Can We Twist the Nuts, or Just Squeeze Them?

One thing you can say for President Reagan is that when he made a treaty with a foreign power, he more or less stuck with it, how ever unpleasant the later consequences. Clearly the current administration isn't hamstrung by such traditionalist thinking. Whenever Mr. Bush doesn't understand something—which as you might imagine is somewhat frequently—he can always count on his good friend Mr. Ashcroft for interpretive assistance. Pesky foreign treaties like the Geneva Convention getting in your way when you want to torture someone? Don't worry, says Mr. Ashcroft, they "may be unconstitutional" when applied to the President.

Now let's think about this for a minute. The U.S. signs a treaty, the Senate ratifies it, and the world community expects (or at least, used to expect, until now) that the U.S. would abide by it. Now along comes Mr. Ashcroft to advise Mr. Bush—certainly no great Constitutional theorist himself—that such pesky restrictions couldn't possibly apply to the President. Silly rules just apply to the country, not to its chief executive! (Perhaps Mr. Ashcroft solicited his opinion from Ken Lay or Bernie Ebbers?) One imagines that this is just the sort of "above the law" thinking that Mr. Bush likes to hear.

Herewith a snippet from the Justice Department's rather chilling idea of what it is "permissible" for the President to authorize:

In the view expressed by the Justice Department memo, which differs from the view of the Army, physical torture "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." For a cruel or inhuman psychological technique to rise to the level of mental torture, the Justice Department argued, the psychological harm must last "months or even years."

The gist of this is that, short of, say, cutting into your lower abdominal cavity and ripping out a kidney, it's probably not impermissible torture.

Thank goodness this sort of thing only applies to the nasties and not to faithful Americans like you and me. But don't feel too left out. All that's necessary is for the President to find that you are an "enemy combatant," and you too can be dragged around on a leash by a skanky Appalachian chick while your best friend is forced to lick your balls in a humiliating (for at least one of you) fashion.

Ah, but you protest, surely there is some due process that would protect a U.S. citizen from such arbitrary treatment. It can't be as easy as the President and Justice Department just saying that you're an enemy combatant, can it? Surely they'll clear all this up at your hearing, right? Sorry, Jack—you don't get no stinking hearing. You just get to rot in jail with no lawyer until, if you're lucky, Mr. Bush et al. get voted out of office.