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Skriven 2006-01-06 14:05:08 av BOB SAKOWSKI (1:123/140)
Ärende: Above the law
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What Year Is This Anyway?
Rollback to 1214 AD
By Nick Turse

What might happen to an "often cruel and treacherous" national leader who
"ignored and contravened the traditional" norms at home and waged
"expensive wars abroad [that] were unsuccessful"?

On June 15, 1215, just such a leader arrived at Runnymede, England and
--under pressure from rebellious barons angered by his ruinous foreign wars
and the fact that "to finance them he had charged excessively for royal
justice, sold church offices, levied heavy aids," and appointed "advisers
from outside the baronial ranks"-- placed his seal on the Magna Carta. The
document, which was finalized on June 19th, primarily guaranteed church
rights and baronial privileges, while barring the king from exploiting
feudal custom. While it may have been of limited importance to King John or
his rebel nobles (as one scholar notes, "It was doomed to failure. Magna
Carta lasted less than three months"), the document had a lasting impact on
the rest of us, providing the very basis for the Anglo-American legal
tradition.

Over the years, the Magna Carta came to be interpreted as a document that
forbade taxation without representation and guaranteed trial by jury. In
the U.S., it is seen as providing a basis for the 5th Amendment to the Bill
of Rights that holds: "No person shall… be deprived of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law…" (The Magna Carta states: "No Freeman
shall be taken, or imprisoned… but by lawful Judgment of his Peers, or by
the Law of the Land.") While many progressive and democratic understandings
of the document, popular from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century,
have now been dismissed as misinterpretations, the Magna Carta has one
absolutely significant feature. As the website of the U.S. National
Archives and Records Administration (NARA) notes, "When King John confirmed
Magna Carta with his seal, he was acknowledging the now firmly embedded
concept that no man -- not even the king -- is above the law."

Fast forward 561 years. Says NARA, "In 1776, the Founding Fathers searched
for a historical precedent for asserting their rightful liberties from King
George III and the English Parliament." They found it in the Magna Carta.
Fast forward another 230 years. Their war for independence long since over,
Britain's former rebel colonies begin the new year of 2006 on a precipice.
During the previous 365 days, they saw, among other shocking displays,
their Vice President publicly campaign against Senator John McCain's
anti-torture amendment and, as such, essentially offer his support for
illegal torture. Then, following a failed attempt by the President to quash
a New York Times story on the National Security Agency (which the paper had
already suppressed for a year), the people also found out that their
President had ordered unlawful spying on American citizens.

After the latter scandal became public, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
(who, in 2002 as White House counsel, penned a memo advising the President
on how to circumvent the 1996 War Crimes Act) claimed that George Bush had
the right to violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which
makes it illegal to spy on U.S. citizens in the United States without prior
or retroactive -- within 72 hours-- court approval) due to his "inherent
authority as commander in chief under the Constitution." This, despite the
fact that in 2004 Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for
the court, insisted, "A state of war is not a blank check for the president
when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens." Bush himself then
came out swinging, claiming that he had no need for the courts since he
acted as his own agency of oversight, and his acts were legal because he
"swore to uphold the laws."

The President's threatened veto of the McCain anti-torture amendment, the
Vice-President's pro-torture campaign, the President's illegal spying,
which he proudly claimed he had re-authorized many times over, his attempt
to squelch the free press (which Thomas Jefferson once called "the only
security of all" and about which he stated, "Were it left to me to decide
whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers
without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the
latter"), and his own and the Attorney General's defense of all of the
above, are not only the latest examples of the administration's quest to
shred the U.S. Constitution and expand already vast presidential powers
past anything conceivably envisioned by the founders of the United States,
but also a direct attempt to overturn nearly 800 years of Anglo-American
legal precedent. In other words, the administration has launched nothing
short of a bid to invalidate the guiding precepts of what the U.S.
government acknowledges to be the Ur document that inspired and provided
precedent for America's founders to issue their Declaration of Independence
in 1776: the Magna Carta. 
[snip]

The rest of the article is at:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/indexprint.mhtml?pid=47195
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