July 09, 2006

Gitmo and the Search for a "Lawless" Zone--like Outer Space

Link: The Fight Over Presidential Power - Newsweek Politics - MSNBC.com.

David Bowker vividly remembers the first time he heard the phrase. A lawyer in the State Department, Bowker was part of a Bush administration "working group" assembled in the panicked aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Its task: figuring out what rights captured foreign fighters and terror suspects were entitled to while in U.S. custody. White House hard-liners, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his uncompromising lawyer, David Addington, made it clear that there was only one acceptable answer. One day, Bowker recalls, a colleague explained the goal: to "find the legal equivalent of outer space"—a "lawless" universe. As Bowker understood it, the idea was to create a system where detainees would have no legal rights and U.S courts would have no power to intervene.

The Administration's fear of the rule of law is palpable--and brings us much discredit.

Luckily, outer space is not without international law, or we could expect the Space Shuttle to be deployed to solve the Administration's Guantanamo predicament.

Posted by Anupam Chander on July 9, 2006 at 04:30 PM in Globalization | Permalink