Looking Back

Dahlia Litwick looks back at 2006 for Slate and compiles a "the 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006"-list. The numbers 3 -1:

3. Abuse of Jose Padilla
First, he was, according to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, "exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States." Then, he was planning to blow up apartments. Then he was just part of a vague terror conspiracy to commit jihad in Bosnia and Chechnya. Always, he was a U.S. citizen. After three and a half years, in which he was denied the most basic legal rights, it has now emerged that Padilla was either outright tortured or near-tortured. According to a recent motion, during Padilla’s years of almost complete isolation, he was treated by the U.S. government to sensory and sleep deprivation, extreme cold, stress positions, threats of execution, and drugging with truth serum. Experts say he is too mentally damaged to stand trial. The Bush administration supported his motion for a mental competency assessment, in hopes that will help prevent his torture claims from ever coming to trial, or, as Yale Law School’s inimitable Jack Balkin put it: "You can’t believe Padilla when he says we tortured him because he’s crazy from all the things we did to him."

2. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
This was the so-called compromise legislation that gave President Bush even more power than he initially had to detain and try so-called enemy combatants. He was generously handed the authority to define for himself the parameters of interrogation and torture and the responsibility to report upon it, since he’d been so good at that. What we allegedly did to Jose Padilla was once a dirty national secret. The MCA made it the law.

1. Hubris
Whenever the courts push back against the administration’s unsupportable constitutional ideas—ideas about "inherent powers" and a "unitary executive" or the silliness of the Geneva Conventions or the limitless sweep of presidential powers during wartime—the Bush response is to repeat the same chorus louder: Every detainee is the worst of the worst; every action taken is legal, necessary, and secret. No mistakes, no apologies. No nuance, no regrets. This legal and intellectual intractability can create the illusion that we are standing on the same constitutional ground we stood upon in 2001, even as that ground is sliding away under our feet.

In the war against terrorism, some seem to be willing to surrender civil liberties. If not from themselves, then from ‘the other’. This is a major mistake. I see the same thing happening here in the Netherlands, where my new ID card has a chip in it. A chip by which the government is able to know where I am. Sure, they tell us that it can only by looked at by a few people and only in special circumstances, but the potential for abuse is there. No combine this with a (relatively) new law which says that we (the Dutch) have to be able to identify at all times… and a scary picture emerges.

Can I add that to the list?

We have to fight terrorism: every country in the West must be aware of terrorism and has to fight it as good and effectively as possible, but always within the limits of civil liberties. There is no need to abandon those civil liberties.

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