Leon Trotsky wrote in 1932 that "The successes of fascism easily make people lose all perspective, lead them to forget the actual conditions which made the strengthening and the victory of fascism possible."
Well, ladies and gents, this is a success of fascism. It even drives me, a person who used to scoff at such remarks, to wonder whether this is just the good intentions of idiots or the cunning manipulation of future dictators.
If you missed the news, it was one week ago today that the Supreme Court blocked a lower court from opening the records of hearings of suspected terrorists. This means that you, the common person, cannot know what is happening in the cases of these people.
Sympathizers would say (and I have heard time and time again) that "if they deserved freedom, they wouldn't have attacked our country". Let me put this into perspective, okay?
Person A is detained under suspicion of terrorist acts. Popular media says that it's quite likely that A did commit terrorist acts. The question you need to ask yourself is, do you know A? Did you see A sneaking around DC with a pound of C4? Probably not. You most likely know all you know about A from the news. Can you be sure that A committed terrorist acts, then? No, you can't, and that's why we have trials to determine this kind of thing.
The courts were intended to have open hearings since about two and a quarter centuries ago. The reason for this is that the founding fathers, whose names have been evoked enough to make one sick, had wanted to prevent their country from falling into tyranny. The purpose of an open trial was so that the public eye could be watchful of the proceedings of the country, and say "now hold on" if something wasn't being done right.
Still not convinced? Let's say someone in power in the government has a problem with you tomorrow, and has you detained. Now, normally, if this happened without just cause, the justice system would follow procedure and you would be freed, and the man responsible for having you arrested would probably lose a lot of face, maybe his job, and maybe more for having injustly detained you. However, in this system, since the people can't see what happens, it is quite possible that this doesn't happen; in fact, the person detaining you can do practically whatever he wants with you, since it isn't under the scrutiny of the public eye. They might let you go, sure, and they also might beat you within an inch of your life daily without giving you a fair trial. They have the power to do that.
Do you have faith that they won't? Say "baa".
Now that everyone's on the same page, the reason the Supreme Court cited for staying the lower court's decision was that terrorists would be wise to how much the U.S. knows about them if they made the hearings open; to quote Theodore Olson, Bush's top lawyer, "terrorist organizations will have direct access to information about the government's ongoing investigation".
Holding a double standard, are we? If the police arrest a gang member, do they close the hearings to the public just so other gang members don't know what the police know? No, they can't do that. It would seem that as soon as anyone mentions terrorism, we all go shit-for-brains and tell the government that they can do whatever they want so long as we can drink our cafe lattes without being hit by a 747.
News flash: terrorists are people, no matter how skewed their motives are to our definition of normal. While I condemn the attack on 9/11 as much as the next guy, we must realize that these are real people. They're just as real as, say, the people running the country.
One more quote, this time from Aesop (a bit of paraphrasing), and then I'm going to leave you be:
A cattle dealer once drove some bulls to the slaughterhouse. And the butcher came night with his sharp knife.
"Let us close ranks and jack up this executioner on our horns," suggested one of the bulls.
"If you please, in what way is the butcher any worse than the dealer who drove us hither with his cudgel?" replied the bulls.
"But we shall be able to attend to the dealer as well afterwards!"
"Nothing doing," replied the bulls, firm in their principles. "The butcher saved us from the dealer."
And they refused to close ranks.
Moral: it is unwise to hand your lives over to someone to protect you from another person when the one you consign yourself to has just as much motive and ability to screw you over.
