Clip: The Mukasey Precedent

This piece from Andrew Sullivan is so correct and well put that it was hard to reduce the excerpts....

Clip: The Mukasey Precedent:

The stakes in this fight therefore could not be higher: the vote on Mukasey is about the rule of law, the honor of the United States and the security of the West. Mukasey is by all accounts an honorable man. He must know that he is going to work for war criminals whose condition for his appointment is that he not prosecute them for their law-breaking. By acquiescing to this, Mukasey is acquiescing to the elevation of the president above the law. If he does that, he is no better than Gonzales, a man who never hesitated to give his political patrons whatever “legal” sanction they wanted for anything they wanted to do.

This is not some technical issue with respect to interrogation techniques. In my view, it is much more fundamental than that. Many seem to think that because these techniques are only used on terrorists, they are no threat to American liberty. What this complacent view doesn't grapple with is that these torture techniques can be used against any terror suspect; that such suspects are not subject to due process under president Bush's understanding of his powers; that such suspects can be captured within the United States; that they can be citizens; and that the war that justifies this extraordinary power is defined as permanent. That is why combining the power to detain without charge with the power to torture is an effective suspension of the rule of law and the Constitution. And such a suspension is astonishingly broad and open-ended.

That is why this has become a fight for the West's values against the moral relativists, legalistic parsers, and advocates of total executive power. The point is not a subjective judgment about the intentions of the torturers. It is not about whether Cheney and Bush can be trusted. It is about whether any individual can be trusted with such power. In a republic based on the rule of law, the intentions of the torturers - whether good or bad - are utterly irrelevant. In the West, we assume that the intentions of our rulers are likely to be evil. That's what distinguishes the Anglo-American tradition from those who trust individuals to govern them, rather than those who trust the law to allow us to govern ourselves. The point is that no person in the United States should ever have the power to detain and torture another person without due process. Once you make an exception for one man, the rule of law is over. The Decider may decide out of his own benevolence not to torture again. But he can still torture. And the knowledge that he can, and the knowledge that he was never stopped, and the knowledge that he was able to distort the plain meaning of the law to mean whatever he wants it to mean is a precedent that is staggeringly dangerous.

It would be easy to pretend that we haven't come to this pass. But we have. We have been incredibly naive about what Cheney wants and believes. His decades-long desire to turn the president of the United States into a protectorate, empowered to do anything to anyone, and restrained only by his own benevolence is a profound threat to the rule of law and the Constitution. He must be stopped - clearly, unequivocally. He is not the people's master. He is the people's servant. In America, no one is the master of anyone else. And if the Congress cannot stand up for that principle, then the dark days we have gone through are nothing compared to what's ahead.

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