Habeas Corpus and Bush-bot Bulimics

Swallowing that would hurt, at least twice: Stevie Starr is an illusionist who performs under the stage name "The Regurgitator." Here he prepares to swallow a billiard ball that will (apparently) return via a reciprocal route, which would be the (slightly) less painful alternative.


Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, Scottish illusionist Stevie Starr has been made known to hundreds of thousands of people once tragically ignorant of his existence.


Mr. Starr performs under the stage name "The Regurgitator," which lacks a certain subtlety but displays the virtue of candor: Nobody properly advised of the act has moral standing to protest if offended by the spectacle of someone swallowing and then disgorging large, unpleasant objects -- or at least appearing to.


A typical performance by Mr. Starr (who claims to have refined his gift for selective, on-demand regurgitation as a survival skill at an orphanage) might feature the performer swallowing, and then retrieving from his stomach, a light bulb, nails and coins of various sizes, live fish, and a billiard ball. His routine is embellished by sundry creative sound effects and a winsome line of patter intended to sell the audience on an act that depends on exceptionally cunning sleight of hand, tongue, and embouchure.





It is important to recognize that Starr is not actually swallowing solid objects much too large to pass through his esophagus, nor does he have the ability to select items from his stomach and evacuate them at will: This is a trick. (If you can stand to, pause the video and play it back very slowly from 2:48-2:50 and you'll see that the billiard ball was stored inside his left cheek.)


Convincing as Starr's act may be, it is humanly impossible to swallow something so big, and regurgitate it on cue. Impossible, that is, to everyone other than devoted Republican apologists, who routinely ingest and throw up falsehoods so large and unpalatable that they would make Stevie Starr retch. And in their case, there's no illusion involved -- ample self-delusion, to be sure, but where Starr is harmlessly fooling people who paid to be fooled, Republican slogan-spewers are engaged in a deadly campaign of public deception -- beginning, in many cases, with themselves. I'll examine one heartrending case study of this condition below.


The most recent outbreak of mass ideological bulimia among Republican apologists was triggered by the June 12 Supreme Court decision Boumediene v. U.S. (.pdf), which held that Congress had exceeded its constitutional authority by destroying the habeas corpus guarantee through the Military Commissions Act.


Boumediene was the result of lawsuits filed on behalf of several men detained as "unlawful enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay. Counsel on their behalf contended that the Military Commissions Act (MCA) nullified the habeas corpus guarantee in a way not provided for in the "Suspension Clause"(Art. I, sec. 9, clause 2 of the Constitution); that provision allows Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in the event of invasion or insurrection. Those challenging the MCA were involved in neither invasion nor insurrection; Congress has neither declared war nor suspended habeas corpus in constitutionally legitimate fashion. But the MCA was designed to prevent individuals designated "unlawful enemy combatants" by presidential decree from mounting judicial challenges to their detention. That would be true whether or not the person thus designated is a U.S. citizen.


Except for the right to armed self-defense, there is no guarantee of individual liberty more elemental than the habeas corpus guarantee. If the Chief Executive -- be he or she a monarch, dictator, or president -- can summarily imprison anyone indefinitely without a trial or independent judicial review, then all of us are free only by the grace of our Dear Leader.



"The Framers viewed freedom from unlawful restraint as a fundamental precept of liberty, and they understood the writ of habeas corpus as a vital instrument to secure that freedom," wrote the majority in Boumediene. They likewise note that "protection for the privilege of habeas corpus was one of the few safeguards of liberty specified in a Constitution that, at the outset, had no Bill of Rights." In the debate over the MCA, Pennsylvania Senator Arlen "Magic Bullet" Specter described the MCA, with its provisions eviscerating that foundational due process guarantee, as a measure that would "set back basic rights by some 900 years." He then voted for the measure.


This must be understood: The MCA was not a counter-terrorism measure. It was an instrument of a claim to absolute executive powers that can only be called dictatorial. This was understood by its supporters in Washington, if not by those who dutifully devoured the relevant soundbites and slavishly spewed on command in defense of Bush's dictatorial ambitions.


The Bush Regime insists that 1) Gitmo, located on Cuba, is outside U.S. jurisdiction, and thus not subject to constitutional due process guarantees; and 2) that foreign "enemy combatants" are not protected by the U.S. Constitution. The Court dealt with the first objection by demonstrating that the Regime's denial of the Constitution's extra-territorial application was selective and self-serving, and that Gitmo -- a military base under essentially permanent lease to Washington, over which flies the federal flag -- is very much part of U.S. jurisdiction. In answering the second objection, the majority offered a detailed recap of the relevant history -- both in British and American law and practice -- to support its conclusion that "at common law a petitioner's status as an alien was not a categorical bar to habeas corpus relief."

Appeaser! Defeatist! Dhimmi! Thomas Jefferson pointed out that habeas corpus protects everyone within our government's claimed jurisdiction, citizen and alien alike.


Interesting and edifying though the majority's historical tour may have been (they drew comparisons, for instance, between Bush's claims and those of the tyrant Charles I, a theme explored in this space as well), they could have saved themselves some trouble by merely quoting that notorious appeaser and coddler of Islamic radicals, Thomas Jefferson.



It was Jefferson's understanding that the habeas corpus guarantee must apply to everyone wherever our government claims jurisdiction. Habeas corpus, wrote Jefferson in 1798 (during an earlier war frenzy during which another despotic president was tearing great, gaping holes in the Bill of Rights), "secures the rights of every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume." (Emphasis added.)



The issue was not the identity of the individual claiming the right, but rather the legitimacy of the government's act in depriving him of liberty. This is why Jefferson, in his first Inaugural Address, described habeas corpus as one of the "essential principles of our government."


The majority opinion in Boumediene repeatedly struck Jeffersonian notes in its demolition of the Bush Regime's claim that the president, in wartime or any time, has supreme, unqualified, and unaccountable power to imprison anyone at his discretion for as long as he sees fit. "The Framers' inherent distrust of governmental power was the driving force behind the constitutional plan that allocated powers among the independent branches," noted the majority decision. "This design serves not only to make Government accountable but also to secure individual liberty.... That the Framers considered the writ [of habeas corpus] a vital instrument for the protection of individual liberty is evident from the care taken to specify the limited grounds for its suspension...." (Like Jefferson, I would prefer that the Constitution not permit the writ to be suspended at any time.)


Anticipating objections that the Court was intruding on the exigent powers of a wartime presidency, and thereby undermining "national security," the majority offered an elegant reminder that true "security" in the American tradition begins with protecting the rights of the individual, rather than the supposed prerogatives of rulers: "Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to to separation of powers..... Within the Constitution's separation-of-powers structure, few exercises of judicial power are as legitimate or as necessary as the responsibility to hear challenges to the authority of the Executive to imprison a person." So spoke the five-member "liberal" majority of the High Court.


"Don't ask me about that point of law; Jack Bauer hasn't yet shown us the way": Antonin Scalia, reality-challenged voice of neo-fascist "conservatism" on the Supreme Court.


To which the designated spokesthug for the four-member "conservative" minority, Antonin Scalia, replied, his voice thick with ignorance and glazed with contempt: "Yeah, but there are, like, weirdly dressed guys with beards tryin' to kill us and stuff, and have you forgotten 9-11?" Or words to that effect. At one point in his career, Scalia was regarded as a serious jurist with a taste for writing caustic dissents.


In recent years, he has apparently decided to abandon the Federalist Papers and other original documents as a source of wisdom regarding constitutional questions, choosing instead to consult the wisdom of Jack Bauer regarding the legality of torture, and -- apparently -- Republican-aligned talk radio regarding the open-ended conflict with "Radical Islam."


As a result, Scalia didn't so much write his dissent as regurgitate it, thereby inviting second-generation agitprop bulimics (I'll turn to a suitable specimen of the same anon) to retail selected samples to those within their sphere of influence. While Chief Justice Roberts wrote a separate dissent, it was written at a level of diction beyond the reach of the intended audience, for whom the statement "Muslims suck!" is a masterpiece of the polemical art.


Pancake makeup artfully applied to the forehead conceals the "vacancy" sign: Sean Hannity, whose unfortunate lack of higher cerebral functions gives him the ironic blessing of being zombie-proof.*


Scalia's dissent, on the other hand, was written in a key that the Hannity set could understand. It is a work of pugnacious sophistry, replete with rallying cries to the dead-ender Bu'uhists who still gather in their Mega-Church madrassas to feast on fear of the "Islamo-Fascists" and marinate in their untutored hatred of those who supposedly live for the sole purpose of hating us "for our freedom" -- while the government purportedly protecting us from the Mohammedan hordes destroys what remains of our liberties and prosperity.


"Today, for the first time in our Nation's history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war," lied Scalia at the beginning of his dissent.



Every element of that statement is a conscious falsehood: The decision "confers" no right, but recognizes one long guaranteed by Anglo-Saxon law; those affected by the decision include civilians who have never taken up arms against the United States; and the base at Gitmo is as much United States territory as any embassy abroad.



Not content to leave wretched enough alone, Scalia emitted another pre-digested outburst that indicates his clerks have been researching his legal opinions by reading Republican-created chain e-mails (go here for a representative sample): "America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Daran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen.... On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil...."



It goes on like this for some time, sentence after sentence of sententious dicta intended to pre-empt rather than provoke critical thinking. (In reciting the history above, for example, Scalia could have usefully asked why Marines were stationed in Lebanon in 1983, or run the clock back to disastrous U.S. interventions in the Arab world beginning in the 1950s, were he possessed of a molecule of intellectual honesty.)



When he finally gets around to quoting "authorities," one of his first citations is to a brief co-written by John C. Yoo and William J. Haynes III, two of the chief architects of the Bush Regime's torture policies. After countless paragraphs of adolescent trash-talking and tendentious history, Scalia concludes with another ready-for-Hannity harangue.


After lamenting that the decision will allegedly tie the hands of "our military commanders" on the battlefield, Scalia darkly intones: "The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today." Over to you, second-hand bulimics. Tragically typical of that cohort is Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance, a man of short acquaintance for whom I have no small amount of respect.

Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance: He's just as kindly as this picture would suggest.


In his organization's newsletter, Mr. Fischer -- who in this case was actually a third-hand bulimic, passing along twice-regurgitated soundbites by way of the demented and dishonest Hugh Hewitt -- literally picks up right where Scalia's gorge-casting left off. He refers to the Boumediene decision as an "incomprehensible" ruling "giving constitutional rights to terrorists who have never set foot on U.S. soil"; he recaps a handful of selected soundbites from Scalia and Roberts without so much as citing a syllable from the majority decision, which he apparently didn't deign to read.



In fact, Fischer displays no symptoms of first-hand familiarity with either the majority opinion, the concurring opinion, or the dissents; all he needs to "know" about the matter is what was pre-chewed on his behalf, and then shoved down his eager gullet, by apologists a little higher on the GOP's propaganda food chain.


Mr. Fischer, who yields to nobody in his concern over the distant and diffuse threat of "Islamo-Fascism," offers an unqualified endorsement of the real, immediate, and tangible practice of the all-American variety by way of brazen, dictatorial presidential lawlessness: "The ruling of the majority in this case has no constitutional, legal, rational, ethical or historical legitimacy and could and should properly be ignored by the Commander in Chief."



Once again, let this be understood: What Fischer is endorsing here is the notion that the president is, quite literally, our Living Constitution -- an individual whose word, will, and whim is law, not subject to checks and balances or the limits of any written charter of government. This is, in a precise and unmistakable sense, fascism.














Not surprisingly, this appears to be the course the Bush Junta will follow; they will proceed with the military "trials" at Gitmo -- which have been denounced as "show trials" in the totalitarian tradition by Col. Morris Davis, the man once assigned to serve as chief prosecutor therein -- and then simply ignore the decision for the rest of term. Their transparent hope is that Bush the Bloody will be succeeded by John "War Without End" McCain, who denounced the Court's decision and would appoint judges determined to kill the Great Writ for good.



That outcome is much to be desired, insists Fischer, because to do otherwise would be to set back "the rule of law beyond my lifetime and perhaps forever."


By "rule of law," Mr. Fischer apparently means the unaccountable, illimitable rule of the "Commander-in-Chief" -- at least this particular one, whose relationship to Mr. Fischer is roughly that of Imam to disciple. And in this Mr. Fischer is, once again, heartbreakingly representative of millions of genuinely decent Christian people who dutifully swallow any excuse for demolishing constitutional restraints on presidential power as long as the "right" politician is the immediate beneficiary. For such misguided souls, only the prospect of such powers falling into the "wrong" hands can trigger the long-dormant gag reflex.

__

*This diagnosis and observation comes courtesy of William Wallace Grigg, age 10.



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Dum spiro, pugno!

Talk Radio Bulimia and Fox News Reflux: A Case Study

Fox "News": Fair...


We wouldn't be where we presently find ourselves -- mired in a pointless foreign war, looking down the barrel of undisguised executive despotism, and teetering on the precipice of national insolvency -- were it not for the capacity of Americans to believe passionately in things that are patently untrue.

... and balanced.

I refer to a specific form of dogmatic credulity, the kind displayed by those who accept as truth -- or at least a suitable substitute -- practically anything that is said by a political official or apologist, as long as the figure in question is "on the same team," however that "team" is defined. In the Bush Era the most common manifestation of this mind-set takes the form of "Talk Radio Bulimia" or "Fox News Reflux"; those who suffer from such afflictions earnestly regurgitate the pre-chewed soundbites fed to them by the media organs of the Bush Regime, convinced that by doing so they are imparting genuine wisdom and insight.


Most who suffer from those afflictions -- and I say this in utter sincerity -- are good and decent people. They are not depraved or consciously dishonest. They simply don't understand the extent to which they have surrendered control over their opinions to paid professionals in the art of manipulation.


The people I'm describing have had their synapses scrambled through prolonged exposure to high-potency indoctrination of the sort depicted here:






An otherwise estimable fellow who suffers an acute form of the disorder I describe sent me a long and detailed letter in response to a recent essay. In the interest of promoting public understanding of this condition, I'll reproduce his salient points and briefly comment about them.


"[F]rom my perspective, we are where we should be in Iraq. It is unfortunate that we are in the first decade of a war that will most likely last, at varying rates of intensity[,] for the next 50 years or so. It is an ideological conflict that no one on the Left seems to grasp completely. Fortunately the conservative heart of the average American seems to grasp [it] as if by second-nature."


Conservatives understand, "as if by second-nature," that neither liberty nor civilization can survive wars that last for generations. Nobody has made this point more forcefully -- arguing from exactly opposing points of view -- than James Madison and Karl Marx.


Warned Madison in 1795: "Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. . . . [There is also an] inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and . . . degeneracy of manners and of morals. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."


Writing in 1851 to his disciples, Marx made exactly the same point, celebrating what Madison had lamented and preaching the revolutionary virtue of generational war: "You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change existing conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power."


If this open-ended war against an undefined enemy lasts for fifty years, what remains at its end won't be recognizable to anyone -- conservative, liberal, libertarian or of whatever political conviction -- who understands and appreciates the principles of our Founding generation. This is a point frequently made by the only authentic conservative in the 2008 presidential race, Rep. Ron Paul. And if the intention is to fight a war to destroy all radical Muslims, or to convert them to the Civil Religion of modern democracy, simple demographics and economics demonstrate that we'll lose -- particularly if our rulers make the Iraq war and occupation the model for that campaign.


The Iraq war resulted in the removal of an admittedly hideous dictator who ran a relatively secular regime, and his replacement with a bloody, tyrannical, Shi'ite-dominated government defined by a constitution that enshrines Sharia law as Iraq's ruling ideology. That's "where we are in Iraq": We have tens of thousands of American troops fighting, killing, and dying on behalf of a Koranic despotism.


"The military strategy in Iraq is quite clear and clever.... First, use Iraq as a magnet for the most maniacally-minded terror lovers in the Middle East.... The second part of the Iraq strategy is to put this magnet exactly where the radical Muslims can get to it.... The third part is to protect America by putting the magnet as far from American soil as possible, i.e. Iraq."


This familiar trope, that Iraq is the "flypaper" intended to trap and destroy the world's Jihadi population, is based on what I call the "fallacy of finitude" -- that the world's population of radical Muslims is a static quantity, and that when a Jihadi is killed in Iraq, that population contracts irreversibly.


My correspondent clearly is hostage to that fallacy, insisting that occupation forces in Iraq "are killing 250 Muslims in Iraq for every American or British soldier [who dies]" and that this is having an impact on "the minds of 10,000 or 100,000 more intelligent Muslims."


It is indisputable that the occupation is having a measurable impact on the minds of Muslim people: As the Bush administration has been forced to admit, the war is actually expanding the population of current and potential Jihadis, while giving those that make the journey to Iraq valuable on-the-job combat training.


The logic of occupation dictates that it is the occupiers, not the guerrillas, who are trapped like flies on flypaper, and that occupation degrades occupation forces while distilling a hardened and very efficient military force out of the armed opposition. It takes a peculiar type of military genius to ignore this amply demonstrated fact of history. Lamentably, our politicized general staff has just the right skill set for that challenge.


Furthermore, the Bush junta now informs us that after more than four years of bloodshed, frequently turned "corners" in Iraq, and the creation of an immense and invasive Homeland Security apparatus at home, the threat to the United States today is at least as acute as it was in the Summer of 2001. In fact, the general heading Northern Command (which covers the continental United States) has said that new al-Qeada cells are forming here right now. If this is true, we will soon be fighting "them" both here and "there." (See the salient points in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate here.)


Of course, my correspondent invokes the inscrutable historic insight of the Great Visionary in the White House, insisting that we won't fully understand the elegant wisdom of his strategy "until it is all over and we are explaining to our great grand-kids how the West defeated radical Islamic terrorists." If we simply have childlike faith in the Dear Leader, our victory is assured; the sacrifices will be vindicated, and the present perplexities and contradictions will all be reconciled.


"The fact that Bill Maher and Michael Moore among thousands of others can say what they say without censorship, punishment or worse is testimony to the fact that the Bush/Cheney regime, as you call it, [is] not about infringing the rights of the average American.... [D]o you know of anyone who has suffered materially or physically from the [so-called PATRIOT] Act other than the intended terrorists or terrorist wannabes[?]"


This is also a familiar thought-stopper: As long as we are free to complain, we have nothing to complain about. In fact, summary suppression of dissent is becoming quite common under the Bush Regime.


Matthew Rothschild, author of the documented study linked above, offers the following account of the consequences awaiting those who exercise the right to petition for redress of grievances in contemporary America:


"A man walked up to Dick Cheney, calmly told him he thought his Iraq policy was reprehensible, and walked away. A few minutes later he was arrested by the Secret Service, in front of his 8-year-old son, for `assault.' When he asked what would happen to his child, the Secret Service said, `He can be sent to Child Services.' Luckily, the boy found his mother and was safe. But the citizen who practiced his free speech spent a few hours in jail before he was released."


Even if such things weren't happening, genuine conservatives are inclined to reject that view in favor of Madison's admonition that we "take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties" -- whether it affects us personally or not.



After all, most of the onerous and obnoxious impositions that inspired the drive for American independence had been repealed by the time the war began in 1775. The problem was that the British Parliament explicitly reserved to itself the supposed right to impose such measures on the colonists whenever it seemed appropriate to do so. The American Patriots fought a war for independence not because they were living under unalloyed tyranny, but because their rulers displayed an undisguised intention to impose tyranny.


The same is true of the regime that rules us today. And the PATRIOT (sic) Act is merely part of the architecture of domestic tyranny.


As I've pointed out elsewhere, it wasn't until long after the War for Independence began that King George III suspended habeas corpus for those deemed "unlawful combatants"; Hitler likewise suspended the Great Writ (or the German version of the same) shortly after he came to power. In both cases, the clear intent was to deny due process to those targeted as enemies of the regime.


To the Bushling's abolition of habeas corpus we must add last week's executive decree permitting the expropriation of those designated enemies of the "stabilization" and "reconstruction" of Iraq. Mention must also be made of the adoption of Nazi/Soviet-style torture methods, clothed in exactly the same euphemism coined by the Gestapo ("enhanced interrogation techniques"), which include exactly the same practices condemned by Washington when used by Russian security forces against those deemed "terrorists" or seditionists.


And it's significant that my correspondent, like so many others suffering from Talk Radio Bulimia or Fox News Reflux, assume that anyone seized by the federal government on suspicion of terrorist activities is ipso facto a "terrorist" or "terrorist wannabe." The proper designation, of course, is "suspect."


But then, the whole point of the "war on terror" is that we're all "suspects," and thus subject to the unceasing scrutiny of the State -- through its electronic surveillance capabilities and its growing army of paid informants. And the Regime's official position is that it is not necessary to prove that an American citizen is connected to a specific plot in order to convict him of terrorism.


If one's privacy is violated by a voyeur, the victim need not demonstrate that he or she was "materially or physically" harmed in order for a criminal prosecution to ensue. The same principle obtains when we're discussing illegal scrutiny of our private affairs by government; in fact, the threshold of offense where government actions are concerned must be lower, given the State's unique capacity to inflict death and mayhem on innocent people.


"While my family and I are fully-involved in helping America survive this new cold war, you will be free to blog and do whatever perversions you deem necessary to express your freedoms that we've earned for our family and yours as well, as a by-product."


Given the fact that the U.S. and post-Soviet Russia are quickly mutating into largely interchangeable authoritarian kleptocracies, I'm not willing to stipulate that we actually survived the last Cold War, but let's set that issue aside for the nonce.


The point made in the self-exalting comment above was made in reference to the fact that my correspondent recently saw a daughter graduate from boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. On the strength of this fact -- namely, that he has offered a child to kill and die on behalf of the State, the eternal enemy of freedom and decency-- this fellow asserts a proprietary claim on freedom, while condescending, at least for now, to grant that gift to those of us who are not similarly inclined to feed their children into the maw of the War Machine.


I recently set out some of the reasons why I think that our rulers will soon demand a blood-for-debt swap: Through universal conscription, our children would be used as living collateral for continued financing of Washington's imperial pretensions.


That earlier essay outlined why and how the ruling class would carry out that design. The comment above illustrates the attitudes on the part of at least a segment of the population that make such an abhorrent arrangement a vivid possibility.


Please be sure to visit The Right Source and the Liberty Minute archive.

Confronting the Latter-Day Reich: When Insubordination is a Moral Duty

This was a man: Helmuth Hubner was executed on October 27, 1942, at the age of 16, by the Hitler regime. His "crime" -- for which he was excommunicated from the Mormon Church -- was circulating anti-Reich leaflets with the help of two young friends.

One of the noblest moral examples I was taught as youngster was that of an insubordinate officer in the Missouri Militia.

Principled insubordination: Alexander William "Will" Doniphan, seen in this primitive portrait, refused to carry out the execution of a civilian convicted of being an "unlawful enemy combatant" by a military tribunal in Missouri.

Alexander William Doniphan served under Maj. Gen. Samuel D. Lucas during Missouri's “Mormon War” of 1838. The conflict was a grace note (perhaps “graceless” note would be a better description) to decades of bloodshed. (By the end of the War Between the States," "Missouri" was a proverb alluding to the bestial violence of unrestricted guerrilla warfare.) The Missouri civil war grew out of an irreconcilable cultural dissonance between the Mormon settlers – who arrived in Jackson County in 1831 and announced that God had given them the land to build “Zion” -- and the state's established settlers.

(The most comprehensive, even-handed, and nuanced treatment of this conflict, in my view, is Stephen LeSeur's book The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri.)

By 1838, following numerous incidents of mob violence and persecution, some Mormon leaders organized a covert force commonly called the “Danites,” an oath-bound proto-terrorist group intended to plunder the church's enemies and intimidate its internal dissenters. This followed a July 4 oration (.pdf) by Sidney Rigdon, the Mormon Church's second-in-command, in which he spoke of a “war of extermination” between the Mormons and their enemies (including internal dissenters).

Over the next several months the conflict waxed bloody, with the Mormons getting the worst of it -- particularly in the abominable mass murder committed at Haun's Mill. That atrocity followed the Mormon attack on Missouri militiamen at Crooked River, which prompted Governor Lilburn Boggs to issue an executive order designating the Mormon population en toto as (in effect) unlawful enemy combatants to be “exterminated or driven from the state.”

After the massacre at Haun's Mill, which demonstrated that literal extermination of the Mormons was an acute possibility, Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith and his top associates were forced to surrender to the state militia at the town of Far West. They were arrested, run through a burlesque of a trial under Maj. Gen Gen. Lucas, and sentenced to be shot at dawn.

Lucas issued a written order to Colonel Doniphan commanding him to carry out the execution:

"Sir: You will take Joseph Smith and the other prisoners into the public square at Far West, and shoot them at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning."

Doniphan, to his eternal credit, refused the order and more or less gave Lucas anatomically explicit instructions regarding its proper disposal.

"It is cold-blooded murder,” Doniphan wrote to Lucas. “I will not obey your order. My brigade shall march for Liberty [Missouri] tomorrow morning, at 8 o'clock; and if you execute these men, I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God!"

Consider how this situation – additional relevant details of which I'll share – appears today, in the sixth year of an open-ended “war on terrorism”:

Joseph Smith, as the civilian leader of an armed insurgency, had been arrested and tried by a military commission in the midst of a literal war. His closest aide had threatened to “exterminate” those who didn't belong to his sect; his movement included an oath-bound, violent secret society, some members of which had killed state militiamen. And defectors from Smith's movement had testified, under oath, that Smith had promised “he would yet tread down his enemies, and walk over their dead bodies; and if he was not let alone, he would be a second Mohammed to this generation, and that he would make it one gore of blood from the Rocky mountains to the Atlantic ocean; that, like Mohammed, [his] motto in treating for peace was `the [Koran] or the Sword.'”

Alexander Doniphan, by contemporary conservative sensibilities, would have to be considered a traitor for insisting that the sectarian extremist named Joseph Smith was entitled to due process of law, rather than being summarily executed after a perfunctory trial before a military commission.

As a youngster raised in a Mormon home, I was taught to revere Doniphan as a man of principle – not just because he had saved Joseph Smith's life (or at least deferred his death for nearly six years), but because he defended the rule of law at considerable risk to himself. I hold that view now as an adult who has left Mormonism and – much more importantly – come to trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation.

My opinion of Doniphan has been shared by others outside the Mormon faith, among them the producers of the television serial based on Profiles in Courage, adapted from the book of the same title ghost-written for John F. Kennedy by Theodore Sorenson.

I have no reason to doubt that Doniphan's story was well known to Jay Bybee, Timothy C. Flanigan, and Kyle Sampson – all of whom are Mormon attorneys who served in key positions under George W. Bush, and all of whom played critical roles in the creation of a Leader State in which the rule of law is subordinate to the will of The Decider.

Jay Bybee, as I've pointed out elsewhere, signed the notorious 2002 torture brief commonly called the “Yoo Memorandum” after its chief author, John C. Yoo – proponent of totalitarian presidential power and defender of the president's supposed right to order the sexual mutilation of innocent children ( children as innocent as those murdered and mutilated at Haun's Mill, Mr. Bybee). After putting his imprimatur on a memo claiming broad discretionary power on the part of the president, and his designated agents, to commit acts of torture and even homicide, Bybee was rewarded with a post as a federal appellate judge.

Timothy E. Flanigan, who served both Bushes, was one of the Republican litigators deployed to Florida just hours after the Bush-Gore deadlock was announced in November 2000. Appointed as a deputy to Alberto Gonzalez when the latter was Chief White House Counsel, Flanigan was reportedly the first to propose the creation of “military commissions” for accused terrorists (military commissions like the one that ordered Joseph Smith's execution, Mr. Flanigan).

“Military commissions, [Flanigan] thought, would give the government wide latitude to hold, interrogate, and prosecute the sort of suspects who might be silenced by lawyers in criminal courts,” reported the New York Times on October 24, 2004. More importantly: “[The commissions] would put the control over prosecutions squarely in the hands of the president. To act pre-emptively against al-Qaeda, the authorities would need information that defense lawyers and due-process rules would discourage suspects from giving up. Flanigan framed the choice starkly: `Are we going to go with a system that is really guaranteed to prevent us from getting information in every case or are we going to go another route?'”

In defiance of his oath to uphold the Constitution – which, as a Mormon, he was taught was a divinely inspired document – Flanigan helped the Bush regime find “another route,” albeit one well-trod by its predecessors in Moscow, Baghdad, and Berlin.

(Flanigan, incidentally, would likely be Alberto Gonzalez's deputy AG today were it not for his connections to Jack Abramoff.)

A bespectacled young man of unexceptional stature, Kyle Sampson is saddled with an ironic surname. But his unprepossessing appearance belies his ambition and cynicism he revealed by facilitating the White House scheme to purge from the ranks of federal prosecutors those US Attorneys deemed inadequately loyal to The Decider and insufficiently submissive to his will. This plan would exploit a provision in the updated version of the so-called Patriot Act permitting the Attorney General to replace US Attorneys without Senate approval.

Prior to his resignation two days ago, Sampson was chief of staff for Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. Last December 7, as recently revealed e-mails document, Sampson composed a “Plan for Replacing Certain United States Attorneys,” which instructed Justice Department officials in how to evaluate prosecutors and how to justify the firing of those deemed unsatisfactory.

The criteria outlined by Sampson (or by Bush and Gonzalez by way of Sampson) included a positive answer to the question of whether a given prosecutor had “exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general.” That “loyalty,” it is now clear, would be displayed by using prosecutorial power in the service of Republican partisan interests by pursuing politically useful investigations of Democratic politicians (or by refraining from pursuing Republicans – the supposed offense that led to the termination of Carol C. Lam).

In a section entitled “Prepare to Withstand Political Upheaval,” Sampson provided talking points to placate elected representatives and others who would be angered by the summary and unjust termination of the federal prosecutors.

As Paul Craig Roberts and others have pointed out, federal prosecutors have become a besetting plague to our nation. Had the Bush White House implemented its original plan and fired the entire lot of them, our nation would be better off – provided that they were not replaced. But the objective was to make the entire prosecutor corp an instrument of The Decider's will and a partisan asset of the Republican Party – and Sampson eagerly abetted that criminal undertaking.

Bybee, Flanigan, and Sampson each had opportunities to emulate Alexander Doniphan's admirable example: They could have refused to participate in the Bush Regime's assault on the rule of law, due process, and separation of powers; they could have acted as whistleblowers; they should have been true to their constitutional oath.

Because the leader they served was destroying the rule of law, insubordination was a moral duty. Instead, they consecrated their time and talents to the building up of the Leader State and the establishment of a latter-day Reich.

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