale Law School Dean, Harold Koh, said that ‘the image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it’s not clear that most of the members understand what they’ve done.’” Sixty-five Congressmen and women have sold-out their good conscience and their country…or are totally oblivious to the serious ramifications that will materialize from what they have done, as Dean Koh has stated! The former motivation is shameful; while the latter motivation is unforgivable!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:27 am
Gerald Asher:

Our enemies, we are told repeatedly, hate “freedom and democracy.” Will someone now please tell us exactly who America’s enemies are?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:29 am
Elmer:

It seems to me that the former Sovjet Union’s KGB —-(the dreaded secret police that commited unspeakable tortures on its citizens and non citizens, for example, in the 1960’s Garry Powers the US U2 pilot was instructed by the US to commit suicide if captured, because the US was aware of the brutal KGB torture methods, –but Garry opted not to kill himself)—- have been transplanted and now being carefully nursed in the USA.
This present administration seems to be demolishing the constitutional rights of its citizens.
Sad to see that the last bastion of freedom in the world the USA is now at the edge of a cliff…..
If we only say, God save the USA ,is not enough. It is our duty to vote to save the country from this rampaging tyranny. But I am afraid that the cyber space voting machines are already fixed.

Elmer Teleki, participant in the 1956 Hungarian revolution, was admitted to the USA by President Eisenhower, naturalized in 1962.
I love this country, but now, I am crying

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:36 am
roger:

Condolence form letters to bereaved families indicate how much the lives and wellbeing of our brave mean to republican chicken hawks.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:40 am
steve G:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, Who shall guard the guards :Juvenal

Indeed, who watches the watchers???

While no one is supposed to use the word, this bill being passed is simply one more step towards it. Facism, ugly word isnt it, but with our “leaders” choosing to let our ‘decider in chief’ select who among us is the most guilty and most in need of disappearing, we are only a few lock steps away from it. Sad, embarrasing, infuriating.
When the next country decides to remake their own definitions of torture, and we get to see Rumsfeld (or Rice or whoever) crying and wringing their hands on television about imporoper treatment of OUR citizens and solidiers, maybe then we will realize what a foolish thing this has been. My only hope is that if not before he leaves office, soon afterwards, George and his cohort are all hauled off to the Hague.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:43 am
John Russell:

Beyond the real ant-democratic issues, why would you give more executive power to any individual or group who have so consistantly demonstrated their incompetence, and willingness to lie and cheat to cover up that incompetence? Simple question. Boggles the mind.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:44 am
Pat:

Will we ever be able to be proud to be American again? Who is going to lead us out of this darkness? These are such depressing times! How are we going to undo all the damage that has been done under this administration?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:45 am
JIM BUCHANAN:

I can’t believe any right given should be taken without due process. We do not live in the days of “Old West Justice” anymore and life has become too precious to be thrown away in a reckless manner.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:46 am
Harold S Kramer:

The GOP will rue the day they voted to pass a bill that will give Bush the authority “to establish specific permissible interrogation techniques, and strip detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court.” This seems such an egregious outrage that I can’t help wonder - what did Bush promise or threaten legislators to get their support.? Maybe a Special Prosecutor should investigate? And why didn’t the Democrats, and others who objected to this Draconian law walk out en masse - or at least - march on the Whitehouse with torches and pitchforks chanting - “Stop The Torture.”

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:48 am
Richard Weaver:

This an assault on the Constitution. It shames us in front of the world, as we turn our backs on the principles that have made us admired. It puts arbitrary power, without oversight, in the hands of one person - one who has already shown himself incompetant at handling terrorism and yet ruthless at politics.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 7:58 am
Don:

No. Absolutely not. This is not the most dangerous enemy we have ever faced and these are not the most dangerous times we have faced. This is probably the most amateur and incompetent administration we have ever had.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:00 am
James Schmitt:

In the hands of most administrations these new laws would not be a problem. However in the hands of wrong headed ones, including the Bush-Cheney one, serious conditions for individual personal freedoms are on the line. Anyone including innocent American citizens can be branded and thrown in jail forever with no recourse. They only need incur the displeasure of someone in the administration. God help us.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:09 am
Thierry:

The foundations of the American legal system are seen in the world as a strong basis to any democratic country. Modifying them is a step towards a new world where people talking about spreading democracy elsewhere (i.e. Middle East) have no credibility at all.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:10 am
Robert Allen:

Now that we can have secret tribunals with torture “evidence,” why dawdle around further? Why not just go where this is headed — Republican Party secret police, torture jails, and death squads. Why bother with further charades about “rights” and “law”?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:11 am
Earl:

What American “legal principles”? Consider the two cases (1965 & 1995) before the U.S. District Court for Western District of North Carolina (Asheville, N.C.), U.S.-vs-Wheby and the fact that these so-called “crimes” were nothing more than cheescake 8mm 5 minute films and the second “conviction” was due to sending evidence to the court to show the first conviction was for something no longer against the law and the prosecution in the second case was based solely on sending the evidence to the court! This is AmeriKan “justice”! Now, here in un-free U.S., where all 3 branches of the government are run and dominated by LAWYERS, where is the criminal prosecutions for all the firms making millions of dollars a year producing hard core porno films and videos and flooding the U.S. mails with them? I will tell you. There is no prosecutions because your lawyer “leaders”, who were damned by Jesus in Luke 11:52, openly stand for DOUBLE STANDARDS of “justice” and these same lawyers are not prosecuted for their defeated foreign policies in Vietnam because here in U.S. lawyers don’t sue or prosecute each other. There is little “justice” in U.S. so what in the world could you be referring to when you speak of “legal principles”?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:12 am
John F Callan:

SECURITY = PROTECTION FROM HARM ( internal and external)

If our constitutional rights are being taken away, no matter by whom , and no matter why,

The people of the USA are being harmed,

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:15 am
Earl E. Bush, Jr.:

The primary purpose of the detainee bill is to expand the powers of the executive branch. The price, unfortunately, is a serious threat to some of the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of the American people.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:16 am
Eileen:

What’s wrong with “regular” Republicans? Are they will to close their eyes to moral corruption in favor of their pocketbooks?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:17 am
Ann:

This is emblematic of the fact that the Republicans will do anything to retain absolute power. It is very disturbing and against our consistitution. The Republicans are in bed with all of the special interests and this bill shows that they are chipping away at our rights. Goodness help our men and women abroad — this bill should make many think twice before going over to fight due to the potential reprocussions on safety.

Next year we will all be citizens of Halliburton.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:18 am
Stuart Day:

The trashing of our Constitution and our Laws “so the C.I.A. can have the tools it needs to get the job done” is a strategy on par with the one we claim to be waging a ‘war’ against.

If the matching strategy of those who wish to do us harm is to dupe us into harming ourselves, the detainee bill just rushed through Congress is the latest example of what our enemies are unable to accomplish for themselves and are all too happy for us to do on their behalf.

At this rate, we’re making it harder than ever for them to lose. “Sic Semper Tyrannis”, indeed, Senator Warner (R-VA)..

Stuart Day
St. Rémy-de-Provence

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:19 am
Carolyn:

When you study the McCarthy era in history, or the Japanese interment camps, you wonder how all of that could possibly have happened.

Now we now. Fear, hysteria, political manuevering….now coded into law,
and all in the name of winning elections.

What kind of coalition does Bush have if it is a coalition of fear?

I believe this law will be found unconstitutional by the courts, and I feel students of the future will read about this time and wonder, how could this have happened in America?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:20 am
ceci:

Shame on these Democrats who voted AYE!

Carper (D-DE)
Johnson (D-SD)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Lieberman (D-CT)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Salazar (D-CO)
Stabenow (D-MI)

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:21 am
Phil Patterson:

The detainee law that the republicans just passed is the most un-American piece of legislation I’ve seen in 57 years. Why can’t the Bush regime operate like every other administration? Why do the law have to be perverted for them to achieve whatever it is they’re trying to achieve? They don’t know how to govern by the normal rules?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:22 am
Not an apologetic American:

All those who want to whine, cry and wring their hands, saying that America is such a rotten place. Go ahead and sit down with the terrorists see how quick they are to throw you to the groound and saw through your neck with a dull rusty knife, laughing the whole time. You think they care if you are a card carrying member of the ACLU or a haliburton vp? This is the real world folks not an abstract homework assigment given by some product of the 60s liberal professor. Spend some time overseas as I have dealing with people who despise us, not for who is running our country or because of our foreign policy but because we are America, the land of mindless Hollywood drivel,excess to the extreme and in their minds the reincarnation of Saddam and Gomorrah. Hate yourselves if you want but you need to quit hating America so much. If you really hate it then you have the freedom to go elsewhere…..

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:23 am
ken warner:

Can you all see that the people who want to destroy us are more than willing to use unconventional techniques to do that? Have you forgotten the 90’s and the attacks that happened then? New tactics demand new responses to defend our country. The French adhered to WW1 thinking as Germany developed new strategies, and the French had to capitulate when confronted with those tactics.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Phil Patterson:

Bush should be impeached immediately and members of his “administration” should be imprisoned. This is the most serious attack on America yet. The terrorists have won. Bush is scared to death and acting like a petulant punk.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Alan Hyatt:

I see that George W Bush has not learned anything from America’s recent history. During World War II we upheld the Geneva Convention on German soldiers in this country to the letter. The rules state that prisoners of war be fed, clothed, housed and medically cared for at the same level as our Troops! This demonstrated to the world what America and Democracy stood for. If religion is going to be a part of politics it should be the very foundation of all religions of the World “The Golden Rule of Ethics”. Do unto others as you would have do unto you.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:26 am
Kenn Pearson:

This bill should serve as a warning to Americans that YOU are next. If there are few protests to the rights of others, it will make it that much easier for this power-mad administration to steal away even more American rights, all under the pretense of fighting a ridiculously open-ended, and money-draining, War on Terrorism. This proves the real number one terrorist in the world is George W. Bush! He’s about as religious as one of the Sopranos.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:27 am
Rachel:

I am scared for my children and the world that they may be growing up in.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:28 am
C. A. Hudson:

65 Senators need to be asked to go read the German Enabling Act of 1933. Their just past Bill on Detainees gives Bush remarkably similar descretionary powers the earlier act gave Hitler. A sad day for real Democracy. A discraceful day for Senate Democrats too spineless to object and filibuster.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:29 am
Terence Gaffney:

The NYT editorial “Rushing off a cliff” is exactly right on this issue, and should be e-mailed as widely as possible. The concessions to executive power made in the bill compromise who we are and what we fight for.

More disturbing than the content of the bill even, is the fact that a substantial portion of the country either approves it or is willing to tolerate it. This is a time when we need to hear from our moral and spiritual leadership, so that the country can regain its moral compass.

Why has our religious leadership been so silent in the run-up to the passage of this bill?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:29 am
Bob Lombardo:

This bill if approved by the Supreme Court, signals the end of the Democratic Republic of America. America is strong becuase of its system of laws. if we tear the basics from that structure it will topple into a totalitarian state.

After the war, Niemoeller’s condemnation of bystanders to Nazi policies will become a call to early action. His words: “First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist - so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat - so I did nothing. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew - so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me.”

America should be in the streets by the millions protesting this takeover of our Government by this group of liars who rule by fear alone, with no real direction or leadership. Their list of failures is too long to post. Their list of success’ is 0.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:31 am
Al Fisher:

I just finished reading, in this same issue of the NYTimes, an article on the fact that Iraq has now made it illegal to report anything derogatory of the government. The way this administration is heading we can expect a similar law next year if the Democrats don’t develop some spine and take back at least one house of the Congress. Maybe I’m too hopeful of a Democratic victory. After all, quite a number of Democrats voted for this law. Cowards!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Mary La Croce:

Bush and his co-conspiratorshave diminished our standards in those very areas that define us as a nation to be emulated. It’s absolutely disturbing to think that these men will be in power for another two and a half years. They have wreaked havoc on our institutions, on political discourse, and on the future of this country. Will we stand up to this onslaught come election day?

If not, we deserve to be spectators at the fall of the great ideals of this nation. Bush should be impeached.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:36 am
Sue Newman:

It was very necessary to pass this bill. If the President thinks this is
needed I will go along with it because he knows more of what is going on
than any voter. I also believe that the media and dems have made it much harder for us to win this war.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:40 am
Ken McGee:

The Geneva Convention is soooo—-”Old America.”

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:44 am
Joe:

The idea that torture works is directly opposed to the traditional wisdom gained from days when such barbarity was common place in western nations. Such treatment gave rise to a movement that changed the world.

Do we forget that the Christian Cross is THE symbol of ROMAN torture tactics and brutality?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:44 am
John Larson:

This bill for terrorists trials is again stepping on the USA way of law and everytime Bush does something he lowers our esteem farther.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:46 am
Rodney Cole:

The passage of a bill like this is entirely counterproductive and uncalled for. In passing this bill the Senate will destroy the rights that we pretend to uphold when we subscribe to such a bill. The “terrorists” have won…American freedoms are destroyed. The only winners are a repressive administration.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:49 am
Roger Vaughan:

That the detainee bill was passed, even with the modifications wrought by McCain, Warner et al., is shocking to me. After all the documented evidence about innocent people who have been arrested and tortured, it boggles the mind that our Congress would pass any bill that leaves so much decision making in the hands of this outrageously misguided administration. Doesn’t our Congress know who GWB and his cronies are by now? What will it take to open the eyes of our elected officials? One of their close relatives being sent off to be tortured at a CIA prison overseas? The Bush administration’s pre-emptive venture into Iraq and the resulting mess has given terrorism an enormous boost. Now the head of Civil Rights is on the block. The detainee bill is one more nail in the coffin of Democracy that is being ravaged on a daily basis. One thing that’s always puzzled me about terrorists is the nature of their goal. What are they trying to accomplish? These days I have to ask the same question about the Bush administration.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:54 am
brenda spencer:

Hidden deep in this bill is amnesty for the Bush administration for the atrocities they committed before now.Thats why Bush pushed this so hard. How good does this make them look? The word COWARD comes to my mind.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:55 am
Fred Carlson:

Are we at War or are we sitting on a hill side listening to a parable from the Sermon on the Mount.

Maybe we should be in the Temple throwing over tables!

fred carlson

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:56 am
etienne perret:

Why do our representative in government not understand this new law eliminating the rules of habeas corpus for non Us citizens?
Do they not think that other countries will feel comfortable following our lead?
Do they not realize that US citizens wil now be vulnerable to indeffinite detention in foreign jails?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:59 am
Pat Bean:

America needs to take the high road and treat others the way we would want any American arrested in another company treated. Our legal system is part of what this country stands for. I believe that by allowing everyone these same rights we will actually be saving lives in the long run. Our enemies will have less fuel to war with us and fewer recruits may want to join their ranks. In the past we have condemned countries for doing exactly what Cheney and our president want us to do. I am thinking that if we continue along this path someday we may face accusations of war crimes against humanity. And rightly so. I’m 67 years old and I hate to see the things that made this country great crumble before my eyes. Some things in life are worth a risk.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 8:59 am
Pam:

For those of you who support this bill (luckily not many here, but that’s the NY Times readership, I suppose), have you no concern for the people who are wrongfully apprehended and tortured? This is not a hypothetical; we have an actual case, that of Maher Arar, who is living proof that such a thing has happened. Do you honestly believe that a man’s life, any man’s life, is forfeit to the cause of our safety?

And this is not to mention the fact that this bill will serve as a perfect recruiting tool for terrorist organizations. I do not believe America is an evil country, but I have no doubt that for Arabs, this bill will be an indication that it is, and people sitting on the fence will now jump down on the side of terrorists. Because in their eyes, we are no longer harbingers of freedom. In their eyes, we have become the terrorists.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:00 am
I. I. Yikes:

The fanatical terrorists are inhuman. They have no rights. We are in a war against them where “some of” our sons and daughters are at risk, as is our homeland. We have an obligation to obtain information by whatever means required to support our troops. When you go after pigs you have to go into the pig sty. The Marines who fought in the Pacific theatre in WWII beat a savage enemy by giving their tactics right back to them and then some.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:04 am
Gene Sidore:

Bush ignores the constitution in every way. Handling of detainees is just an example. There is no way in which I can be assured his minions will not brand me an enemy combatant and lock me away with no recourse.

Bush should be impeached to show that the American people explicitly reject all his illegal and criminal actions.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:06 am
Ane Hanley:

This bill is dreadful. When my husband was a POW in WW2 in Germany, he didn’t get much to eat except Red Cross parcels because the US had signed the Geneva Convention. All he was asked when he was shot down was name, rank and serial number. We are making ourselves worse than the Nazis by having Guantanamo and now this bill to make some illegal things legal. This does not bode well for any American POW’s!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:07 am
Richard J. Hoekstra:

If we save ourselves, but destroy everything that made us a great nation in the process, then what have we gained and what have we lost?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:08 am
Peggy Gilges:

I can’t believe the Republicans feel that they’ve accomplished something of which to feel proud. I’m embarrassed by this legislation and feel that most Americans, if they take the time to consider the implications of this, will reject this and the Bush administration’s claim that it must be done for our security. It’s shameful.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:09 am
A. Piner:

It is at this moment, more then any other, that I am ashamed of our country and the individuals that govern it. That anyone who has seen the images that have come out of Abu Gharib could then legalize those very same methods is completely abhorrent to me. That we can place even more power in the hands of a single individual, the president, goes against everything our founding fathers intended. That we place this power in the hands of this president is completely insane and shows that the real values of America have been lost along the way. Has no one seen “V for Vendetta?” Has no one read George Orwell? Don’t people understand that this bill can be used against American citizens? Is there no one who understands that it is better to die in a terrorist attack then for one instant give up our moral and ethical basis as a country? It is wrong to torture people! It is wrong to throw out one of the most important laws (habeus corpus) just to get a better night’s sleep! It is wrong to make an elected president into an elected dictator who has the power to decide, on an individual basis, who is or is not an “enemy combatent! Congratulations Mr. Bush, you have taken another step into making us exactly like them.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Walter Horodyski:

Bush is right. His detainee regulation is a tool. But it’s not intended to aid him or any other president in the wars being waged. This is a well timed political tool designed to bump his popularity among the fools who will vote for republicans and the continued decline of America’s segment of civilization. Sadly, he managed to garner the support of Graham, Warner and the useless Mr. McCain to grandstand the issue into the public limelight for all to see. It was all staged, an entirely political episode in which he is the winner and the nation loses it’s dignity.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:14 am
Bruce:

Because the twin towers were brought down using explosives, I question anything related to the use of the word “Terrorist”, or anything used inconjunction with the 9/11 “Terrorist” attacks, that Bush tries to get through the system. I think we are very gullible because after five years we don’t see, we don’t want to question the man.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:15 am
elaine komorowski:

SHAME SHAME…SHAMEFUL! Obviously Senator Warner has forgotten history enough to dismiss armies like that of our own colonial times (largely un-uniformed) or that of the french resistance fighters in WWII as “terrorists” and not worthy of the basic rights that organized “uniformed” armies are due. STUPID, SHORT-SIGHTED SENATORS! This administation and those who blindly support it have made me ashamed to be an american.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:15 am
w.dougherty:

It is an embarassment to me and to this country. There will be a price for this colossal stupidity.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:16 am
Nigel:

Even King George recognized the value of Habeas Corpus in the 1700s. But America’s King George is unwilling to offer others even the right to face their accusers. Being allowed to face one’s accusers and see evidence leading to a charge is not a priviledge, it is a basic human right. This isn’t a Replican/Democrat issue! It is a moral issue!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Robert Curtis:

This is not a necessary tool. It is a victory for our enemies. It is a destruction
of our country greater than could be achieved by any bomb or military attack.
9/28/06 should be remembered as the day the terrorists won the war. My last
hope is that the courts will not tolerate this abuse my the executive and
legislative branches. I hope we will have Isaac Newton to thank for our idea
of a balance of power. This bill is an abomination. It violates all that we should
hold sacred.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Bill Lowe:

We have a President that has reportedly said the Constitution is just a Damn piece of Paper. During his term in office he has repeatability demonstrated that he believes he is above the Constitution & Laws.

I think it should be obvious to all informed citizens that we no longer have a government by the people for the people but a government of the Rich & Corrupt for the Rich & Corrupt. Probably never in our history have we faced such perilous times to this country, not from external enemies but the enemies within.

But to be fair either party cares about the Citizens, or the future of this Nation. All Politicians of both parties put their selves First, Party next, Lobbyist next. Both parties focus is on raising money for their next political campaign & few if any allow what’s best for this Nation & its Citizens to stand in their way of getting money for their next series of attack ads.

During the last 20 years this country has experience the greatest invasion in the History of the world. Either the Politicians or the Citizens have demanded that Article IV Section IV of the Constitution or ours Laws be enforced! The detainee & terrorist policy is just one more example of the political disdain & diminishment of our Constitution & Laws.

When both American Citizens & the Politicians start picking & choosing which parts of the Constitution & Laws are abided by & enforced then both the Citizens & Politicians are refuting everything that made us a great Nation.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:21 am
Ding:

Too much reaction about the rights of individuals, remember these are enemy combatants, and lot of us is have the wrong pretense that when you let them go they will go home and become a law abiding citizens. We need to protect our own turf and don’t let anybody take that tools away from us. Put these in your brains “they are there because they want to kill every one of us”. If there is another attack here in this country, I hope all these so called civil rights liberty groups can still say what they are saying now. Damn if you do and damn if you dont.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:22 am
Civil:

Giving any president the ability to throw somebody into jail, forever, without hope of pleading their case in front of a neutral third party (Supreme Court) used to be unAmerican. Even Kings haven’t had that power for 800 years (since the Magna Carta).

What the Congress has done is repudiate of the separation of powers doctrine and basic Constitutional liberties. This is a sad day for America.

Has the War Crimes Act been changed so War Crimes committed while it was in effect are no longer war crimes (this had been one of the provisions of the bill but I don’t know if it was passed)?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Walt Schweizer:

For a European, it is very encouraging to see that 99 percent of the reactions condemn Bush and Congress for making U.S.A. even more incredible in the rest of the world.
Should, however, the Republican majority stay after the November elections, the image of the whole of U.S.A. will be even more damaged.
In November, the world will watch where democracy in America really stands.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Susan Watt:

Your detainee bill now plants your country back in the 12th century. My understanding of the law is “innocent until proven guilty” and yet you call all detainees in Cuba “terrorists” without ever proving it. You should all be ashamed of your government and work hard to get back to a civilized state.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:33 am
Marie Kane:

I echo the cry of Ms Malloy # 20–
Where ARE the Democrats, in this travesty and betrayal of all that this country believes in and represents? We need a voice–sane, rational, and yet vociferous–to stand and denounce what George Bush and his henchmen in Congress have accomplished– all in the name of fear.
If one dares to object to the removal of habeaus corpus and the legalization of torture, he or she is branded ’soft on terror’ or even ’someone who does not love this country.’
Is this nor similar to the Salem Witch trials? Or Joseph McCarthy’s bullish tirade again Communists? Those vendettas succeeded because of irrational fear foisted on American citizens also. But, someone has to do something–or what, then, have we become? The very country that our ‘enemies’ would wish us to be.
The President and Congress’s version of the American Constitution, I imagine, would shock the very men who wrote it and were willing to give their very lives to protect it.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:37 am
Catherine:

I don’t know yet what my decision is on this bill; I do know that President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and also shut down newspapers he regarded as treasonous. I know that the British Diplock courts in Northern Ireland sent innocent people to jail requiring only the testimony of one person and after police and army utilized these same torture techniques. Britain was found guilty of torture by the European Court of Human Rights. I also know that I and many, many others do not care a fig what Europe thinks of us, as it is busy wimping out on its own heritage, and I begin to wonder why we bothered helping them out of two wars.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:43 am
Sally Hawkridge:

Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgeway. All disgusting, frightening, dangerous, monstrous human beings. All successfully and legally prosecuted under our beautiful system with all of its rights and protections, as crafted by the Founding Fathers and refined over the last 217 years.

What makes a terrorist better or worse than any of these? Is it somehow worse to die at the hands of an al-Qaeda operative than the Son of Sam or a drug lord?

Should any of my loved ones ever be slain by the hand of another, I would feel no satisfaction if their killer were prosecuted by any unjust, improper, or unfair means. The system that was good enough for Timothy McVeigh and Ramsey Yusuf is still good enough for all of us after all these years.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:44 am
robert myers:

No, the detainee bill is not needed. Present laws, properly enforced have sufficed world wars and previous events that are similar.
A government that has yet to secure it’s own borders shoul revisit it’s proirities. The job of government is to protect the citizens and the nation and to better the life of all the residents. Perhaps this has been forgotton.
Will “terror” ever be defined?
This is not a needed bill it is a diversion from the priority of getting the criminals who did these deeds off the streets.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:47 am
Michael Allen:

All that needs to be said is contained in the Constitution of the United States. The knowledge that these words were written to and for American citizens should not blind us to the fact that the principles behind the words are applicable to all men as basic human rights - true justice knows neither borders nor birthright. It is a sorry day when a worthless congress of ciphers kow-tows to the ignorant, arrogant ass who described the Constitution as “just a goddamn piece of paper.” Is anyone so foolish as to think they are immune from this law, that their citizenship will protect them should they fall afoul of the administration? The Great Decider will decide what rights, if any, you have; if you think otherwise, you are a fool.

Impeachment and imprisonment, domestically for high crimes against the American people and internationally for crimes against humanity, are called for. I fervently pray that these things both come to pass.

Consider, please, the following:

ARTICLE IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated……..

ARTICLE V: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury………..nor be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.

ARTICLE VI: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed……and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Roy Schaetzel:

So, America is denying its true self! A black day! The Constitution is bleeding! What nonsense. Since 9/11/06, America lives in a different world with a different enemy. Grow up. Free yourself of your politicial biases. If Lincoln could understand the necessity of suspension of habeas corpus, perhaps you may allow common sense to enter your thought process. The real problem is the errant Supreme Court decision which, without legal basis, legitimized terrrorists by placing them under the Geneva Conventions and forced the Congress to go where appeasing jurists dared not go. The Court blinked and exchanged legality for social desire, leaving the country in a legal lurch - an abject neglect of its position and purpose in our system of government.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:49 am
Don Brown:

It is so sad to see such a noble country brought so low. State sponsored terrorism, the CIA, illegal and unnecessary wars, an incredibly corrupt “democratic” political process and now this legalized torture. Is this the democracy you are trying to spread around the world? The U.S. is the real axis of evil along with its subjugated “coalition” of Britain, Australia and now most distressing, Canada. Do you wonder why the rest of the world hates you?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:54 am
Jim Kellock:

This administration and congress are doing in plain view what Americans have previously denounced as evil repression of rights when done by “shadowy” regimes elsewhere, yet we sit back and watch their actions as if they were deciding how to schedule trash pickups or how long we should allow our grass to grow.

Our laws are supposed to offer protection from the crimes of other people and also from the excesses of government, but in posturing to increase the former, government is eviscerating the latter as we watch.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:54 am
lawrence larkin:

america is not the america that I have always. loved. We cannot afford not to abuse prisoners in the name of our own freedom. right now we are LOst. L feel asamed of our country.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:55 am
Steve Allen:

It is definitely a threat to our rights as citizens. It smacks of Fascism which seems to be creeping into our federal government under the current administration.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:58 am
John Moffett:

Yesterday, in an act of utter disdain and contempt for freedom and our Constitution, the U.S. Senate voted to limit human rights in the United States. Almost all Republicans were joined by a handful of Democrats to vote away many of the freedoms that President Bush has claimed we are fighting for. In addition to secret trials for military detainees, the bill retroactively excuses American officials who have perpetrated torture on prisoners, and permits continued torture of prisoners in US custody. What has happened to “innocent until proven guilty”? Now it becomes “tortured until proven innocent”.

But Bush does not see the provisions as sanctioning torture - much like a Soviet style dictator he simply perceives torture as providing “the necessary tools” to fight an ill-defined enemy. A more heartless perception could not be imagined.

As the Bush administration frantically scrambles to eliminate hard-won freedoms here in the US, their claims that we are fighting overseas for “freedom” rings ever more hollow. As the administration blurs the lines between democracy and totalitarianism, it becomes ever more evident that the United States has lost its moral basis, as well as the respect of the civilized world.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 9:59 am
Monte Brown:

Emperor Bush and his imperialistic right wing cronies want to do away with the 4th Amendment. “With catlike treads upon the gray they steal”-Gilbert and Sullivan. Black people account for half the prison population in the United States and they are only 12.5 percent of the total population. I believe part of the reason is that many poor blacks, who receive the most scrutiny by law enforcement (especially black men) are unaware of their rights under the 4th Amendment, and because they are under represented in court, not because they are inherently proned to criminal activity. This detainee bill, which overlooks habeas corpus is just another way of imposing on peoples freedom from unlawful search and seizure. They want to catch people “riding dirty” as that rapper said. There is no war on terror. The right wing is waging war on the middle classed and poor, especially minorities. They are using that terror crap as a mask.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:01 am
Brian:

How may people posting comments here have actually read the Military Commissions Act of 2006 from beginning to end?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:03 am
Matt:

I am an American who has lives and works in Vietnam. From time to time, the topic of the Vietnam War arises in conversation. “Are Americans remorseful for the destruction and devastation they inflicted on our country? If so, then why were Americans so easily led into another devasting conflict in Iraq based on fabrications and falsehoods?” I am often at a loss for words. As an American abroad, I try to be a cultural ambassador and highlight America’s most positive and transcendant aspects, namely our democratic system. But lately, it has been difficult to paint a positive portrait our our country in earnest. When we tolerate torture, detain those suspected of terrorist acts without allowing them to challenge their detention, and allow egregious abuses of executive power, we are in principle no different from the regimes in this part of the world. In doing so, we also deflate courage, hope, and resolve of those who do not live in democratic societies- those who so eagerly yearn for democracy and take selfless risks to advocate for it.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:03 am
Roger Buzzard:

The American tradition rooted in English common law extending to the Magna Carta is under attack. Due process and the rule of law are critical components of democratic government. What do have to offer those peoples searching for a model of democratic/constitutional government if these fundamental principles are compromised by the country pretending to believe in democracy and freedom from arbitrary, totalitarian regimes? What is the Unites States defending if not its fundamental values?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Clyde Paige:

The Republican’s and 12 cowardly democrat’s just sold our country down the drain.This is one step closer to America becomming a dictatorship as Bush/Cheney and the neocon’s want it.Yesterday was one of the darkest days in our history. The awol coward Bush is out now calling we Truman Democrat’s cut and run.I served in WWII and one of my Sons served in the Air Force. Bush is the one who cut and ran not us. To give power of life and death to an inept failure like Bush is a crime against the United States.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:11 am
Bill:

Islam is drawing the U.S. into playing their game, as Congress creates law that equates to the tyrannical laws of Islam. We have lost a sense for taking pride in and standing up for the laws we created, as we escaped the tyranny of King George III.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:14 am
kristinar:

Military professionals agree that information gained from torture is questionable and this should be obvious to anyone with common sense. Of course people will say anything to end torture and verifification of information comes only very much later at best so this can never be fully tested.
The people pushing for this legislation are playing war games with other peoples lives and have no personal knowledge of the realities of war and apparently no respect for human life. The delusion that we are bringing democracy to Iraq is rarely mentioned any more because the Iraqi government bears no resemblance to democracy whatsoever. There are laws against free speech newly instituted. Another thing, who do you think the insurgents are? Apply a little common sense and you will see that the insurgents are really all fighting age men capable of defending their homeland and we are killing them all off. Of course they are trying to get rid of the occupying force in their country!!! Who wouldn’t??? If we were invaded, we would be the “insurgents”.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Jeff Bray:

This is a letter I wrote to my Senator.

Dear Senator Johnson:

I am very upset that you voted for the measure on Thursday dealing with the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects. Not allowing habeas corpus, even to terrorists, has to be one of the most nefarious decisions ever made by the Senate. You have contributed in making the United States the pariah of the world. The Senate has undermined our position as a beacon of freedom and fairness. Surely you know that this bill only adds to the President’s already unprecedented powers, and that he and his administration have already illegally abused the powers they already have. It is hardly to be believed that you - a senator I have always respected - should stoop so low as to vote in favor of such a despicable, illegal, and in the sights of history, shameful bill. We will all pay dearly for what has happened this week. Please explain to me why you voted for it. Surely you have some strategy to it, otherwise I can’t imagine what you were thinking.

Jeff Bray
Sioux Falls

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:19 am
Phyllis Sato:

It is clear to me that the motivation for bringing this bill now was with an eye to the mid-term elections. Because of the haste, it was impossible to fully digest the bill and negotiations on the language were too rushed. Furthermore, it is another example of a bill designed by the majority party without any attempt to incorporate minority views. Unfortunately it also doesn’t incorporate basic American values.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:20 am
Ruud Schouw:

Being European, I’d like to share my views on this subject, as we are still part of the ‘coalition of the willing’, for whatever that’s worth;
America as a country, is rapidly losing the last vestiges of respect from it’s traditional allies, on which it could once safely rely.
This has come about in record time and, in my opinion, is the logical result of passing acts such as the one discussed here, but also by
1) the seeming willingness of a large part of the American population to let others do their thinking for them, and then act surprised when it discovers that their leaders use fearmongering and anything but the whole truth to make bad policies even worse;
2) the zeal with which the media silences any form of critique of the Bush administration by branding it traitorous, terrorist enabling, or at the very least partisan, thereby reducing any form of political debate to a shouting match;
3) the baseness of the actual political debate, where getting the actual facts is nearly impossible (as is obvious to anyone who regularly compares mainstream American newspaper coverage to their European counterparts), and reasonable, non-partisan analysis of said facts is even harder to come by. Spin seems to rule all.
4) and finally, the shameless “the end jusitifies the means” attitudes towards established rights and values, coupled with the incredible lack of truthfullness that most senior members of the current administration display towards their own population, their European allies, and the other nations of the world.
I can only hope that at some point in the future things will improve, but from this side of the Atlantic, the current American government and state of affairs are a sad spectacle to behold. Where once your country set an example to follow, it now does exactly the opposite.
R. Schouw, the Netherlands

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:22 am
Rita C. Tobin:

The detainee bill is yet another step by the Bush administration to curtail fundamental civl liberaties under the cloak of ending terrorism. Not only does the bill disembowel the Geneva Conventions, whose purpose was to prevent the very practices authorized by the bill, but the ability of the Administration — any Administration — under the bill to declare anyone, including an American citizen, an “enemy combatent” and hold that person indefinitely without trial, or right of habeas corpus, virtually licenses the Administration to “disappear”, not merely likely terrorists, but also anyone of whom it chooses to get rid. We are witnessing the last days of democracy in the U.S., voted down by the very elected officials whose duty is to protect democracy, and administered by “Big Brother George,” a smiley face fronting for Cheney, Rumsfeld and the right wing, spouting propaganda, slogans and disinformation. Are people dumb enough to let this tragedy occur? Apparently — or so Rove and his buddies have determined — say “terrorism” and “9/11) and Americans will close their eyes to anything, including their own future and the future of their children.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:25 am
lookingglass:

The Bush adminstration has sunk to a new low with its drastic, unilateral, reinterpretation of the Geneva Convention advanced through the so-called detainee bill that it is pushing through Congress. Its time to leave this failed experiment in democracy to emigrate to nations that advance human rights. The United States now seems bent on torturing those who oppose its militaristic foreign policy and its gross misadventures abroad, with no sign that it understands that abandonment of its underlying principles signifies the end of this once-great nation and renders laughable its assertion that it has engaged in the Iraq war to advance democracy.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Juliane:

This bill does nothing to facilitate “winning the war on terror”. The recently released NIE confirms that torture and the lack of due process have exponentially increased the number of terrorists and terrorist incidents.
The specious concept of american exceptionalism, if America tortures it is not touture, must be eviscerated if we are ever to regain the mantle of a civilized nation.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:31 am
michael lozano:

all bills to the american people should be explained as to what exactly they contain…i do believe these goes beyond the necesary to protect us

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:32 am
Roger Duronio:

Just another instance of incompetence. Our 1993 laws enabled the capture and imprisonment of those who attacked the World Trade center. We needed no new laws. Bush and company couldn’t use the laws that exist. Why? Incompetent! And without new laws the President’s power could not grow. That is the whole idea. King George. For the good of the people. With me or against me. I’m against. A gigantic tyrant is much worse than a petty tyrant. The tyrant factor in Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Gonzales, is, to be frank, Gigantic.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:33 am
Stephen Heller:

All is lost.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:34 am
Paul R. Cooper:

Many previous comments illustrate the frustration many of us have with finding the worlds to express our indignation at the bill’s abuse of our values, our system of government, our hopes for a less savage world. I am more worried about creating a savage America than the few thousand savages abroad.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:36 am
Joe Lane:

We’ve now heard from the Master of the ole “Cut & Run” brigade himself. Never showed up for his gentleman’s C’s at Yale, never showed up for his duty roster with the Texas National Guard, never showed up for any of the issues of his day - just “working too hard” at his frat parties, alcohol and drugs to bother with anything except coasting along on his family money and contacts. Now this clown, this fraud, this phony, has the gaul to critize those of us who don’t share his enthusiasm to offer up more of our best people and treasure on the altar of his failed policies and overpreened ego. It will take our nation generations to recover the stature we enjoyed in the world before this egotist became President. Can no one rid us of this meddlesome fool?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Tuzoner Native:

I think it’s safe to conclude this is the beginning of our end courtesy of Senators McCain, Warner, and Graham. You did your country proud by agreeing to the lowest common denominator. Oh… and God Bless America.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:39 am
Jeunes:

We are in a Kafkaesque game with a sadistic, faith-driven zealot who was elected by a U.S. breadbasket full of sadistic, faith-driven zealots. Their orgasms arise from seeing their self-appointed enemies in the throes of torture and death agonies.

To hem, haw, dance around, piddle with, or in any way honor this maniacal frenzy with “discussion” is wasted effort. If there is a god, and this god allows such men as W to rise to power, then it’s clearly useless to pray for better times or better leaders.

What is the old saw about “A country gets the leaders it deserves”?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:41 am
Anagadir:

@Brian: “How may people posting comments here have actually read the Military Commissions Act of 2006 from beginning to end?”

Brian don’t try to be a referee without even holding a whissle. Please summarize this Act to show you’ve read it and then give us your opinion. Mine is that this new “law” that Bush, et all, want to pass would be a major step backwards in Western Civilization - and eventually would make us the loosers - for a long time to come. Hitler tried but wasn’t very successful - and cost Germany an arm and a leg. The USA has to stick with present USA laws and present interpretation of Geneva Convention, integrate more with other Western Countries in its approach to tackle terrorism, bin Laden characters (there will be many more to come), etc. We (USA) certainly have to be more inventive and forward looking in understanding the terrorist approach. Sofar, especially in Iraq, we have reacted - not acted. Perhaps our work in Afghanistan with help from NATO allows us to be a bit more creative and forward thinking. Actually, I believe Rumsfeld has these skills but needs more capable experts - both above and below him and who understand what this Geneva Convention is all about. He will listen. Bush won’t (is dangerous).

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:41 am
jessica lucas:

What happened to our justice system? I understand how terrrible an act war is and that, of course, is what 911 was, an act of war. But to bury thousands of people in Cuba without due process is cruel and unusual pusnishment, for crimes that may never have been committed. How can we as a civilized nation support that kind govermental attitude?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:42 am
thu hoang:

I keep wondering who these 40% are that approves of the way Bush & his cabinet are raping this country. This bill is yet another offense to the nation’s dignity & our American moral rectitude. This is an end run; Bush had lost in the Federal court system so he will now deny detainees the right to access the Federal court system. Whatever happened to “ALL men are created equal … with certain INALIENABLE rights”? The argument that by allowing detainees access will bog down our Federal court system is false and misleading. This is simply Bush not trusting the judges themselves to decide what should or should not be heard in their own courtrooms.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:42 am
Miguel:

I´m not north-american neither do I live in the US. I believe the US should get tougher on dealing with terrorists.

The end is not in question, it´s always the how. Suspending the writ of habeas corpus would make the US a dictatorial regime, where the government´s accusation towards someone becomes the last word. If the accused is a true terrorist, it´s an excellent policy. But who decides whose a ‘real’ terrorist is the frightening aspect. This person or institution deciding becomes God, unquestionably. And should he dislike anyone for who knows what, he could do infinite damage to any one, north-american or foreign national. Who could possibly hand all that power to any institution. Plus, it would do away with all the freedom doctrine (locke, rousseau, hobbes) of the founding fathers. But it is a new century, and some laws need to be found to fairly persecute these unpeople–the terrorists. The devil´s in the details.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:46 am
Alan:

From what I was taught in school and by which I have always believed, this bill is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. It’s hard to believe we have only 34 Senators willing to stand by the constitution. How long will we let this so called “war-on-terror” destroy that which it says is trying to protect.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:52 am
smarcy:

We are at war and our laws should reflect that. We can’t possibly give Miranda warnings to foreign combatants, can we?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:52 am
shane cullen:

Uuuuhh, does anyone remember 9-11???? I do not care what the CIA or whoever do to get information about an attack on us or any of our allies. I would hope that my government, no matter what admin., would do whatever it took to defend us.Plus the fact these terrorist are not a state sponsored army and do not wear a uniform, so from my understanding they should not fall under the Geneva convention. They do not care if your a Republican or a Democrat.. all they know is that you are not a MUSLIM or not MUSLIM enough and you should die.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Karly Beckley:

I felt great shame to be an American when I heard the results of the Senate’s vote on this bill yesterday. Yes, there are terrorists out there who hate us. But the terrorists are not the only ones who hate us these days - everyone in the world hates us. They hate us because this corrupt government of ours passes laws allowing torture without question of courts, because George W Bush sees himself as supreme ruler of the entire world. Oh, how sad to see this great country of ours destroyed by greed, corruption and the desire for power and money. I voted for George W Bush in 2000 and again in 2004. I can never, ever forgive myself…

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:54 am
John J. Sullivan:

This only reinforces the belief around the world that we-the U.S.-only care for our own even though we-the goverment-claims that we care for the whole world

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:54 am
Bill Moss:

Yes, it was necessary.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:56 am
Luis Fernando Gutierrez:

The senate’s actions reflect how The Carlyle Group and other decadent allies for Mr. Bush are afraid of loosing power. When will America rise against a bunch of criminals whose only purpose in life is world domination, at any cost? You already lost freedom of speech, now Americans are loosing the foundations of your Constitution, which basically is freedom for every individual.
Seen from outside, the world just trembles every time Mr. Bush speaks,and not because of his evident lack of intelligence, but for the consequences to everybody in the planet.It’s so surreal how White House leaders, and the media in general try to maintain demented minds such as Wolfowitz, Chaney, Rice and, of course, Baby Bush.
Hopefuly Americans will someday remember their duty to defend basic human rights, and will awake from their now permanent TV hypnosis, because now the Us is only fighting “terrorism” with terrorism against muslim radicals. But it could spread to non-muslim states, and if Mr. Bush administration has achieved a worldwide notion that USA is the world’s biggest threat, let’s not make it real…

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Jack Kilcullen:

It’s really simple. Look at the State of Illinois, whose governor put a moratorium on executions because of the number of DNA-exonerated individuals convicted by our own judicial system and you can’t escape the conclusion that we imprison exponentially more innocent people in Guantanomo and the secret prisons. It’s an American Gulag we have created.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:00 am
sullu2004:

is there any deffrence left between third world country under a dictator and america??

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:05 am
Concerned:

I went to write to my Senator about my dismay and on the Senate web site one can easily access the Bill of Rights and there I found the following… “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:06 am
wstander:

In his address to the joint session of Congress in September 2001 Bush said that the reason the Terrorists were waging war on the US was because “They hate our freedoms.” With the passage of this legislation removing or limiting many of those freedoms, there will be less reason for the Terrorists to hate the US. I consider this simply the first step in e Bush’s brilliant strategy: No freedoms- No attacks- Voila, victory in the War on Terror.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:09 am
John H.:

I fail to see why the President should be dickering with Congress over these matters.

The President’s inherent authority in times of war are more than adequate to facillitate the interrogation of any enemy combatant who fails to identify himself as such.

N.B. For those inclined to argue that our enemy has rights under the Geneva Convention; our enemy’s failure to engage us openly and honestly, in uniform and under color of authority, is precisely why the protections of the Geneva Convention, expressly by its terms, do not apply here.

As for the relevancy of recent Supreme Court rulings, I am reminded of the quote attributed to Andrew Jackson; “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:11 am
Derek Gregory:

Isuspect that Bush insisted on these measures not because he (or anyone else) “needs” them — even he surely knows how inhuman, indefensible and counterproductive they are — but because they were taken away from him by the Supreme Court, and like any other petulant, swaggering little bully-boy he is determined to have his own way. The United Shame of America.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:15 am
Thomas A. Vento:

I don’t think the combatants that are trying to kill us deserve the rights that US citizens have. I support the bill.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:16 am
Bill:

Folks, anyone who thinks this bill isn’t Constitutional needs to read the Constitution. When’s the last time you read it? Go to Findlaw.com, read it. For most of the people on this blog, “unconstitutional” seems to be a mere epithet that means “I do not like this thing.” Please bring the meaning back to the word.

The President and the politicians of any party, folks, are not the enemy. The enemy is a group of terrorists that passionately hates everything you care about: religious freedom; rationalism; women’s rights; medical science; minority rights; voting; technological progress; even population control and the environment. They want to kill you. They are bizarre, messianic misogynists, and while they are not rational in the way I use that word, they are committed and frequently very smart. You’d understand if you had met them, as I have. They are not like ordinarily criminals, whom society wants to catch and reform. The price to letting them go free over legal technicalities will be measured in bodies, quite likely (those of you who live in New York) yours. Yes, the tribunal system increases the likelihood of false positives (imprisonment of non-terrorists) but the cost of false negatives (freeing terrorists to kill again) is so high that the cost-benefit fulcrum has shifted, and we cannot afford as a society to give them the incredible level of rights accorded to U.S. citizen ordinary criminal suspects. Debate the specifics of this bill if you wish, and I agree that the U.S. needs to pay attention to the image of these tribunals as well as their substance. But recognize that the tribunals actually give suspected terrorists far greater “rights” than criminal defendants in most, and perhaps all, European countries. The idea that the U.S. criminal system as it exists in 2006 is the only way to prosecute anyone, for anything, anywhere, including a suspected foreign terrorist? That’s ahistorical and a recipe, in this case, for horrible bloodshed.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:18 am
Todd Castro:

Bush is what you call a fabian as with his daddy and B. Cinton. A fabian is an indiviual that conquers a country a little piece at a time and in this case ,conquering the American people for the start up of the NEW WORLD ORDER as stated in Revelations. the private central bankers ( owtlawed bt the constitution ) continues with these men in charge.The USA is headed down and it’s not coming back. The private bankers are totally in charge and the NWO is around the corner.The WTC destruction was planned and executed on schedule like pearl harbor , two steps forward one step back until it’s completed. Want to know more then call1-800-516-8736 an order this 587 page knowledge of the future ,all referenced. ( the history of God’s people and the coming NEW WORLD ORDER…. Todd

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Thomas Deeds:

I am appalled. Thomas Jefferson would roll over in his grave and call for a revolution. Anyone can now be deemed an “enemy combatant” by King George, flown off to a secret prison, not be charged with a crime, not be allowed to see the evidence against him, be tortured and the key thrown away. This policy is a mirror image of Kafka’s story “The Penal Colony.” American citizens, this could be YOU! Quaking in our boots, are we now to stoop to the level of terrorists ourselves? This administration has put a gun to human rights, cast America as the hypocritical bully for the indefinite future. As my now deceased father would say, “THROW THE BUMS OUT!”

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:24 am
Daniel:

It is silly to even suggest that this is needed against terrorism. In the first place, the history of this administration has shown that the vast majority of the so-called terrorists arrested have nothing at all to do with terrorism. This includes the people at Guantanamo, the various camps in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, the thousands of immigrants arrested after 9/11, and the people arrested piecemeal since then. Without habeus corpus and with this law allowing Bush to imprison anyone he wants to for as long as he wants to there is no way that they will ever be released.

Second, the bill itself is an act of terror designed to intimidate anyone who would object to Bush administration “policy.” Despite what numerous “chachalacas” (a bird found in the southwest and northern Mexico noted for making lots of noise) say, you don’t fight fire with fire. You fight it with water. Ask any fireman.

Third, giving the Bush administration carte blanche to torture and imprison people with no recourse to a valid legal system is exactly what the murderers in the Argentine and Chilean militaries did to protect themselves from the consequences of their own viciousness. Fortunately in those cases, many of the “amnesty” laws have been struck down. One can only hope that the same will eventually happen in the US before the perpetrators of what can only be called a totalitarian police state are too old to be brought to justice.

Finally, the world is aghast at what our “democracy” has done. No longer are we regarded as an example of what other nations should aspire to, but rather an example of what other nations need to avoid. We have lost any hope of having close relations with other Western countries, the only real hope of combating terrorism, because now they will regard us simply as a pariah similar to Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. We are now something unpleasant that they have to deal with, but at a distance, sort of like fresh dog diarrhea on the carpet. When a country like Venezuela has more human rights being practiced than we do, we are in a bad state and need to change course.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:24 am
Franklin:

Of course it is necessary that we do exactly what terrorists are fighting for. They want us to abandon our principles and change our way of life to reflect their ideals. Authorizing endless detentions, kangaroo courts, torture… all fits with the fundamentalist worldview.

FDR did not ask congress to authorize torture or kangaroo courts in combating two of the most organized and potent military threats the earth had yet witnesses. Our current resident is so feeble minded that the only thing he can think of to fight a bunch of crazed religious fanatics operating out of caves with cell phones is to throw away a millenium of civilization, trash the constitution and reject the founding principles of our great nation.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:25 am
Ruth:

I am deeply saddened that the Senate has passed this bill.
Why the Republican leadership has set its sights on dismantling the important freedoms our founders set forth is beyond belief.
Despotism has taken hold in American, and I fear for all of us. If we do not treat terrorism suspects with dignity, each of us, safe in our homes, is one presidential phone call away from that same treatment.
Can’t happen here? I wonder what Germany’s propserous middle classes felt as they saw Jewish freedoms being curtailed. Hitler won’t kill them, he won’t target other inconvenient minorities like Catholics and gypsies.
No, to view a terrorism suspect as beyond human dignity is to degrade all of our dignity. Try them, convict them and imprison them. Battle with them on whatever battlefield you find them. But waterboarding? Torture? It is evil itself. That is assuming these “suspects” are actually guilty. What of the innocent ones? God help us.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:26 am
Garee:

A very simple concept is at work here. The idea of a “slippery slope” should ring in everyone’s head. This bill is one more step toward the end of America as we dreamed of it when we were growing up.
Our naivette has caused us to stand on the sidelines while forces that we could have once easily controlled assumed unassailable power.
Most of my generation was caught up with “other priorities” and we have forgotten to exercise the rights our fathers and mothers fought for in wars gone by.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:30 am
Donney M.:

We have only one option here VOTE VOTE VOTE COME NOV 7TH. It can’t be much clearer now. What are you going to do wait until they create Nazi prison camps.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:31 am
Paul:

This goes to show that we are in a seriuos social decline. It is sad to say that human rights are not amajor concern anymore. GWB is just an impotent, pitiful bufoon who has visions of despotic demigogery.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:31 am
Harlan:

The argument coming from the right misses the entire point, as well as showing a complete misunderstanding of the reason we have things like habeus. The argument made by the right is “we must keep these dangerous people locked up.” Not one person anywhere in any political point of view thinks that dangerous people should be let go. The problem is that we don’t know who is actually dangerous and who is there by mistake. The entire purpose for court challenges and due process is that sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes people cheat. And sometimes people lie. There is already proof, incontrovertable proof, that one of the “dangerous terrorists” who we sent to Syria for torture was guilty of nothing more than being a computer engineer.
Abandoning all of the trappings of civilization is not a tool to fight terrorists, it is in fact a way to turn us into unprincipled thugs who are no better than the terrorists.

If to defeat evil you become evil, then evil wins.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Dr. Raymond Martin:

Denying someone their Civil Rights is unconscionable. We are witnessing the birth of a police state.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Anagadir:

One other thing (see my # 143 above). I’ve recently returned from Banda Aceh, Indonesia doing some work on this Tsuname disaster. I’ve been all over the world but this was the first time ever that I didn’t feel confortable, save, respected, well liked - just because everybody there knew I was an American. It was more than intuition and gut-feeling. Just interacting with the local people there said it all.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Matt Mahaffey:

I would be happy if the detainee bill was just a “threat to our rights”. At worst, I believe this legislation could lead our country into a democaracy by name and dictatorship in practice. The concept and application of Habeas Corpus is older than our constitution. Habeas Corpus is one of the central pillars of our constitution, our democracy. How can we spread the concept of democracy around the world while violating it’s central tenets here at home? This is the ugliest legislation of hypocrisy that I’ve seen in my brief, 27 year life.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:38 am
Earl E. Bush, Jr.:

I refer you to a statement by Benjamin Franklin that was popular during much of the period of the American Revolution: “They that can give up a little liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I believe that is as pertinent today as it was in Franklin’s time. The effort to preserve freedom and individual liberties must never be allowed to be diverted in the name of immediacy.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Peter Baisley:

While I do not agree with any of the ‘detainee bill’ I cannot disagree with the actual passing of the bill, no matter how misguided it may be. What truely mystifies, is the part of the bill that exhonerates those who have broken the current law. If I am not mistaken,the constitutional separation of powers allows Congress to write the laws, the Judiciary to interpret the law and the Executive to enforce those laws. If laws have been broken, it is not up to Congress to relieve those individuals of their legal responsibility.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:48 am
John:

This law that was just passed is further evidence that US citizens need to get out and vote agianst the current Republican controlled House, Senate and White House. Hopefully the pendulum starts to swing the other way and people will take there blinders off and realize that the greatest threat to us is our own government.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:49 am
john m:

I am paraphrasing a writing from the holocaust. “when they came for the jews, i said nothing, for i was not a jew, when they came for the commnists, i said nothing, because i was not a communist, when they came for the gypsies, again i said nothing, for i was not a gypsy. when they finally came for me i found there was no one left to speak for me.” who decides what terrorist is? If i disagree with Bush, am i a terrorist?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:51 am
Mark Hecht:

Every U.S. Senator and Congressman, even those who voted against it , should be ashamed that this bill was passed.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:52 am
Frank Myers:

This is not a WAR on terror, as I understand war. I think war is “A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties.” (answerw.com) In my opinion we are engaged in a CONFLICT of ideologies. On one side is American democracy. On the other side is radical Islam. The tools of radical Islam are almost exclusively violence. The tools of democracy are much broader and subtler. From answers.com again, democracy is defined as:
1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2. A political or social unit that has such a government.
3. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4. Majority rule.
5. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.
I see nothing in radical Islam that resembles any of these principles.

Of course any nation must meet violence against it with violence. But this form of violence must be measured and taken within the principles of democracy if democracy is to survive and thrive.

9/11 was very traumatic to me and most Americans. In my opinion the violence we returned against Afganistan was an appropriate response and within our democratic principles. We should have gone on and used our strength to encourage a truly democratic nation to emerge there. This would have clearly demonstrated the power and wisdom of democracy.

Instead, this administration for their own selfish reasons abused our collective 9/11 traumas to suspend our democratic principles and declare war on a sovereign, wealthy, and weak Iraq. This detainee bill headed to the president’s desk is just another example of a long string of the anti-democratic actions of this administration.

These actions must stop or we are in serious danger of losing our democracy.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:54 am
David:

We saw the far right of the Republican party arguing with the right side of the party on this trying to make a loss of freedom seem like a good alternative to a loss of a lot of freedom. Where’s the voice of reason? I’m ashamed of this country.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Bill Wasson:

Yes, the detainee bill is required. Remember–these are enemy combatants not American citizens. Therefore, our constitutional guarantees do NOT apply to them.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Marge Keyishian:

We have not right to torture. We disgrace our nation when we do. And it does not work. We have a wimp for a president. We fought WW 2 & 1 and won without transgressing. Torture does not work AND endangers our own soldiers.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 11:56 am
Len:

Obviously there are a lot of opinions being posted here by people who have NOT been in a war situation. It’s pretty easy to sit back in your comfortable little nest with all your eggs and comment how even our enemies should be afforded the same rights as you are. But if you were forced to leave your comfy little nest to fight a war with Terrorists where your life was at peril, you might change that opinion. It’s really a shame that we ask people to issue opinions on things they know absolutely NOTHING about. I’ve been in a War and I really, really, really hate it when I hear these bleeding liberals say things should be FAIR .. Stick the terrorist in front of you with a gun and we’ll see how fair you are.

The thing I noticed in Vietnam about liberals, when they hestitated in a firefight because of their beliefs, they died very quickly ..

When did we ever get the point in life where our enemies (Terrorist) are given the SAME rights as we are ?

The muslims are correct, American society is SICK !!!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Richard Nosco:

Absolutely not neccessary.A Republican ploy in an attempt to shift the focus from the their Iraqui debacle.Another slight of hand tactic by this administration to frighten Americans into thinking that the Democrats are weak on defense.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Joan Conroy:

I am from Maine and am not at all surprised by the “yea” vote of Sen. Collins and the “not voting” response from Sen. Snowe. They continue to call themselves “moderate republicans” all the while continuing to support the dangerous and extremist views of the Bush administration. Torture is torture, even when it is conducted by loyal and patriotic Americans who are suffering from the silly and false notion of exceptionalism. Durring the 1930’s a majority of Germans were also duped by their leaders into thinking they were exceptional too. Have we learned so little from the lessons of history??? Extremism is any form is never the answer.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Chris:

As a student at Boston College, I am afraid of what future lies ahead for my generation and those behind me. The administration is trying to hang on to power by planting the seed of fear into the public. Anytime their rating goes down, they arrest another “terrorist”, discover a new plot, or give another speech on the war between the two worlds.
Its time for the fear to end. A democracy in fear is not a democracy. Its sad that Congress is acting as a doormat to this tactic, and its time for a change in November.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Hans:

Sinclair Lewis was right:

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

It can happen here.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Marian Santoli:

I am ashamed of the administration, and terrified of the effects of this bill. The members of Congress, so many of who are lawyers, are cowards. We no longer have the right to criticize other countries for human rights violations, we are down in the immoral mud with the rest of them. It is amazing to me that a president who has claimed to be a Christian has traded only in fear and paranioa, lowering us to the level of the terrorists. He has stolen the soul of this country and dishonored our forefathers.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Bret:

For all those who object, I have this to say: Vote Democrat in the upcoming election. When the Democrats take control of the House and the Senate they will revoke everything the President has done to protect Americans. When that happens, don’t come crying to me when we’re attacked again and the President says: See? I told you so.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Larry:

This bill further erodes American’s rights and adds to the world’s diminished view of the U.S. observing the rule of law. I am scared to death of Bush and his cohorts. I pray that this bill will be challenged and sent to the Supreme Court as soon as possible so that it can be declared unconstitutional before any more damage is done.

This is one more Bush step to bring America in line with the terrorist’s goals. One would think he and Bin Laden had met and agreed on changes needed in the U.S. The terrorists are winning with Bush’s policies.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
g. arnolfini:

i don’t believe any measures proposed by bush will be effective. the president and his advisors have shown themselves to be highly incompetent. based on recent intelligence reports, it appears they are not winning the ‘war on terror’. why should anyone believe military tribunals and the denial of habeas corpus are anything other than a side show that distracts attention from the collosal blunders of iraq and afghanistan. so, the main effect of this aspect of the treatment of detainees will be an erosion of the geneva conventions and evacuation of any moral superiority the USA might claim in the ‘war on terror.’

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Roger K. Krakusin:

The dismantling of one of the brightest gems in our Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence by denying persons incarcerated by the sole whim of the Executive branch the right to access the courts to challenge the validity of their detention though the great writ of Habeas Corpus is a tragic day for our country. It is made even sadder by the realization that many members of Congress who voted to approve this monstrosity were only vaguely familiar (to be charitable) with its content, but instead merely only sought an electoral advantage no matter what the cost to the nation.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
diogenes:

The Bush administration’s modification of the foundations that have governed our society’s laws(e.g., the habeas corpus) is a clear indication that we are moving percipitously towards the police state that was predicted by George Orwell in !984… We have to recognize George Orwell’s discernment and plan for the coming Orwalian police state.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
Joan Braner:

It is frightenihg to observe that we have a President who sees defending torture as a viable method of winning elections. I don’t know whether it is a sad commentary on the President ( who has also demonstrated a tin ear to the Constitution) or on the American public who Bush believes is as H.L. Mencken
saw us ( Nobody ever lost a nickel underestimating the intelligence of the American public.) I pray fervently that Bush and Mencken are wrong, otherwise
we can kiss goodbye to what was a lovely country.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Stephen Fugett:

What frightens me most about the new detainee bill is the ability of a military “tribunal” to withhold “classified” evidence that allegedly led to the individual’s detention, or only offer a redacted account; and, closely related, the denial of the right to petition for writ of habeas corpus. Will the classified status of information be subject to review? Who gets to define “classified”? The military judge? The military prosecutor? The military defense counsel? (Will the detainee even have the right to counsel of his/her choosing?) The Bush administration? It is my feeling that the Bush administration just does not want anymore black eyes. The fall out over the number of detainees who turned out to be innocent, following extended periods of detention and mistreatment, is killing the world’s view of us, especially when we have been the most vocal opponents of identical practices by governments like the former Soviet Union and modern-day China. Those governments have never had qualms about detaining anyone for any reason they saw fit, without sharing the nature of the charges, the evidence supporting the charges, or the right to see the evidence and challenge its sufficiency for creating probable cause for the detention. Is this what you want? Do you want the government to be allowed to label someone enemy combatant, and detain them as such, without any true definition of that word, and without giving the detainee the ability to challenge its evident application to you, or the right to subject the governments findings to review? Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and all the rest of the Bush cronies scare the crap out of me. They’ve already labeled those who oppose their detention bill as un-American and terrorist sympathizers. How long until “un-American” and “terrorist sympathizer” morph into “enemy combatant”?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
MARDELL MOFFITT:

DO UNTO ‘OTHER” SOLIDERS, AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO “OUR” SOLDIERS….

WHAT IS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT THAT??????

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
Gini Reticker:

The right to know what you are accused of and what evidence is being used against you is at the very foundation of our country. We are becoming a nation of men, not a nation of laws and in the process causing great harm to our souls, our reputation and our future.
Who ever imagined that we as a nation would be asking: Should a person be strapped to a board and have water poured down his nose? Should he be forced to stand naked for long periods of time in extreme cold without being allowed to sleep? Does it constitute murder if a suspect was killed at the hands of an interrogater if the interrogater was only seeking information?
It is hard to believe that this is America.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
Tracy:

This bill is flagrantly in violation of the Constitution of the United States. You cannot throw someone, no matter how certain you are of their guilt, into a prison and not let them see the light of day until you are ready for them to.

Reports are coming in of Pakistan selling innocent civilians to the US for bounty. These same civilians are now in Guantanamo under stark conditions and have no ability to challenge their detention. This is evil.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
Ari Schiffer:

I am deeply saddened that Congress has passed this bill. President Bush is gradually chipping away at our democracy by exploiting our fears. He is giving America a false of security, yet our biggest threat is our enemy from within–THE BUSH ADMINISTRATON! Nontheless, we Americans seem to be impotent to do anything about. These are indeed very unfortunate times for all America.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Sunny:

Torture? Are we for real? I have tried several times to craft a well-spoken and thoughtful response here. But I am sputtering and angry. We are supposed to be the “good guys.” We have not been invaded on our shores — 9-11 wasn’t followed by fighting in our streets. We are quickly becoming the people we are fighting. Torture? My country would legalize torture? I am ashamed. I am afraid. I see us turning into a nation of people whimpering and cowering, willing to trade our liberty for some fantasy of total iron-clad safety. This is my country. I am proud of where I live. I would not trade this nation for any other on the earth. But I am horrified of the thought of what we are becoming. What kind of land will my children inhabit? Torture? Dear God forbid that we become a people who would torture in the name of security.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Jesse:

I am so deeply ashamed of our current government. I have faith that in time we will be able to bounce back from all of the detrimental effects created by our president and his cronies. I am hoping this lapse in American values is only the product of an ego-driven administration and this backwards descent into the dark ages will quickly come to an end once they are removed from office.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
David A Dowding:

The problem with this bill is that it eliminates the targets from any right to habeus corpus. The folks who rant about protecting the homeland are giving the Bush administration the tools to eliminate human rights. These shadow terrorists held for years without trial could be innocents that are wrongly accused and targeted for their political beliefs. Why are these folks hidden away . I suspect it is because many we jailed and tortured and cannot be freed because the administration would be found
culpable.This is a “cover your ass” ploy not a method of protecting America. What is sad is that they cloaked their mistakes in the mantle of protecting America while dismantiling the Bill of Rights,
David A Dwdiing

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Carolyn:

The ‘terrorists’ have won.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
ciaran o:

Who could have predicted that a government of the US could enact such a policy, I am reminded of history of the Athens at the zenite of its influence and the bad policies that led to its downfall.
God bless the US

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Daniel:

For Catherine #113 who wants to know why we helped Europe in two world wars, it was because we were attacked, not any altruistic feelings to save Europe. Remember it took the Lusitania in WW I and Pearl Harbor in WW II before we got our act together. If the Germans had played it right in WW I, we might even have gone in on their side if we went at all.

Now we have been attacked, but we have not been invaded so the suspension of habeus corpus based on the Constitution does not apply. The situation is entirely different from the War of Northern Aggression when there actually was an insurrection in the US. Now we have a group of people claiming that because we were attacked it is ok to punish anyone that Mr. Bush & Co. feels like punishing outside of our Constitutional guarantees. Sorry, but that is not your father’s America, the one he fought for against the NAZI’s.

For those who claim that the bill is Constitutional, I wonder whose Constitution they are reading. For those who claim that it’s ok to imprison and kill innocent people on the off chance that one of them might actually be a terrorist, I wonder what is wrong with them. These people are sick. For those who think accident of birth gives them special privileges not accorded to other human beings, I’m sure that the elites would agree with that sentiment, but not that you should be included. As for those who think that Bush’s autoassumption of Commander in Chief is legitimate, they need to be reminded that no war was ever declared. What we have instead is the same thing that has been facing many of the European countries such as Spain (ETA), Greece, Italy and Germany (Red Guard and offshoots) who have been able to contain and control terrorism without resorting to military mobilization. By the way, someone said that the bill gives terrorists more rights than they have in European countries. This is as false as anything that Bush or Cheney ever said.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
Alejandro Tomasini:

I think the bill is the worst thing that the American adminstration could have done. It’ll certainly have negative consequences inside the USA, i.e., for the American people’s rights, and it’ll leave Americans more unprotected abroad and liable to attacks by people who’ll feel themselves utterly justified in doing whatever they want, since they too are now potential victims of “legal torture” by American soldiers and political police.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
Amy:

The government of this country has been torturing prisoners and suspending habeus corpus for three years. Why does the president need this legislation all of a sudden? Because the Supreme Court said that he was breaking the law. (Remember that checks and balances thing with the three branches of government? Every once and a while it still works a litlle bit.) He knew that he damn well had to change the law before the next election, when his puppets in the legislative branch might lose the majority. In that case, this legislation that grants him amnesty would not pass. Now it’s passed, and even if the Democrats squeak in, they won’t be powerful enough to undo this shameful law (yes, that’s what this country needs–more shame).

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Doug Theriaul:

Habeus Corpus has been thrown out in this bill. Remember, the other wars did not WRITE THIS INTO LAW. This government can do whatever it wants to now. First it’s the terrorists, then the people who speak out against the government (depending on who’s in power, could be anyone, or anyone in your family because you are now feeding a terrorist), then it’s the artists, then the gays, then the jews. This is the worst thing to ever happen to the united states since slavery. Making torture legal? Throwing out legal rights we all faught for? I’m mean, it’s just awful. Fascism here we are..

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Jarrad Mills:

I cannot believe the Senate just passed a bill explicitly denying
detainees habeas corpus. I just can’t believe it. Yes, I am aware, my
conservative compatriots, that habeas corpus has been denied to enemies in
wartime in the past. And furthermore I am familiar with arguments that “Our
prior concept of war has been completely altered, as we learned so
tragically on Sept. 11, 2001, and we must address threats in a different
way.” (Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia)

If, as Senator Chambliss asserts, our prior concept of war has been
completely altered, then I agree we must address threats in a different way.
If our concept of war has been expanded to include cat-and-mouse conflicts
with shadowy groups of individuals that don’t necessarily share ethnic,
national, or even religious ties, who seamlessly blend in with civilian
populations, who could be anyone that is not a U.S. citizen, then yes, we
need to address the threat differently. As our concept of the potential
enemy broadens dramatically, and as the evidence used to identify enemies
becomes less and less direct, we should be be MORE vigilant than ever about
whom we classify as an enemy. We must permit those people who are
classified as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ to challenge that classification
in a civilian court with robust standards of admissable evidence.

And to address an objection that my detractors will certainly make, I am not
suggesting that unlawful enemy combatants must be tried for their alleged
crimes by civilian courts. Trial by military tribunals may be appropriate.
I am merely saying that the determination of a defendant’s status (enemy
combatant or no) should not be made solely at the discretion of the military
and the executive. That may have been good enough for our “prior concept”
of the enemy, but it is not good enough for our current, expanded one.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Peter:

If you read even parts of the bill, it suggests the main reason Bush needs
something like this is that they really don’t have enough evidence to convict
in a court of law the vast majority of the people they’re holding, and are preemptively trying to protect themselves from well-deserved legal action for false imprisonment. Hence all the restrictions on the right to appeal the president’s determinations in federal court.

It is a sad commentary on America that this can be passed stealthily, in a hurry, with hardly any protest from citizens- do we really believe that
non-citizen residents or suspected terrorists have less of a claim to due process or civilized treatment? Do people realize Congress just gave the president a blank check to decide what constitutes torture? In the 70s, Germany had Baader-Meinhof and Italy the Red Brigades (real terrorism, not isolated events)- and dealt with them without such nonsense.

To participants in this forum -let your congressman know how you feel. As I
told mine yesterday- shame on the 109th Congress for passing such un-American legislation, worthy of a banana republic- and shame on you for voting for it!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
don anderson:

I believe the greatest threat to the security of America (I’m not sure if “our great nation” still flies as an appropriate expression) is not from the terrorists, but from the cabal or cabals (or “think tanks”/ “thought directors”) that steer our supposed elected officials.
No group of outside thugs, no matter their weaponry, will long subdue this country - frighten it into temporary immobility perhaps, but subdue it no.
Un-American activities set up by a shadow government can, however, set the stage for such a substantial degradation of democracy so as to make it make un-recognizable and unusable.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Cary:

The bill is absolutely necessary to fight the war on terrorism. I have no sympathy for terrorists. I do for the loved ones of victims on 9/11 and all other innocent people killed by terrorists. Bush is doing a great job and I’m glad we choose him to be our leader twice.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Michael Cooks:

I am wondering is when the bill to make bush King of the US is going to come up in congress? I would think they would try to get that through before the elections, can’t wait to how many senators and congressmen will vote for ilt. All Bush has to do is say he will veto a few of there bills and they will be right there with him. It is really very sad times when the American public will no longer defend themselves against the likes of this administration.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Jerry G.:

We will now have the legal tools to go after these people who mock us for our perceived “weaknesses.” This is a new era and requires new methods (with safeguards in place) to deal with those whose hatred and murderous intentions know no bounds.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
John R.:

I am waiting for this administration to declare a state of emergency that nulifies the entire constitution. Congress will of course give it their approval. We cannot win a fight against radical ideologies by ignoring the principles by which we have lived for more than 200 years.

I will never have mercy for people that try to bring change through terrorizing others. However, either the detainees in Guantanamo (or wherever else this administration hides them) are Soldiers of war and afforded the rights under the Geneva Conventions or they are common criminals and afforded the rights under our consitution.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Charlie:

All one need do is to read the bulk of the sob-filled comments on this page to see the reason for the detainee bill. We are dealing with people who keep women in bondage, and gouge out the eyes of people with whom they disagree, or, worse, innocents who happen to be in their way. And all our sob-sisters and brothers can do is attack the administration. I thought I read where 15 of the 19 Arabs who flew into the Trade Center were Saudis, not members of the Bush Administration.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Karl Siegemund:

What use is this bill?

Do we get any better intelligence by torturing people? Torture will make people confess. But what? The truth? No. They confess what the torturer wants to hear. Because only this makes the torturer stop the torture. So all torture is able to do is to cast the prejudices of the interrogator in iron. It doesn’t add any valuable information. And if it does by chance, then it is buried in a heap of false confessions from people who just wanted to escape torture.

Are we able to hold people who will otherwise try to kill us? Maybe. But that can also be done with bringing those to justice and let the courts decide. But in this case we are surely also holding people who didn’t want to kill us. How many people have been released from Guantanamo without further charges? They weren’t a thread to us when they were imprisoned. So did this increase our security? No. Did it make a lot of people unhappy and created the impression, that terrorism is a valid form of self defense? Yes.

So this bill will not get us better information in the so called war on terror. So this bill will not prevent any terrorist attacks which could otherwise not be prevented. All this does is a late rationalization of the mistakes of a president who thought himself above the law.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Stephen H. Unger:

This is a good example of destroying an asset in order to protect it. The glory of our country is in the way it has stood for human rights and freedom. Our constitution unequivocally rejects authoritarian government, and prohibits arbitrary acts of government against individuals. The most fundamental point is prohibition of arbitrary seizure and imprisonment of people without due process, which is the essence of habeas corpus (a shield first developed in Britain centuries ago). The legislation under discussion would allow the President to “disappear” anybody, including US citizens, by simpler designating them as “enemy combatants”, which can be done arbitrarily. Such people would be unable to defend themselves via normal legal procedures. This is not just a theoretical possibility–it has already been done in the case of Jose Padilla. A US citizen, he was kept for more than 3 years in a military prison and never charged with any crime. This is the sort of thing that went on in the Soviet Union and in Latin American dictatorships.

Other provisions of this bill weaken barriers against torture and violations of the Geneva Convention. In general it represents a major step toward the destruction of our hard won liberties. Those who have supported it have demonstrated that they have no confidence in traditional American values. They act as though freedom and democracy are luxuries that must be abandoned when the going gets rough, rather than as robust principles that are particularly valuable in helping us navigate through difficult waters. Note that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and South American dictators such as Pinochet, that abandoned (or never embraced) the concepts embodied in our Bill of Rights did not survive. It would be tragic if we followed their path.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Susan:

This bill erases habeas corpus and generally gives Mr. Bush and his minions a free pass to do whatever they wish to anyone they decide to label ‘enemy combatant’. Any of us could become so labeled given the capricious vindictive nature of this administration. Who could have imagine such sadistic fascism could take hold in my country. We should all be disgusted, and determined to create a regime change in America. Educate yourself, open your eyes and mind and VOTE for change.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
April Williams:

I don’t believe these extraordinary measures should be legalized. I have no faith that the Bush government is telling the truth about it’s need, and without specifics that can be independently verified, I’ll continue to believe that it’s all a bunch of bull s…. April Williams

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
kat b:

This administration has corrupted the American system to achieve their own ambitious, devious goals. The working men, women and children of this country and our senior citizens will be paying for the blunders in Iraq and the loss of personal freedoms here at home for generations. We have lost the moral higher ground that traditionally guided our international and domestic programs; this most recent push to negate the spirit of the Geneva Convention reflects a corporate, profit-driven ethic that dehumanizes and distorts the truth. These “leaders” wear their religion like a convenient cloak to hide their dark deeds and inflame the public on topics best left to individual choice. Shame on them all.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
martin:

we are witnessing the decline of the american civilization. all empires fall, and it is usually the rotting from within that precipitates it. nov. 7 will indicate its completeness.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
Denise Medley:

I am stunned that the United States even had to have a debate on whether or not to sanction torture. Our heritage is one of democracy, yet the current administration, while mouthing the word democracy out of one side of its mouth, utters contempt for those who suggest that they act democratically.
Since taking office the president has done everything he can to turn our allies away from us and put our country in greater peril. Adding torture to our bag of tricks will only put us in league with despots and dictators in other countries. We have sunk to a new low and I sincerely hope that the country takes a good look at itself and uses the upcoming election to turn our country, not in a new direction, but back to the direction we started in the 1700s.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Sharon:

I am ashamed of my NJ Senators. Americans lack knowledge of their own history and the implications of this bill. We have allowed our representatives to ignore our basic human rights.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Steve:

This is a disgusting power grab and misuse of executive power, albeit supported by (mostly) republicans. Sadly, there is no telling how long it will take the Supreme Court to be involved and to stope what appears to be constitutionally suspect legislation. Until then, you can be sure the republicans will trumpet the success of their torture law and paint everyone else as weak. They are sick. We must vote for serious change in November!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
Robert Queen:

Appalled. Appalled. Appalled. Ignorance, cynicism and greed have brought us as a nation to a point where the ideals of our founding fathers and what they fought for no longer matter or are understood. The wrongness of the lettres de cachet of Louis XVI and the unchecked powers of an executive such as George III are precisely why the checks and balances of system of government were created.

I wonder now if we don’t deserve the inevitable reaction that we are doomed to suffer by what is being wrought in our names. Do not ask “Why us?” when we are once again hit by a terrorist act, America. Don’t dare ask that question.

I am ashamed and disillusioned by who and what we have become. It is not in my name, no. Not in my name, not this. Two billion dollars a week, America, that is how much your compassionate conservatism is costing you. And to what good?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
J.W.:

this may be a day to remember the famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Richard Stumbo:

As much as anything I am disgusted by the 34 Democrats in the House who voted for this criminal measure, including our own spineless Dennis Moore from the 3rd Dstrict of Kansas. He calls himself a Democrat, but he is little if any better Joe Lieberman, the creature from under the rock.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Jeff Stein:

Acting tough is not the same as being tough. And being tough alone is not the same as being tough and smart. When is the American electorate going to get hip to this and realize that current administration policies are not providing the results that we’re all seeking. This bill is further evidence of a moral decline that is gripping this nation. We’ve not only lost our way but we’re losing our power, day by day. Congress should be tossed out along with the rest of the current administration

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Casey:

In addition to the comments above, this law is, like so many other pieces of Republican legislation, just plain stupid. How long before there are mass demonstrations throughout the Muslim world to “Free the Guantamano 500″? How many of our allies will stand beside us on this issue? How many Muslims not damaged by our current depredations in the Middle East will now be inspired to join the fight. (I don’t bring this up as a fear-mongering, “the terrorists are coming!” administration campaign tactic. It is just a little reality.)

My God. Is offering a level of justice practiced by the entire civilized world just too much trouble or is it too damaging to Mr. Bush personally? Guantanamo and the other secret prisons have already been condemned by the U.N. and by nations around the world. What possible good do the Republicans believe will result from denying common, human rights to a bunch of prisoners who are no longer any danger to anybody.

Immoral and unconstitutional and stupid, stupid, stupid!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
Dominic:

It is revolting to me that this administration is emulating in great detail everything it is purportedly fighting against. I’ve been very ashamed at the actions of this country’s leadership for the past few years but my disgust has reached a new low.
I have read every one of these comments and I sense the overwhelming outrage of the American people. That is why is is ESSENTIAL that we act in November to vote out the senators who have shown themselves to be collaborationists with the worst administration this nation has ever had the shame to see.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Merrily Helgeson:

This is the most terrifying legislation of my lifetime. I am appalled that no Democratic senator would stand to filibuster it. It will mean that any of us, slapped with the appropriate designation, can be snatched out of our lives and sent to be tortured. We won’t be able to protest it or defend ourselves and no one will ever know. Do we believe that this administration won’t use its new power in this way? Do we have any good reason to doubt it?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
nino assereto:

The theory of check and balances that has given such a high moral ground to the USA constitution, has been dewstroyed. I hope Americans will redress this descending moral path started with the “war on terrorism”. USA is loosing this war and the simpathy of the rest of the world.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
Bennett:

This can’t be my country. My country is the moral leader of the world. We abhore countries that deny people due process. We despise countries that find torture their prisoners.

We have codified in law that the courts do not have the right to review whether imprisonment is legal or not. What we have made is a monarchy, where people are imprisoned indefinitely and tortured at the whim of the President.

Of all the horrible things that this administration has done, this is the worst. Of all the rubber stamps this cowardly group of legislators has stamped, this is the worst.

Now we can put the United States in that auspicious list that includes Cuba and China as states that sponsor human rights violations. Our moral leadership has evaporated and we are despised throughout the world. I wonder why?

I love my country. When did this happen to it?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Jean Gerard:

U.S. acquiescence to torture in the military tribunal laws, the denial of habeas corpus — all that is a huge mistake. It will only increase cruelty and pain, hatred and the desire for revenge. Our country’s reputation will sink further down.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Patrick P.:

I am deeply saddened to see yet another example of the decline of the once-great American empire. You folks used to embody many of the ideals that much of the rest of the world strived to achieve. Whatever horrors your foreign affairs wrought on unsuspecting people (and there were many), you always had a great legal system at home that protected basic rights. No longer. The US govt has become little more than a playground bully both abroad and now even in your ‘homeland’ (aka ‘Fatherland’?), and your friends are starting to keep their distance while your enemies are emboldened.
“First they came for the Muslims, but I wasn’t a Muslim…”

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
DeWitt Angevine:

The aim of terrorists is to disrupt and damage our way of life. When we compromise our liberties, our beliefs and our constitution as a result of an act of terror, then the terrorists have achieved their goal.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
patrick hughes:

this is a sad day for the america that emerged after WW2 as the leader of a free and democratic world. To have written these lines into law defines a new low in the behavior of Republican Presidents and the Republican Party since the years of Nixon. America badly needs new leadership that can reconfigure our traditions for a realistic engagement with current national and international circumstances.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
Amigo:

From the NY Times—

“The House voted on Thursday to give the president the formal power to order wiretaps on Americans without a court order for 90 days, even as a federal judge in Detroit once again declared the administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants to be illegal.

Even some Republicans who voted for the bill said they expected the Supreme Court to strike down the legislation because of the provision barring court detainees’ challenges, an outcome that would send the legislation right back to Congress.

“We should have done it right, because we’re going to have to do it again,” said Senator Gordon H. Smith, Republican of Oregon, who voted to strike the provision and yet supported the bill.”

This is the classic Republican way of doing things, screw up first and then hope somebody will catch it and correct it !

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Amigo:

From the NY Times—

“We should have done it right, because we’re going to have to do it again,” said Senator Gordon H. Smith, Republican of Oregon, who voted to strike the provision and yet supported the bill.”

This is the classic Republican way of doing things, screw up first and then hope somebody will catch it and correct it !
The Republicans and the President are playing right into Osama’s hands!!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Dick Heiser:

Torture is always wrong, and we are mistaken to look for opportunities to practice it.

We shame ourselves by condoning it. We endanger our own soldiers.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
michael:

It is a sad day for democracy when we vote to deny basic human rights to anyone. A person can be locked a way and tortured, held forever at the whim of the president, never told what his crime is, and never released. Would that the Republicans had understood Kafka’s THE TRIAL as a nightmare to be avoided rather than a dream to bring to life. Rest in peace Habeas Corpus (1215 to 2006). You served us well. But no more.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Joel Hammer:

The passage of this bill will be a great tragedy for America and for what we stand for in the world. It is being passed to give George W. Bush and his war criminal cabinet a get out of jail pass for high crimes and misdemeanors against the American people.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Jim Campbell:

It is imperative that some process be adopted in order to bring the issues of guilt/innocence to a fact finder. However, this bill is a travesty when viewed in the context of jurisprudence. It creates an unfair process, and puts the President of the United States in the position of determing what is proper interrogation. A very sad day for the US, but par for the course for this Republican “toadie” Congress.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
steve chapple:

Torture. What are we Austria-Hungary 1885? This is another nail in the coffin of American democracy driven by the Texas oil thugs. Does anybody believe Dick Cheney has any interest in or respect for American freedom? Impeach Bush. Jail the rest for high crimes and misdemeanors. And will we even be able to say these things in four years?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Ken P:

There’s little to add to the great outpouring of angst and sorrow already posted here, except perhaps this. What is particularly distressing about what the Bush leadership has done in this mid-term election season is that the move to rush this Bill through Congress was so blatently cynical. This President has already shown that he is willling to authorizie as “C-I-C” much of what is contained in this legislation. He didn’t “need” it, but by pressing it into legislation the President has given one more opportunity for his machine to attack those who vote NO,as soft on security! It was merely a ‘turkey shoot’.

Thanks to the Democratic senators and congressmen who were brave enough to vote their resolve anyway! Their example could just be enough for me to see some light at the end of this dark tunnel our country is going through.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
hawkwoman0:

A disgrace, a complete disgrace. This will rank with the internment of US Japanese citizens someday. I am so ashamed. If I were younger and starting a family, I would emigrate to Canada at this point. The Republicans have betrayed everything this country once stood for and it will take decades to undo their damage.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Farley:

It’s not surprising since the constitution is only “a piece of paper” to Bush. This will never pass muster with the Supreme Court. And as someone mentioned earlier Congress has treasonously reniged on its obligation to uphold the constitution of the United States.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
Kapaka L. Senko:

Passage of bills that give the President unchecked power are akin to supporting the likes of infamous dictators! I can only hope the next President, Congress, and Courts will undo this anti-democratic regime’s chokehold on rights we Americans have formerly protected with our lives! This is a dangerous and irresponsible breach of my trust in the officials I helped to elect!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Marc Zarowin:

The new “terrorism” bill may give some in the world a sense they can be satisfied by retribution.

In the short-term, such retribution mania-medication will, to the extent it arises, cause far greater danger all around the world by numbing citizens to the fact “terrorist” behavior grows in disarming alliance to the extent it is “battled” with military armament, rather than building the community structures that Hezbollah, for example, has so effectively used to further its own growth, popular local support.

Hezbollah military “power” is not the most effective method, making perhaps as many enemies as the new “terrorism law” may make.

I am ashamed by such “playground” behavior, despite not supporting simplistic, military solutions.

From this strength does not grow.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Gillian Zeldin:

It is remarkable that the road to the loss of Habeas Corpus is so short. The construct of our American legal system was built on the recognition of centuries of weaknesses and oppourtunities for abuses of freedoms of all prior governments. We sought to do better, and have earned the respect and envy of many other nations, because we could never ‘disappear’ anyone. I am proud to be American, but I am less proud today - less proud of the complacency of our citizenry, of the widespread lack of understanding of the foundations of our freedom, and of the complicity of our elected lawmakers.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Milan Vesely:

Eighteen years ago I came to the United States as a white refugee from the African country of my birth. My choice was based on the fact that America was a nation of just laws that occupied the moral high ground.

This was important to me and my family because, as a successful businessman, I had been falsly arrested, held for 4 years without trial, tortured, seperated from my family and finally stripped of all we owned by a president and his henchmen bent on enriching themselves.

Now I read the new detainee bill and wake up at night asking
myself: “Am I really in the United States of America?”

Milan

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
daveO:

This law brings shame on all Americans. It abrogates all that America stands for: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Luke 6.31; “Hurt noone so that no one may hurt you,” Mohammed’s Farewell Sermon; “Love thy neighbor as yourself,” The Torah, Leviticus, 19.18. I am disgusted that Congress and the administration feel the need to pass such a law. The implications of this law are too horrible to imagine.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
Noam:

What the administration fails to understand is that our best weapon against the terrorists is our moral high ground. The battle is not one over territory, but for people’s “hearts and minds”, and by turning a country the world looked up to as a model of democracy, freedom, and human rights, and turning it into only now throughout the world associated with torture, lack of basic rights, and little respect for international norms, we are handing the terrorists the battlefield.

The current system worked fine fighting communism, Nazi Germany, and other threats. To assume that the terrorists are so much a greater threat than all others before that our basic rights and system of justice are a luxury we can no longer afford is ludicrous.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Ute Kavanaugh:

Our country’s laws deal with criminals. The Geneva Conventions deal with other nations, nations who love their families and have something to lose. Torture can never be the answer but we have not found a way to deal with people who hate us more than they love life - people who do not submit to any human laws upheld by mankind.
How then do you propose to handle someone who has sworn to kill you and your family when given the chance? Terrorists held in Guantanamo and being released after declaring they are innocent have returned to the battlefield and killed again - killed truly innocent people.
We must uphold our honour and laws, but we also must make sure that people who kill without regard to humanity cannot do so again.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
H.B.:

I hope when history looks back on us they see the people who have tried to stop this travesty from occurring - our government is no longer accountable even to us.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Steve R:

It’s already been said here but I think it needs repeating: no one wants terrorists to run free but the problem seems to be in proving who is a terrorist. We can’t arrest whomever we please or say have secret information about someone without publicly charging him, proving the allegation and/or allowing him to defend himself against it if he chooses. It upsets me to think that we are allowing our government to behave like fascists in order to protect our democracy. If the current administration is allowed to continue leading our nation, I am afraid that we will no longer have a democracy to protect.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Brian:

For the we’re in a time of war guys….

We are indeed in a time of war, but the war on terror it isn’t a convential war like WWII or the Civil War, its a war of patience, taking several generations to end. Much like the Cold War which started in 1945 and ended in 1991. If there are no terrorist acts on a continued basis, which ironically, this adminstration likes to point out, shouldn’t we drop the time of war bit, and try them fairly when accused terrorists come to trial for after all you’re innocent until proven guilty?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Stan Schurman:

Why has there not been more of an outcry from the American legal community? The arbitrary nature of this law (or lack thereof) essentially means that the Bush gang can take anyone it deems to be a threat (i.e., anyone that doesn’t agree with its policies) and have them detained without council or recourse. This goes against everything the U.S. supposedly stands for and everything most democracies stand for. If these detainees are guilty, then why the fear of putting them on trial? Denying basic legal rights to a few puts the population as a whole at risk eventually. A right to due process that doesn’t apply universally is no right at all. When are the American people going to recognize that they are on a slippery slope being greased by a gang of lawless, self-serving sociopaths in the White House.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
Lans:

Responding to post 183 by Len:

I think many Americans have never fought in a war, including myself, but that does not mean many these people are not hurted by war. Think parents and friends having to bury the dead or taking care of the disable soldier for the rest or his/her life. It is true most people will never know what it will be like fighting in a war but I hope it remains that way — do you really want to see a war where everyone is a solider?

I don’t think anyone said soldiers should not be allowed to defend themselves and in fact I would believe everyone would agree that killing someone in warzone is more or less expected.

However, what we are talking about here is people captured and have no real way of doing any harm to others. Do you want your family and friends to be detained and tortured without a trial maybe because they were wiretapped and thought to have conenctions to terrorists? Or on some other very shady grounds?!!! Is that what you fought for?

I have family who fought in Iraq but I would never claim to know their pain. I believe the longer we stay in Iraq, the more likely it is I’ll get drafted but that fear should and can not justify legalize torture.

I feel this is the first concrete step towards the downfall of the US as a superpower. The US no longer has the moral high ground and this gives other nations reason to stand up against the US and all injustice and bullying through out the years.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
E. Camacho:

The bill is unecessary. Sadly, the current administration seems to be drifting away from the values, which made this country great, and made us proud to be Americans. Instead of trying to make more laws, the administration should put its efforts into abiding by the current ones, and enforcing the rule of law–including due process. Nedless to say, we should go back to the American values–respecting human dignity, honoring the rule of law (national and international), promoting tolerance, and respecting different ideas– that once made this country an example to all others. Only then, can we start gaining some of the many things we have lost as people of this wonderful nation.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
kim k johnson:

The detainee bill in NOT a necessary tool for prosecuting terrorists - it is a bill designed to protect an administration that has broken the law. It provides a huge opportunity for innocent people to be arrested and hidden away forever. This is not the American way. This is a tragedy of corrupt power.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
hatchje:

The argument that we should not amend the geneva convention because it may cause other nations to amend it and in turn torture and kill Americans is NO ARGUMENT.

No matter what the reason,TORTURE AND MURDER are wrong, and we are in a position to be leaders in this. We as Americans have the priviledge to make correct choices out of freedom, not because we want (or need) something from someone else.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
karen turro:

I am ashamed and embarrrassed for this government. Our democratic values are being destroyed by an incompetent and arrogant White House, Senate and House of representatives. The minority party should be ashamed of themselves for not standing up to this chicanory, It’s all about getting power and keeping power. To paraphrase a poet, the best have lost all incentive and the worst are full of passionate intensity.
I don’t recognize this country any more.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Laura Lockridge:

The detainee bill is a dangerous threat to the Constitution. We in the US do not need such extreme measures to combat terrorism. We risk our reputation and standing in the world with laws that allow us to arrest people and let them sit in jail without recourse. It has already been proven that we have treated innocent people as terrorists.

We must hold ourselves to a higher standard. I fear most people are thinking “This is what terrorists deserve.” It is a gut reaction to the violence of 9/11. A desire for revenge. But we are putting our democracy at risk while telling the rest of the world that democracy is the only way to peace and freedom.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Burke Omalley:

Cheny and Rumsfeld’s vision of a president with dictatorial powers has been ratified. The constitution has no merit. The Supreme Court is meaningless. Habeus corpus is meaningless. The world can see that the leaders of this country are so frightened by terrorism that they have lost their moral compass. We are no longer a nation of laws but of men. Now we can fear not only our enemies overseas but the prospect of being sent to Guantamo for the most flimsy of reasons. What a sad and shameful day for the republic.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
William Miller:

The “detainee bill” is a horrid contortion of the U.S. constitution and even the Magna Carta. Sadly, the country is losing credibility on all fronts.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
alex simon:

this bill, like everything else this administration, with the complacency of the American people, has done, is against everything this country stands for. We have lost the “war on terror” when we act like the people we’re supposed to be standing against.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
gregdn:

If you’d have told me ten years ago that we as a nation would even be debating torturing people, let alone enshrining it into law I’d have accused you of being a wild eyed kook.
How far down the slope we’ve slid in these five years.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
H Bavinck:

Whatever this bill is about, it’s not fighting terrorism. You can’t fight international terrorism without international cooperation. As of Bush’s signature under the bill, almost all democracies in the world will be disallowed by their courts from extraditing subjects to the U.S., from giving names to the C.I.A, or from committing any other action that may result in their citizen’s being tortured or transported to a country where they are not guaranteed a fair trial.
To put in bluntly, if Great Britain captures Bin Laden, thanks to this bill they’ll be forced to keep him safe from the U.S.
Germany has already put out arrest orders against 24 C.I.A. operatives, for their role in the torture of an innocent German citizen…

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
tony:

The US is becoming what they always said they were fighting against.
Hello Stalin Junior

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Dale Eldridge:

If more than a handful of senators and congressmen had children in the service, I wonder how the vote would have turned out. They have not only voted to deny basic human and Constitutional rights to many who may be innocent, they put our service men and women in greater jeopardy by this despicable act. We ought to be so ashamed.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Scott:

It is a shame that we should try to convince ourselves that, somehow, we can protect our constitutional form of government by destroying the intrinsic protections that it guarantees, and that our forbears fought for. It is a shame that we have the only military force in the world that refuses to learn the lessons taught by the Viet Cong and others regarding fighting an ill defined war where every retaliation only polarizes the general population. It is a shame that we somehow consider “our” current government’s fundamentalist oil-family mullahs to be better than “their” fundamentalist oil-family mullahs. Mr. Bin Laden, who was explicit in his desire for a confrontation between the West and Islamic people no longer needs exert himself — we seem to be doing his job for him.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Christy Smith:

I believe this is the first step toward the wholesale internment of ordinary American citizens who simply oppose George Bush’s policies. A terrorist is whoever George Bush’s government says it is. Will you or I be next?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Robert Parsons:

I believe the rendition of detainees to secret prisons in foreign countrys, speccial rules of interrogation for the CIA and denial of habeas corpus to prisoners are all threat to our civil rights

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
keith clarke:

Osama Bin Laden wins when we become no better than he is. When they make us abandon our moral high ground on torture, and we can no longer be a naive little nation ignoring the reality that Bush condones torture, the terrorists win. When we crawl in the gutter by running away from the Geneva Convention because our leaders are so despearte to appear to be winning, then Osama Bin Laden smiles from his cave at our slow unravelling. Bush, Rove, Rumsfield, Rice et al are traitors to this country’s great Constitution because they are more concerned with being Republican than they are with being American. History will consider them cowards… May they be haunted by all of the unneccasary loss of life they continue to heap upon the world… Afghanistan was an opportunity to rebuild a broken nation and show the Muslim world that we embrace them, yet Bush abandoned it for Republican agendas that had nothing to do with terrorism. I hope Bush’s God has mercy on his soul.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
Ron Clabaugh:

The Republican controlled Congress has totally failed its responsibility to the America. I had thought that perhaps Senator McCain would have the courage to stand up for the principles he expoused on protecting the rights of detainees, but once again he apparently is more interested in running for president than he is for standing up for his purported principles. Congress gave Bush the blank check he wanted, just as they did in allowing him to take us to war against Iraq. Once again they have taken action to demostrate that the only diifference between us and the so called “terrorists” is at most one of degree and not principle. They use roadside bombs to kill innocent people which we describe as murder, we drop our bombs from airplanes killing innocent people which we describe as “collateral damage”. They decapitate some prisoners, we humilitate them and keep them in jail until our President in his sole discretion has determined that there are no more terrorists to make war agaisnt.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
James M. Mathis:

This bill is a waste of time and legislative effort, a diversion from other matters far more important. At the bottom of it somewhere is lawyer pocketbooks. There is ample precedent in war on what to do with ununiformed, irregular combatants, so those picked up on the battlefield are easily identified as those who should be shot. Morally, due to their lack of concern for humane sensibilities set forth in conventions, what is done with them before they are shot is totally a matter of necessity or perhaps even expediency as established by their captors. The citizenship of the irregular should not be considered at all. A US citizen should get no more consideration in Afghanistan than an Iranian or Saudi would which should be “none”.

In the states, foreigners suspected of terrorist support or activity shouldhave no rights whatsoever, either, especially if their legal status has lapsed or was intitially illegal. This is where the Congress could apply some law so it is easier to catch and exterminate citcizen terrorists, especially those hiding behind the Moslem religion.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
Maggie Sherman:

Sadly the scariest thing going on in the entire world is the reign of George W. Bush.

Maggie

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Lukas:

The owners of this country use this bill to give themselves power. They effectively mangled the constitution and rendered it useless to a large percentage of the US population. They do this in the face of security. The problem with torturing people and removing their rights ,be the enemy combatants or just non-citizens, is that these heinous acts will become an everyday reality for even natural born citzens.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Franklin’s Contributions to the Conference on February 17 (III) Fri, Feb 17, 1775

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Joe C.:

Ask any Vet that spent time in a P.O.W. camp what kind of good info the N.V.A. got out of them? How can the leader of our country condem nations such as Iraq and Iran as an Axis of Evil yet use the exact same methods that make them evil. This is a sad day for democracy.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
Richard:

The detainee bill is one of the worst assaults on the Bill of Rights since the Alien and Sedition Acts. It will not make us safer; indeed, our troops will be at greater risk than ever, since we have abandoned any pretense of adherence to the rule of law. Congress - and particularly the Democrats in the Senate, who could have filibustered this awful bill but lacked the wisdom or courage to do so - will have to answer to future generations for this effront to our liberties. I am increasingly ashamed to call myself an American.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
arnold Abelson:

This bill takes American justice back to the days of the Star Chamber in England. No one is safe from being snatched off the street on the word of a anonymous accuser. The yea votes of Lieberman and the mid-westerners are understandable, but why did both NJ senators vote yea?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
Harriet:

This bill is against everything I believe in as an Episcopalian Catholic.

I don’t see how we can possibly call ourselves a Christian country after this.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Jan R:

This is a shameful bill and these politicians who passed it are shameful men and women. They are sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America and are, instead, gutting its basic protections. This bill is really treasonous to the American ideal, to the Constitution, and to all the men and women who have fought, who have died and who are fighting and who are dying to protect America. This is really “rotting from within” and we are now exposed before the world. By grace of this administration and the Republican Party, we’re not the good guys any more.

This is a morally bankrupt administration - that has been amply demonstrated. It is harder to understand why the rest of the Republican Party joins in this rush to start down the slippery slope toward tyranny. I for one feel much, much less safe as result of all of these actions to “protect us”. I consider myself fiscally conservative - but there is no way I can support a party that has abandoned its moral moorings.

I often wonder if this administration (intentionally not capitalized - they do not deserve it) has adopted the novel “1984″ as their true bible. They certainly act that way.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Sebastian Wreford:

The bill is a shameful atrocity.

I don’t know how those people can look in the mirror.

And I can’t teach my children to be proud of an America that allows this.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Kelly R Burnett:

I am a 59 year old Vietnam era veteran, and I have never been more ashamed, angry, disgusted and shocked that this Administration would sell America’s values for political gain. This President and his cabal should be impeached. If the Supreme Court doesn’t overturn this bill America will be lost forever. We have become what we supposedly hate. I am not proud to be an American and I think of all the men and women who have given their lives to uphold America’s values, what an historic waste.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Fred:

This new law is shameful and is just another indication of how low our
country has become under this administration.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Tom Pacheco:

I am distressed that this bill passed and will become law. This bill not only sets a dangerous precident but goes against all common laws of decency. Our president claims to be a religous person but what he is doing is a sin in my eye’s and the eye’s of most of the civilized world.
I hope that someone , somehwere will fight this all the way to the Supreme Court. Hopefully they still have the capability of preserving our Constitution. Sadly I am becoming ashamed to be an American. I am a Vietnam Veteran and served my country during what I thought were the most perilous of times. Unfortunately now we are at the precipace of destroying all that we have fought and died for.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Grady Ward:

Not content with contradicting our constitution, not allowing habeas corpus seeks to undermine the Magna Carta of 700 years earlier. Shame on Congress.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Dan Balfour:

Democracy and political rights are always fragile. The Bush administration is in the process of smashing them beyond recognition. The arguments being made for the necessity of these measures are eerily similar to those made during the dark days of McCarthyism. We can fight our enemies without destroying our political system. Bush and company reveal their moral weakness and lack of courage when they insist upon using torture and usurping rights in the name of defending the nation. They swore to uphold the constitution and now deserve to be removed from office.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Kumar:

Imagine this scenario. American soldiers caught as enemy combatants in another country. They will be denied the right to courts\attorneys and can be held indefinitely (read it as life long) with no contact to their families in prisons on foreign soil.

If your gut revolts at this, so should you to the new legislation.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
James Charles:

In case I go missing tomorrow and you can’t find me, please do me a favour and remember something.

Until yesterday, what separated America from every other nation on the face of the earth was the elegantly simply idea we can think what we want, speak what we want, write what we want, worship (or not) as we want, go where we want, befriend who we want, vote as we want, protest as we want.

That was the dream.

Once upon a time, it existed for real. It lasted 230 years. Tell your children so they can tell their children. And tell them to remember that no good idea ever dies.

Like Camelot, the dream was here for one brief, shining moment.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
John J B Miller:

Our Civil Rights are eroding more and more. I fear we are no longer the “Land of Liberty”. We should take the word off our coins!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
John R.Tkach:

I will try to keep this comment as moderate as possible. Prior attempts at posting comments have sometimes resulted, I assume, in rejection because I have been immoderate. Requests for clarification were futile.

I am astonished that Americans accept the torture of innocents as a worthwhile pursuit of this administration. After all, we are torturing Iraqis, Bedouins who were only roaming over their part of the desert, when we attacked them for their oil. No ties to anyone or anything involved in 9/11. A small group of neo-cons, involved in a cabal with megalomaniac delusions, thought they could create “their own reality.”

Book after book, the latest by Bush lapdog Bob Woodward, details the colossal ineptness of this administration.

This same cabal, undeterred by their massive incompetence, are still pursuing a tyranny and attempting to do away with any checks and balances.

The reason, I believe, that they are so inept, is because truth no longer plays any part in their daily lives. Everything is cover-up and spin.

Polls indicate that 25% of the population think congress is doing a good job. They must be from a different planet than earth.

80% of republicans think the Iraq war is being fought because of 9/11.

We have lost a once great country!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
Peter Bohacek:

We fled Communist Czechoslovakia in 1948 because my father was persecuted, but no charges were ever disclosed. His “crime” was probably that he was critical of the Communists and chose to “vote” in the rigged election against the communist candidate. We were very lucky to be able to immigrate to the US, the land of the free. Now this wonderful country is operating in ways that are very close to the way the Communists operated: punish your critics; do not disclose charges; jail dissidents and suspected people after holding rigged political trials; discredit lesser critics in the state friendly press; and bring wealth to the ruling class.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
Ian Pepper:

“Here there is no why,” Hier gibt es kein Warum,” said an Auschwitz guard to Primo Levi when the Italian author and Holocaust survivor questioned an arbitrary and cruel command.

Our founding fathers would have cheerfully died to defend Habeas Corpus, the sacred rights of the accused to petition the state, because without it, there is no longer any “why,” only tyranny at its most savage.

Every legislator who voted yes for “there is no why” is a traitor.
To have voted “yes,” moreover, in the expectation that the Supreme Court will later rescind this fascistic bill was a cynical evasion of responsibility.

I am a US citizen who has lived for many years in Germany, where I have been treated with the greatest respect.

Now I will have to explain to my European friends (including those residing in the US) that when visiting my country, they are stripped of the most fundamental rights, are at the disposal of berserk executive powers.

The reputation of the US will take decades to recover – if ever.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Anne D.:

My goodness - listen to yourselves! How paranoid. If we lived in a police state, this open forum would not exist. If Bush were a fascist, we would not be having elections in November. Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean they are a fascist. Congress VOTED for this law. That’s right - voted. You voted for them, and now they vote for you. If you don’t like them, vote for someone else - you get to do it every two years. If that doesn’t suit you, then leave. But please, spare us the paranoid babble so we can have a REAL debate.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Fred Vogel:

Today is a dark day in the legal history of the USA. Fundamental rights are being abrogated of defendants - as serious as their crimes may be - in the name of an ill conceived “war” on terrorism.
I remain confident that the Supreme Court will strike down this bill as several other unconstitutonal laws of this administration. It is shameful that so many representatives have given their vote to a flagrant violation of basic civil rights our civilization has to defend and uphold (not deny!) in order to prove to the world the superiority of our Western values.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Al AB:

So now, in order to uphold “American safety” and “freedom” the Republicans are using every dirty trick the comunists used in their day. Remember the Gestapo, anyone?

The first victims of this will be others… in other countries…

But then, one day soon, this is going to backfire on the American public itself. Intimidation will replace our freedom to think.

I’m very sad today. So much for “land of the free”…

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Brad Collins:

To those who approve of setting aside due process and civil liberties in the name of “getting the bad guys”, may I remind you that it was the United States of America that insisted that the Nuremberg trials be conducted according to all the accepted rules of law, by the book, and above board. If those war criminals could be tried under the accepted rule of law, these thugs can certainly be tried and convicted under those same rules.
As a result of the passage of this law the administration has the blessing of Congress to arrest pretty much anyone they deem a threat and hold them indefinitely without any review of any kind. Right now, they are going after Muslims; but I wonder what you will be saying when they come after you. It is more than a pity that a majority of our members of Congress lack the courage to stand up for real American values.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Frank S:

The powers given to the president by this bill would be scary enough if they were being given to a thoughtful, competent president. In the hands of this president, god only knows what will be done. And as he continues to fail in every aspect of his “war on terror” — as in every other aspect of his presidency — what other powers is he going to demand in order to give him more chance of success? It has already been found by many — and not just us darn liberals, but the intelligence community, many in the military, and even a lot of republicans — that Bush’s attempts to beat the terrorists have backfired and only made the world less safe. Why are we handing him more ammunition?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
richard:

This is a dark day, and a dark time, for America. Not only has Mr. Bush–with the disgraceful complicity of Congress–shredded the Constitution, but the methods of “interogation” (ie, torture) he seeks permission for are not even effective in garnering useful information from terrorists. We have the worst possible outcome–our moral standing is an international joke, our legal system is under assault, and we will be no safer against further attack than we are today.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
James A. Long:

Unending imprisonment without judicial review because of being accused, not proved to be, an enemy combatant violates the sanctity of human life. Has the government of our country no shame ?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
Mike Walker:

Amnesty for torturers, suspension of habeas corpus - some “compromise”! The only things Republicans compromised here were their values and our laws.

In ceding its role as a check and balance to presidential power, Congress has surrendered its legal authority. In compromising their values, these senators have surrendered their moral authority.

It’s time for a new Congress with some backbone and integrity.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
Jane Weber:

The detainee bill passed yesterday is the most outrageous and shameful piece of legislation ever to pass through the halls of Congress. Those so-called “humans” are not representing the American people and are as big an embarrassment to the country as are the criminals in the current administration. The civilized world is awaiting the day when Bush and his goon squad will be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. One can only wish that they then too will be subjected to the torture of which they are so fond. I am quite sure our Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves to see what has become of our beloved nation.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Tom - San Jose:

“When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.”

Wake up. It can… no! it IS happening here.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Steve:

Thomas A. Vento@’I don’t think the combatants that are trying to kill us deserve the rights that US citizens have.’

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;”

(sigh) Am I the only one the _believes_ that? Sure it’s an easy thing to say: It sounds pretty. I’m such a chump that I thought that we, as a people, aspired to that.

Ok so sending Dred Scott back to slavery wasn’t too good a deal, but we kept working it. I’m sure the Japanese-American’s watching WWII from behind wire fences thought that maybe we didn’t have the courage to walk the talk, but hey we kept working it.

I thought the stories about wild and strange behavior of US soldiers was too far fetched to be believed. I thought, ain’t no way no how a US soldier would mistreat a prisoner - because how we treat prisoners is what sets us apart from them. Until the pictures of Abu Ghraib.

You can take Mr. Vento’s statement and replace “the combatants” and “US Citizen” with “Hutu” and “Tutsi”. Still rings true doesn’t it?

I’ve lost confidence of the inherent goodness and decency of the United States. No terrorist could’ve ever done that.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
A. Bugler:

Piece by piece we are eroding the very principles our country was founded on. What used to distinguish us was playing the rules and playing fair. Now, in name of national security, we disregard any rule we don’t happen to like. It’s not okay for our enemies to torture but it’s okay if we do because? Because we say so.

As Pogo once said: We have met the enemy and it is us. What is most unfortunate about this is that these abridgements of rights, whether they be ours or those rounded up for questioning, is depleting the United States of its moral authority, its stature, its integrity. Who admires our country now? Who wishes to be like us? Who feels safer now that we have sown fields of hatred across the world?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Garee:

Those who support these actions in their name miss the significance of those who oppose what is being passed on as homeland defense.
Those who oppose these actions are not “weak” or “cut and runners”, or whatever is being mouthed today by the Republican right.We do not want our country attacked again. We want our country to defend itself with the tools given to it by the Constitution. We want it defended by the strength of our cause. We want it defended this way because to do it in the fashion proposed by our leaders is contrary to what we believe in–the Constituion.
Those who support torture or unending confinement without cause think they can breathe easily with these laws in place because they feel safe–now. But what if 20 years from now the then president decides to say that Presbyterians are “combatants”? Farfetched? How about union members??No way, that couldn’t happen!!!Think…. if you dont define what can’t happen, you open it up to happen. By allowing someone to define who or what a “combatant” is opens the door to such mischief!!
I wish people would truly think of their children and grandchildren when they mindlessly support these kinds of actions taken in the name of “homeland security”.
Who will defend you when it is your turn to be accused… if all others have been removed as enemies???

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Paul Tyler:

Allowing hearsay and secret testimony without due process amounts to a Star Chamber. It is a political court; not necessarily in its intention but in his creation and exception. It sets up a direct path to the destruction of all democratic values by its very design. It is the product of a cabal of people who can find no higher duty than to keep the nation in a constant state of crisis.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
kenneth harrow:

the slightness of the threat compared with the overwhelming power of the u.s. means that this is not a national threat. the measures are disproportionate to the actual threat; the fears whipped up are of a piece with far-right regimes who have used such tactics to legitimize police state actions. we have so far lost perspective in this country that it is now no longer viewed as preposterous to pose your question….alas.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Michelle:

What an awful shame to just give this admin what it wants. Another
rubber stamp. What Congress? Everyone is playing follow the leader
oops - fool- G Bush. Whats to come next??

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
Robertson7a:

I think that when people call you names, you can usually just think to yourself, “they’re just jealous” or “isn’t it sad that they feel the need to prop up their egos by bashing”.

But henceforth, forevermore, when other countries say that we’re bad people, or we’re a bad country, we won’t be able to know in our heart-of-hearts that they’re wrong.

It’s really getting mortally embarassing, and bone-chillingly frightening.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
S. Choi:

Going beyond colorful Democratic and Republican arguments regarding the detainee bill, I believe these times call for a very basic reflection and conversation of what America will become (and is becoming), not laments on what it has been.

When proponents of this bill deem it reasonable to strip the rights of suspected terrorists, they assert that it is necessary in the name of self-defense, that since the terrorists do not respect and operate under the same rules and terms of war that we abide by, it is acceptable for us to treat them likewise.

And following this argument, then it is not such an anomoly that the president would seek a bill expressly allowing him to fight this war on his own terms. But that is exactly the problem. This bill was necessary because the President did not want to be bound by his country’s own legal system. The bill was not necessary to get the job done. It was necessary because the President made it necessary, not because there was a lack of means in our current system to capture and try these terrorists. When a man is given power to act above his own system, it is only a matter of time until the legitimacy of that same system is undermined. During the Senate debates yesterday, Senator Obama wrote in his Remarks that the bill was sloppy, that something as serious as human rights should not be dealt with in such a way. How far does this administration have to go before we ourselves become the victims of such sloppiness? The sloppiness of its Iraq plan has already taken a toll on our soldiers as well as numerous Iraqis.

We’ve become a frivolous country, where we shun true responsibility and pass the power (and thereby, the blame) to those willing to abuse it. The tragedy is not that Bush and his administration are succeeding in their agenda; there will always be those who justify wrongful means for their righteous end. The real tragedy is that we as citizens (including the representatives in the House and Senate) are willing to forego the principles on which our forefathers founded this country to save our own necks. This is not the America I gave up my Korean citizenship for, and I will not stand by to see it be redefined for me.

This bill would not have been passed if the Senate and House felt the pressure from its citizens. After all, representatives are, foremost, our elected voices, and their failure to voice opposition indicates a failure on our part to voice our own.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
mary-leggett browning:

Of course we are all in a terrible time/place, but fear of outside forces should never, never replace our long-time rights of defense for the individual against a temporarily over-blown government. This is too high a price to pay for supposed safety.

What a terrible mistake it would be to ever subject anyone to a court in which they would not be able to confront the evidence or accusers that have placed them in this court.

What are we THINKING?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
_enlogax_:

simply as an observation and as a question of statistics, i wonder:
if 95% of the responses to this question in this forum express emotions ranging from regret to outrage to disgust at the passage of this and other pieces of so-called “anti-terror” legislation, then WHY is it that our elected representatives, who are elected to represent OUR WILL, have overwhelmingly passed a piece of legislation that an apparently representative sample of the reading population has OVERHWELMINGLY CONDEMNED?
whose public opinion are these legislators drawing on, anyways? whose america is this?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Marquis C:

As much as I dislike this administration and their incompetencies, I have to say there are no other meaningful alternative to this bill when it comes to dealing with the Islamic fascists. If reason prevails in the Islamic countries and the population by and large shows movement toward tolerance of other people and ideas then the US congress should repeal this law. What I am suggesting is to introduce ’sunset provision’ in the law.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
JenniP.:

There are more broadminded people generally writing here but as someone who has lived and travelled all around the world, including U.S. (and my husband and kids are U.S. citizens!) I’d say people over there are often unaware of the insidious propaganda being spread and this well predates Bush: the constant scares (like communism used to be and still is to some extent) the flags, the pledges, the constant mantras of being “the only democracy” and generally the only livable place on earth. It has probably worked so well because it has been clever, unrelenting yet rather subtle, and because it is easy to lull people into sweet contentment when their bellies are full (and when they are poorly educated?). It is very much a matter of pulling the right strings. Coupled with the fact that U.S. residents are little exposed to the outside world, they hardly see foreign films (except the remade US version of it) foreign tv series (why are all the “baddies” in U.S. programs always foreign like have british accents!?) and extremely little foreign news (which is usually actually about U.S. elsewhere in the world like the media there often presents Iraq war as their only segment in foreign news) then this breeds the notion of “the other”, makes it easy to dehumanize and unable to feel sympathetic towards, for example, the Iraqis. This is what at least accounts for those 30-40% of ardent Bush supporters. The media I again have to say has done an appalling job, especially during Bush era but also before especially concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict. You are the topic here so I’m going at you but I’m not simplistic like Bush and I just want to add that it’s the nature of societies of humans and animals alike to have constant struggle for dominance so propaganda and other forms of powerplay goes on everywhere (no place is perfect, that is) because there’s always a struggle to dominate conversation -it’s just a matter of degree (North Korea is probably at the highest end of the scale in terms of propaganda!). Democracy means work and that’s what went wrong here. They patted your heads and told you not to worry, that you were living in the best place on earth so smile and go back to play. Those people who hate us? They are just jealous because you got a nice ride. They are inherently evil. Let us take care of it. Shh, go to sleep now. The french have a slightly better idea -they don’t take anything lying down! They just riot for anything, it can get a little funny. But they are working for it, not just shrugging “Oh well, I guess they know what they’re doing.” I have excitedly read about the numerous people in the U.S. who have kept cool heads, who are wise and have actively worked towards a just democracy so please don’t get thin skinned! I’m Scandinavian and apart from various democracies have also lived in dictatorships, too, like Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain and in Brasil when it was under military rule so I’ve seen all kinds of systems at work. What I want to say is (like some have already mentioned), the “U.S. is best” mantras have worked well to blind people (in U.S.) to the fact that sh*t can happen there, too. You are pretty much sinking into a fascist state. It sounds crazy to me, too!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
David Root:

The passage of the provision requested by the President, and crafted by
McCain and others, is a disgrace to the United States. It is hard to believe that this actually passed. I congratualate to one Republican Senator who
voted against the measure, and I am upset by the fact that 12 Democratic
Senators who voted for it. The Democrats should not act out of fear, but
should stand up for the dignity of the United States.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
Marcus Rarick:

The bill is yet another example of the Republican viewpoint that the ends justify the means. From Bush and Cheney telling lie after lie in order to get their war in Iraq to his spying on Americans in violation of the law, this group is intent on destroying the moral fabric of the nation. Their actions will encourage further attacks, the attackers concluding (rightly so based on Bush’s actions) that the way to destroy the American way of life is to destroy our freedom, which Republicans appear more than willing to provide assistance with.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
Charity:

What have we become? Where is the freedom our forefathers fought for? I am so saddened by this flagrant lack of regard for our civil-rights, by our elected officials voting for such a debasing and degrading bill. I am scared at what we are becoming, what we project to the rest of the world - that we are above the Geneva Conventions and can snub our great Constituion. Somehow I still had a shred of hope that our Congress would ‘do the right thing’ and vote against this awful and digusting bill. But no. From bad to worse, I only hope that soon things can start to change, to get turned back on track otherwise it will hard to be an American in this world.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
John Houseal:

It is another un-American thing Bush and the Republicans have foisted upon our heritage. Bush has stolen, degraded, and spat on all the values on which this country was founded. He is an empty-headed leader who is leading us down a path towards the lowest common denominator in which we are as depraved as the terrorists. He is doing shameful things which will embarrass our citizens for years to come.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
A. Pugh:

Our Congress ripped the thin veneer of civilization in the name of freedom. How can Americans be proud of our leaders if this action is an example of idea of civil rights. Who do we jail for this civil disobedience?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Bijan:

Perservation of our rights requires constant vigilance against forces of domination and extreme greed. Majority of people in this country have never fought for any of the rights that exists now. We take the rights we have for granted. Mix that with a corrupt mainstream media and
corrupt political system and you have a dangerous recipe for disaster!
More power requires higher responsibility for its rational use and prevention of abuse.
On that front we are facing an exceedingly difficult situation by the action of the only superpower in the world!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
Jennifer Hoult:

It is a dark day for the American constitution. Our Congress has made us the first civilized nation to abolish Habeus Corpus, which provides the most fundamental of all legal protections. Furthermore, it has instituted laws that violate the separation of powers, the Due Process clause, and 6th Amendment. We can no longer call ourselves a nation of laws when our leaders openly violate our constitution.

Jennifer Hoult, J.D.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Tom Abrilas:

Torture is not fun–I can vouch for the pain! The Republicans are playing a game that will end up with some Arab country mis treating our GIs –and indicating that it follows the rules of the Geneva convention.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
William Wagner:

We get the form of government we deserve.

Now this.

Bill

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
Peter B.:

Like so many others posting here, I, too, feel nothing but shame, horror, and an appalling sense of disappointment at our Congress and the President. At a stroke, we have just junked the fundamental freedoms in the American Constitution that we supposedly are fighting the terrorists over. The President (I will never say “our President”) has repeatedly told us that the terrorists hate us because “we’re free.” Well, I guess that’s no longer a problem thanks to this bill, so hopefully the terrorists will no longer hate us.

In a stroke, we have dropped from our basic constitutional system of civil liberties: checks and balances, right to a fair trial (indeed, even a right to a trial at all), right to hear what you are accused of and see the evidence so as to be able to mount a defense, protection from cruel and unusual punishment, and so much more. Yes, these only apply to “enemy combatants,” but the right to name anyone (even Americans) a combatant rests at the whim of a single person, the President, who cannot be challenged by anyone - the courts, Congress, no one.

To those who have posted here saying that this is the best we can hope for given the need to fight “the war on terror,” let me just ask: what more are you willing to give up in the name of fighting terrorism? Yes, terror is horrifying and scary. But how far do you go to stop it? If we say that today the president has the unilateral and unchecked right to jail and to torture indefinitely anyone (Americans, too) without trial as long as he says they were bad people, what will you say tomorrow? That it is okay for the President to veto what the media can print to stop information from reaching the terrrorists? That it is okay to jail people for what they say, write or believe at any time because it might be a clue that they will someday commit terror? Are you basically willing to destroy everything this country stands for in order to fool yourself into believing that you’re any safer?

If so, then I can only remind you of the words of Abraham Lincoln: “At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?– Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Today we have committed a form of national suicide.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
David Durant:

If the Bush Administration’s handling of Iraq is an indication of their competence and their ability to understand the consequences of their actions, I don’t understand how anyone can put any faith or confidence in their opinion that these harsh measures are necessary. In Mr. Bush’s third attempt to explain why we are in Iraq, he states
that we are to democratize Iraq and the area. Is this the form of democracy he is trying to sell to the Moslem world?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Carl Lee:

It rates with the Alien and Sedition Act as a Congressional low-point in our history.
We are such hypocrites and this will only at fuel to fire of hate for America around the world.
The very torture this bill allows (by all but those in uniform) resulted in long prison sentences and even death to Japanese who carried out such torture on US soldiers in WWII. This bill gives the CIA and its contractors a “get out of jail free” card.
It puts the K in Amerika.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
John:

If our goal is to instigate further resentment and hate and to increase the level of violence it is just right.

Anyone willing to give up their rights (yes, you too can be declared an illegal combatant and stripped of your rights under this law) for eledged security deserve neither.

Imagine if all the affort, money and the immeasurable value of the lives lost in Iraq was instead invested in clean renewable energy, rebuilding Afghanistan and securing our boarders. We wouldn’t need the oil, we’d have muslim friends instead of enemies and the few radicals left wouldn’t be able to get into the U.S.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
Stephen D. Ellis:

The detainee bill has been devised by Republicans who want to avoid accountability and accuse opponents of being pansies. This is the same strategy of fear and smear that helped get the last two Presidential elections close enough to steal, and it may work again. Their strategies are politically effective but their policies are inept, immoral, and disastrous for everyone but the insiders who have been granted a piece of the “terror” budget we have charged to future generations. This administration and its fellow travelers have done far more damage to our country and the advance of liberty than any terrorist could ever have hoped. The damage may be irreparable.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
Brigid:

Besides the fact that this bill is morally ambiguous at best and that the mire existence of prison like Guantanimo Bay is terribly frightening. If habeas corpus can be suspended for ‘them’ what is to prevent it from eventually being suspended for ‘us’. Shame on us.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
LAWRENCE BISSELL DOYLE JR:

I have called the office of every Class1 (coming up for election in November) Senator that voted for S3930 and vented my spleen in opposition to their vote. I shall support their election opponents both financially and verbally.
That said, I find no fear in opposing this president as I have no doubt that these powers have been, will be, and shall be abused by him against our citizens and foreign supporters.
I am not afraid to speak and die in opposition to the tyranny in this bill.
My forefather, Capt. John Bissell settled Windsor Conn. in 1620. As I peruse again the vast amounts of treasure and blood lost by him and some 2000 progeny in opposition fascism such as this, I cannot go to my big sleep letting them down.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Bob Young:

Shame on congress. They have foisted their responsibility onto the Judiciary. Special shame on McCain and Graham.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Brett S.:

A million people should stand on the streets in Washington, each holding a sign that reads:

Guaranteeing that an Reckless President Does Not Have to Submit to Congressional or Judicial Oversight Does Not Make Us Safer

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
George Torphy:

I am ashamed! Ashamed of our President, ashamed of our Congress, ashamed of all the people in this nation that support this law and most of all, ashamed for our country.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
Dr. Roberto A. Fois:

The bill passed today gives the president and the secretary of defense great latitude in detainees interrogation, does away with the principle of habeas corpus is a shameful chapter in the legal history of the US and it’s bound to hunt us for generations to come.

The results will be felt in several ways.
First the little moral authority the US had left in the world will vanish with the application of this misguided measure.

Second, the bill will produce a wave of anti-Americanism in the places in the globe where we cannot afford any more hostility.

Our foreign policy is already saying to the world that we regard American lives to be more important than the lives of other people. We are already accused of selectively applying our principles. This new law will unequivocally send the message that yes, in fact we are selective in the interpretation and application of our own laws and principles and the laws of the larger world community.

Third, the bill is a further movement in the direction of the “fascistization” of America. In the name of some sense of personal security we are giving up the very independence and freedom that defines our identity as a country.

One of the most precious freedoms that America has brought to bear in the world scene is the freedom of its citizens from the intrusion and control of their own government.

This is a sad day for America. We went from being a country interested in exporting democracy and freedom, to be a world bully making up the rules of the game just because we happen to have the biggest stick in the playground.

The Bush administration, in its myopic interpretation of reality, is not only mortgaging the financial future of the country with its expensive world policing attitude, it is also planting and feeding the seed of hatred that our children’s children will have to deal with without the resources we have at our disposal today.

Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Tim:

Anne D., comment 298, supplies the trite right-wing sentiment that if things were as bad as those who disagree with Pres. Bush say they are we would not be able to have this discussion. This reminds me of the other right-wingers who are quick to argue “If we do that, what’s coming next?” As in, ‘gays can’t marry because it will lead to other [strange combination] marriages.’ Therefore, Anne D., I will utilize this type of explanation now because it’s one that’s likely familiar to you: can’t you see that we are not in the worst-case situation you describe at present, but this administration’s actions are the BEGINNING of the end of our freedoms?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Vince Agostino:

I am sickened and saddened by the misuse of authority and power that our representatives have decided to condone…. We are rapidly become an imperial state run by a hierchy of business titants… our own noble class… the misinformation being fed the American people by corporate power brokers through a conglomerate controlled media has reached a dangerous level…. As in the past, we need to change the guard to bring things back to a moderate level… if they let us….

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
Michael Crowley:

The jihadists must be loving this. They are watching and no doubt laughing as they watch the Bush administration make this country more authoritarian day by day.When we have been stripped of all the rights of a real democracy then the jihadists will seek the final step of turning us all into Salafist Muslims.They are brilliantly using this administration to subvert our democratic system. Are the Bushies this stupid or are they complicit?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Anagadir:

Believe it or not, but for some time now I’ve been watching Bush to see what scheme he is cooking up to get an extra 4 years. There is something about him that greatly worries me. I’m an American in a nice house and a nice job and can only imagine how the Moslims in Quantanamo are feeling. Like Hell.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
R. Moore:

Why should terrorists be accorded the rights of US Citizens? Why should terrorists be accorded any rights under the Geneva convention? Why should we elevate a terrorist to the level of a POW? What country do they represent? How many holes in the ground in Manhattan will it take before the “hate America crowd” feels we should take off the gloves and stop letting the terrorists manipulate our courts and political structure as weapons against us? How many dead Americans, killed on American soil, will it take before left wing partisans understand that the terrorists don’t hate Republicans, they hate Americans?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
John Leo:

The Laws that the Executive Branch have demanded and which the Congress has submissively passed are not needed to extend our current statutes and Case Law. A criminal is a criminal - but only once he is found guilty of commiting a crime. The “Detaines” around the world have been illegally held outside of our Judicary’s responsibility to judge guilt or innocence. We are in a Constitutional crisis as well as a moral crisis.

The actions of our currrent administration are illegal and they are a pathetic attempt to overcome gross incompetence and selfserving political gains.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
David Currier:

I feel no safer today than I did after 9/11. Banning toothpaste and liquids were window dressing. I sense that a crafty bomber could more easliy fabricate an explosive device from a cell phone and simply call that phone inflight. Yet cell phones were not banned. Now this unconstitutional law is being promoted so that George-the-Decider appears as a tough-guy and really in control. Would somebody please bring back the real Bozo The Clown show? I’m bored with this one. Problem is, this one gives me nightmares!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
Peter Coyote:

If our government was concerned with our safety they would not have cut the budgets of oversight agencies protecting consumers, workers, and the environment. The ‘war on terror’ serves to herd the public and make them tractable to a diminution of their essential freedoms. It does nothing to protect us. Since the government has not fortified chemical plants in the United States or nuclear plants and storage facilities, we are completely vulnerable. Taking off shoes and belts and not x-raying suitcases checked below is a symptom of the same dysfunction. Now that we’ve ‘legalized’ torture and secret prisons, and given the determination of what’s legal to our President, we have sacrificed our moral standing in the world—have fallen from what was once a bright and shining beacon of hope to the world, to the richest, most powerful, Third World country on the planet. I am ashamed of my Congress and if I didn’t need my passport to re-enter the country to visit my children, I would have burned it today.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Mark:

I am afraid that with this one bill this administration has accomplished the goals of al Qaeda. Al Qaeda wants to destroy the American way of life? This bill opens the door to accomplishing exactly that. And all in the name of fighting these same terrorists.

Those who ignore the law and attack innocents should be brought to justice. But they should be brought JUSTICE, not rendered into a secret and invisible gulag. Bring the full force of American might and justice to bear on them. But do it under the rule of law. The rule of law means nothing unless it applies to everyone.

The real problem with this bill is that it opens the door to doing away with the checks and balances that are the genius of our system of government. If applied in good faith this law will be an effective tool. But if applied with malice, or incompetence, there is no way to detect the abuse or correct the error. This law puts the freedoms of each and every one of us at risk.

Someone commented that they are scared? They have a right to be. I pray that this is only a small stumble in the path of our great democracy. But if it should turn out to be otherwise, if this great republic descends into totalitarianism, then it began here, with the unlocking of this door.

We should all do everything we can to make sure that this does not stand and that the respect for the freedoms that have been so hard won in western democracy are not compromised. Do whatever you can. Do whatever it takes. But do something!

Mark

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
GUY FALGOUT:

Bush is only a puppet on strings being pulled by the sadistic neo-cons of his administration. The Democrats and Republicans are also to blame for letting this travestry to continue to fester. Impeachment of this president should be top priorty, not voting on the right to torture other human beings. Truly, a very sad week in the history of our “once” great country. I wonder if the people who allowed this to become law can really live with a clear concious? I cannot see how this is possible. This, my fellow Americans, is the beginning of the end. PEACE!!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Preston L. Winters:

For me, the brightest spot in this otherwise gloomy day is this forum, in which the overwhelming majority of respondents has expressed their sadness, outrage and disbelief concerning the actions of our government. With varying degrees of eloquence, almost everybody who has taken the time to vent here has at least given me hope that the systematic shredding of our Constitution by the Republican party (and a few syncophantic Democrats who fear that the majority of voters in their states or districts are indeed as gullible and ignorant as they suspect them to be) did not go entirely unnoticed. Thank you all, and please don’t forget to vote (while you still can).

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
Wilbert Smeets:

Hi all,

First of all let me say this: I am not American, but I know a lot ot you folks out there are ashamed to be one at the moment.

I am a human in the first place, Dutch second and Europian third. I can only tell you that mr. Bush has made Americans look so bad in the rest of the world since he became president. He lied to you, he lied to his slaves, correction, allies… And now he allows torture, without ever having to prove someone actually did something wrong. I feel sorry for you at this moment. And I feel sorry for the world. I hope your next presidents agenda is the agenda of humanity. We would all benefit. And as for as terrorisme goes… I am not a terrorist, but torture me 1 time, and I will become one. I wish you all the best.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
Charlie:

Isn’t it ironic that we’re having this conversation? Some of us are fighting for the rights of those whose only mission is to destroy the United States and all it stands for, including our model of a Constitution, using that very Constitution as the base for the arguments. The Constitution was not written to protect our enemies; it was written to protect the citizens of our country.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Jim-Dallas:

I think this Administration will still continue their current practices if the Bill does not pass. They will just try not to get caught again. If they do, they will claim it is a necessary evil for National Security which they are doing now. I have no trust of this Administration. Who is being held responsible for the failure to enforce the international laws or the Geneva Convention in this Administration to date? Why hasn’t our National Security Advisor been asked to step down? Have we lost complete control of the Government?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Linda Brown:

I am so saddened by what is happening in my country. I implore every American who believes in freedom and liberty to go to the polls in November and vote out anyone who is trampeling our Constitution. I am afraid my country is sliding into oblivion. It may be too late to undo this travesty. Please go and exercise your right to vote before it’s too late.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
Dave Bryan:

Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Elizabeth Hillmann:

Absolutely NOT.
It is shameful. I am a Veteran of WWII and am ashamed of the people who voted for this bill which is so immoral and only gives the president more dictatorial powers..

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
E. Prentis:

A sickening display by Bush and the Republicans of election year politicking.

I am more afraid of the Republican warmongering terrorists in Washington than anywhere else.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:46 pm
Manuel:

No it is not necessary. It’s a victory for the terrorist. They have won, the world is less free.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
Shyamal Ganguly:

There is no such thing as indefinite period for holding people on suspicion. Government can not hold ITS CITIZENS without trial except for a short period (may be 24 or 48 hours). Government can hold foreigners on suspicions indefintely, until their consulates get involved and use due process of International laws. Holding Al Queda members from Pakistan in Guantanamo Bay was Legal and necessary. These psychotic killers vowed for killing innocent people, just because they are Americans. Just think about it.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
M.Stratas:

The real test of courage is doing the right thing even in very difficult conditions. After 911, the Bush administration claims the world has changed and therefore, they can change the principles that have guided America for over 200 years. It is wrong and cowardly.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Gene Sperling:

I thought that this was settled a couple of hundred years ago?

Seriously though, I feel revulsed to be associated with these leaders so wounded and encased in their own petty fears.

When do we begin the dialogue on impeachment?

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
Jack Grogan:

Let’s end the stupid arguments and elect Democrats so that they can appoint the American Civil Liberties Union to manage homeland security and take over security of our border with Mexico.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Nancy Engelsberg:

The law that the Senate and House have just passed is a travesty. The USA which used to be a beacon of democracy for all peoples has descended to the level of the KGB-ensconced Soviet Union — or worse. This is not my country, this is not the USA I have always known. Mr. Torture — ah, no! not torture: redefine the terms so Mr.Torture can sleep at night. May he some day — not our military — be subjected to the methods he has sought to “legalize.” I guess our only hope is the Supreme Court — and the coming elections.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
Jim Ouellette:

Be careful what you say. You may find yourself in Guantamo Bay!

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
Rob Littell:

It’s a requiered tool insofar as Pres.Bush needs to do Rove’s political bidding.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
+lansford:

I imagine, that only in America, are people discussing fervently the behaviour of the Bush administration and their assault on your constitution. As one who admires America’s uniqueness in history, I also never doubted that America could proudly described itself as the world’s super terrorist ( South and Latin America, the Caribbean etc., and that for the past few decades.
Now in lock step with Israel and its inhuman policies in Palestine, there are now two bullies in the playground, so I have just decided not to purchase anything made in the U.S.A. or to purchase from any business owned or operated by a U.S. or Israeli interest. No, I am not racist or any such thing, but this is the way that I can protest effectively and peacefully against evil doers. I hope other will join me in doing so. Eventually, we will all realise that we inhabit one small shrinking planet and learn to get along with each other, irrespective of colour, gender, nationality, religion, etc.. One love , brother and sister.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
PJ Parkinson:

I have been around long enough to have seen many Republican administrations come and go. This is the old “law and order” dressed up in the new clothes of “anti-terrorism”. It continues to baffle me that some people in this country cannot see this for what it really is: the continued assault against our individual civil liberties. This just proves the lie in the continual drone from the right wing media that the Democrats have no new ideas, when in fact it is the Republicans that continue to trot out the same old ineffectual and repressive ideas.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Josh Rubin:

I will never again believe a US spokesperson who says “We are a nation of laws.”
And neither will our enemies.

posted on September 29th, 2006 at 6:37 pm