I can’t decide whether this article is tinfoil-hat territory or not, but if it isn’t, it’s something to be worried about. I don’t follow the more detailed parts of the legal argument, but the basic point is that the US government has effectively suspended habeus corpus – or put more simply, they can throw whoever they want into jail for as long as they want with none of the normal judicial oversight.
I keep telling myself that it couldn’t happen here, but then I read stories about Tony Blair deciding that actually, this whole innocent-until-proven-guilty business is making it a bit difficult to bang up the people we want to bang up. Add to that a Home Secretary that appears to be getting his orders direct from the Daily Mail, and I begin to wonder.
I vaguely remember a long, long time ago someone describing the Tories as the “natural party of government”, as if they were blessed with some kind of universal mandate to hold office, and losing the election to Labour was just the uppity proles getting above their station. But don’t worry ourselves too much, chaps, we’ll soon be back in once the natural order of things reasserts itself.
I’m beginning to wonder if that’s the way of things in the US at the moment. Add to this the fact that there’s an awful lot of people getting rich on the back of the Bush administration, and it seems like there’s a lot of people in influential places (login details here) with a lot to lose by a change of administration.
