|
if evidence that lead to arrest was gathered illegally, then the process should stop.
what is hilarious---and i mean that---in the conservative posts above is that they assume the law is drawn to the guilty and that due process is a luxury.
a totally indefenable argument that here, as usual, comes all wrapped up in a nice steaming bon bon we call state of emergency.
it is characteristic of authoritarian regimes to use a state of emergency to suspend civil liberties. among civil liberties, none is more basic that the right to due process.
once again, then: how is it in conservativeland that the state is irrational when it intervenes to regulate economic activity but inerring when it comes to exercizing repression?
if you are cavalier with due process, you must assume that when it comes to exercizing its monopoly on "legitimate violence" is a special type of activity, that the state somehow looses its bureacratic character when violence is concerned.
when i find it possible to take conservative politics seriously, i usually am able to gather that the basis for much of their politics is a variant of liberatarianism.
but this acquiescence to removing limitations of the coercive power of the state flies in the face of all that.
the arguments that attempt to dissolve this newest revelation about bushworld hold no water logically--the premises from which they depart are arbitrary (inevitably rooted above in a structured paranoia, a feature that appears fundamental to any support granted this farce of an administration and its various repressive actions).
this paranoia is the reverse of a kind of aesthetiziation of state violence.
it appears they kinda like it.
maybe its the theater. abstract violence visited upon other people is a sign of Action. Action is an end in itself, so long as it is a republican administration that is Acting.
or maybe this affection for state violence is rooted in the assumption that the victims of such actions---illegal surveillance, arrest without warrant, illegal detention without the right to counsel, a policy of torture rationalized in the name of the "war on terror" and endless detention without trial--would only happen to someone else.
so it is all just hunky dory.
maybe this is linked to assumptions about skin color. it is hard to say.
on the other hand, i expect that if any of the folk from the right above were themselves arrested under the suspicion of being a "terrorist" that they would be among the first to scream about the importance of due process.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|