Op-Ed Columnist – ROGER COHEN – A Command of the Law – NYTimes.com
But back to the law, which is what defines the United States, for it is a nation of laws. Or was until Bush, in the aftermath of 9/11, unfurled what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”
There is no need to rehearse here the whole sordid history of the Bush administration’s work on Vice President Dick Cheney’s “dark side:” the “enhanced” interrogation techniques in “black sites” outside the United States justified by invocation of a “new paradigm” that rendered the Geneva Conventions “quaint.”
When governments veer onto the dark side, language always goes murky. Direct speech makes dirty deeds too clear. A new paradigm sounds bland enough. What it meant was trashing habeas corpus.
The facts speak for themselves. This month, almost seven years after detainees began arriving at Guantánamo Bay on Jan. 11, 2002, a verdict was handed down in the first hearing on the government’s evidence for holding so-called unlawful enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.
Yes, this was the first hearing in a habeas corpus case, so long has the legal battle been to get to this point, and so stubborn has the administration been in seeking to keep Guantánamo detainees out of reach of civilian courts.
Glad to know that the new shift in American politics is trying to undo the injustice of the old regime.
