The Supreme Court in an important decision thursday ruled 5-3 that the Bush administration's use of "special courts," sanctioned by no one except themselves, to try prisoners held on terrorism charges at Guantánamo, violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which govern U.S. military courts, and the Geneva Convention. While anyone who supports elemental democratic and human rights should applaud the majority decision, drafted by Judge John Paul Stevens, a liberal Republican appointed at a time when such people existed by President Gerald Ford over 30 years ago, we all should be very vigilant to the present danger.
The Justice who replaces Stevens, rumored to be the next Judge to retire for reasons of age and health, will radically undermine the rights of the American people, the Constitution, and the nation's following international law if the right-wing Republicans are not defeated in the congressional elections this year and in the presidential elections in 2008.
The danger was most evident in the truculent minority decisions of two veteran ultra-rightists, Bush appointee Clarence Thomas and Reagan appointee Antonin Scalia. Thomas, who read his dissent, stated that the decision would "sorely hamper the president's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy." His rationale ignores that the term "war against terrorism" is used to confuse Americans about the differences between occupations of foreign territories and efforts to protect people from small groups of criminal conspirators.
Scalia, known for the sort of arrogance that would not sit well with judges were he not a Supreme Court Justice, stated in defense of Bush's self-serving claims that the special courts were necessary to fight terrorism, and argued that "it is not clear where the Court derives the authority – or the audacity – to contradict this determination."
What is Scalia talking about? Judicial review, which usually is used to defend wealth and power against rulings by the states, Congress, and the president upholding peoples rights, is in principle a defense of the law and the constitution against the sort of arbitrary power that is the foundation of tyranny and dictatorship.
The Bush administration's claim that it has this power, given to it by Congress in perpetuity as a kind of inheritance, makes dictatorship rather than tyranny the more accurate and precise term to apply to what it is trying to do. Tyranny can act in all kinds of direct and indirect ways over long periods of time, but dictatorship almost always operates through a "state of emergency," and martial law decrees rubberstamped by the existing authorities until the dictatorship is ousted one way or another.
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