Land of Shadows

Is the BananaRepublic on its way out? I don't mean just the elected officials like the President With His Head Up His Ass and his Attack Dog in their lame-duck days. I mean their modus operandi or, if you like, their institutional style and substance.

Not to stretch the point, but "there is no crueller tyranny than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice." That's Montesquieu, via Clive James, speaking about the Roman emperor Tiberius. "Montesquieu was impressed by the efficiency Tiberius brought to the business of perverting the judicial system," James writes.

Jess Bravin, reporting in today's Wall Street Journal, gives me hope our boys are less efficient. He writes that the "effort to create a separate legal system for the war on terrorism may be foundering."

The latest sign, Bravin notes, was Monday's federal appeals court ruling that it's illegal to hold a U.S. resident arrested in this country in indefinite military detention without charging him with a crime simply because the president has declared him an enemy combatant. He writes:

Skeptical civilian and military courts, using language both sweeping and technical, have blocked the government's contention that to fight terrorism the president can invoke military powers that supersede traditional legal protections. None of these setbacks has resulted in the immediate release of prisoners, but they raise questions about the long-term viability of the legal regime.

Bravin is not alone in his analysis. Others -- law professor Jonathan Turley on "Countdown," for one -- have commented pretty much likewise, which is heartening. And yet ... it staggers the mind to realize what we've come to.

Postscript: A reader, "Balakirev," comments:

Not when you factor in a benignly complicit press -- owned and operated as conservative/neo-con radical organs, or taking refuge in bland reporting without investigation. This is the tool that has allowed Bush and his cronies to get away with aggravated assault on the Constitution, a smoke screen of Hiltons and Brittanys, haircuts and madrasses, that keep the public from any chance of developing a sense of outrage.
(June 14, 2007 at 11:42am AM EDT)

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

PPS: Point taken.

Meantime WSJ's editorial page has already attacked its own reporter's analysis. Yesterday (June 14) its lead editorial dissed Bravin without naming him. Here's the first graf:

On Monday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that al Qaeda agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri can't be detained as an enemy combatant. The press corps is reporting -- no, shouting, cheering, doing somersaults -- that this is further proof that Bush Administration detainee policies are doomed to legal oblivion.

The headline "Al Qaeda's American Harbor" and the subhed "A bad decision likely to be overturned" summarized the theme.

If that wasn't aggressive enough, the op-ed page led with a piece, headlined "Terrorist Safe Haven," by a former associate White House counsel to Bush that took the same line as the editorial. The pull quote: "Thanks to the Fourth Circuit, al Qaeda operatives can breathe easy once they hit our shores."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

June 13, 2007 4:56 PM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
more picks

Sites to See

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on June 13, 2007 4:56 PM.

The Albanian Idol of the BananaRepublic was the previous entry in this blog.

Just Ducky is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.