NYT/Anthony Lewis: A President Beyond the Law

The question tears at all of us, regardless of party or ideology: How could American men and women treat Iraqi prisoners with such cruelty — and laugh at their humiliation? We are told that there was a failure of military leadership. Officers in the field were lax. Pentagon officials didn't care. So the worst in human nature was allowed to flourish.

But something much more profound underlies this terrible episode. It is a culture of low regard for the law, of respecting the law only when it is convenient.

Again and again, over these last years, President Bush has made clear his view that law must bend to what he regards as necessity. National security as he defines it trumps our commitments to international law. The Constitution must yield to novel infringements on American freedom.

One clear example is the treatment of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Third Geneva Convention requires that any dispute about a prisoner's status be decided by a "competent tribunal." American forces provided many such tribunals for prisoners taken in the Persian Gulf war in 1991. But Mr. Bush has refused to comply with the Geneva Convention. He decided that all the Guantánamo prisoners were "unlawful combatants" — that is, not regular soldiers but spies, terrorists or the like.

(snip)

Instead of a country committed to law, the United States is now seen as a country that proclaims high legal ideals and then says that they should apply to all others but not to itself. That view has been worsened by the Bush administration's determination that Americans not be subject to the new International Criminal Court, which is supposed to punish genocide and war crimes.

(snip)

There was a stunning moment in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address when he said that more than 3,000 suspected terrorists "have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/opinion/07LEWI.html?ex=1084507200&en=314e9f1ecfb57f33&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

When Karla Faye Tucker said she had found religion, had turned her life around and felt she could make a difference to other inmates if her sentence were commuted to life.

We aren't supposed to judge Dubya by his behavior before he found religion, but he sure judged her. He mocked her. She was pleading for a chance to redeem herself and he made fun of her as he told her she was still going to be executed.

This is his example of how prisoners should be treated.

Bush supposedly turned his life around before he became Governor of Texas. He was a "Christian" when he treated her execution as a big joke.

I do not know how any thinking person could vote for this man.

My take on the whole Carla Faye Tucker thing is:

I didn't understand what the hoopla was when that case was in the news. She was convicted and sentenced to death for a horrible crime. While in prison, she had reformed, found God and had been doing something positive for the other inmates. (Probably preaching.)

I think she was appealing from one "born again" to another, hoping that their common "reform" would make him more sympathetic to her appeal to commute her sentence from death to life in prison where she could continue to help other prisoners.

It didn't work that way. He didn't apply to her the same rules we are supposed to apply to him. If he had, she would have gotten much more than her request for life, she would have gotten freedom as well.

He needs to be held to his own standard for her and he needs to be held accountable for his actions before he "found God." He can be forgiven (if that is what you want), but first he has to own up to his actions and ask to be forgiven. This will never happen because he can't admit to ever doing anything wrong.

"Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself."


tell that to the kool aid drinkers

Gideon's Trumpet, the definitive history of Clarence Earl Gideon's landmark Supreme Court case about his right to legal counsel . . . someone to be listened to, imo . . .

snip>

In all these matters, there is a pervasive attitude: that to follow the law is to be weak in the face of terrorism. But commitment to law is not a weakness. It has been the great strength of the United States from the beginning. Our leaders depart from that commitment at their peril, and ours, for a reason that Justice Louis D. Brandeis memorably expressed 75 years ago.

"Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher," he wrote. "For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself."