America's Nuremberg Laws: The End of the U.S. as a Civilized Nation

By Ted Rall
Created Oct 11 2006 - 8:46am

SEATTLE--Students of historical hysteria immediately saw 9/11 as America's
version of the Reichstag Fire. Both incidents were organic acts of terrorism
(contrary to popular misconception, the Nazis didn't set the 1933 fire)
seized upon by power-hungry government officials to justify the crushing of
political dissent and the rolling back of civil liberties. Hitler began
marching his people into the abyss immediately upon seizing power in 1933,
but Nazi Germany's fate as a rogue nation wasn't sealed until two years
later, in the late summer of 1935.

Before then there had been heinous violations of human rights. Nazi
authorities detained thousands of socialists and communists in concentration
camps (death camps weren't built until 1941). Many were tortured; some died
in custody. Stormtroopers enforced state-sanctioned boycotts of Jewish-owned
businesses. Brownshirts beat Jews in the streets as the police stood by and
watched. Ignoring Germany's treaty obligations, Hitler poured millions into
the armed forces and threatened to use them against Germany's neighbors. No
one could doubt that Germany was in the hands of militaristic right-wing
thugs.

Until 1935, however, the home of Goethe and Beethoven had not entirely
abandoned the universal values accepted by civilized states. True, top
German officials and street-level Nazi Party members were breaking all sorts
of laws, including constitutional protections against racial and religious
discrimination. That's precisely the point: the law endured. Pre-Nazi legal
infrastructure and laws, including the 1920s-era "Weimar"
Constitution--still the Western world's gold standard for protecting
individual rights and privileges--remained in force. Technically, anyway.

Had there been the political will, Hitler and his goons could have been
arrested and tried under German law. The German government was a lost cause,
but the German nation still had a (slim) chance. Until 1935.

That's when Germany officially codified the Nazis' uncivilized anti-Semitism
by passing the Nuremberg Laws. Jews were stripped of citizenship and banned
from marrying or dating non-Jews. The laws were a form of legalized
harassment, prohibiting Jews from displaying German flags or shopping in
stores at certain times. Turning Jews into legal pariahs paved the way for
the Holocaust. More immediately, the barbaric ipso facto policies of the
Nazi government had corrupted Germany's lofty and admirable system of legal
guarantees. Even though German law hadn't been of much help to Jews
before--well, there had been the occasional arrest and prosecution of a
brownshirt who had gone "too far"--now there was every reason for them to
succumb to hopelessness. Germany was no longer a civilized nation in the
clutches of gangsters. It had become a gangster nation.

Similarly, the recently passed Military Commissions Act removes the United
States from the ranks of civilized nations. It codifies racial and political
discrimination, legalizes kidnapping and torture of those the government
deems its political enemies, and eliminates habeas corpus--the ancient
precept that prevents the police from arresting and holding you without
cause--a basic protection common to all (other) modern legal systems, and
one that dates to the Magna Carta.

Between 2001 and 2006, George W. Bush worked tirelessly to eliminate
freedoms and liberties Americans have long taken for granted. The Bush
Administration's
CIA, mercenary and military state terrorists kidnapped thousands of innocent
people and held them at secret prisons around the world for months and years
at a time. These people were never charged with a crime. (There was good
reason for that. As the government itself admitted, fewer than ten had
actually done anything wrong.) Yet hundreds, maybe even thousands, were
tortured.

Under American law these despicable acts were illegal. They were, by
definition, un-American. Although it didn't help the dozens of Bush torture
victims who died from beatings and drowning, the pre-Bush American judicial
system worked. The Republican-controlled
U.S. Supreme Court handed down one decision after another ordering the White
House to give its "detainees" trials or let them go. For a brief, shining
moment, it looked like there was hope for the U.S. to find its way back to
the light.

Now, thanks to a gullible passel of Republican senators and an unhinged
leader who is banking that Americans are just as passive as the Germans of
the mid-1930s, we have our own Nuremberg Laws.

Under the terrifying terms of the radical new Military Commissions Act, Bush
can declare anyone--including you--an "unlawful enemy combatant," a term
that doesn't exist in U.S. or international law. All he has to do is sign a
piece of paper claiming that you "purposefully and materially supported
hostilities against the United States." The law's language is brilliantly
vague, allowing the president to imprison--for the rest of his or her
life--anyone, including a U.S. citizen, from someone who makes a
contribution to a group he disapproves of to a journalist who criticizes the
government.

Although Bush and his top officials ordered and endorsed torture, the courts
had found that it was illegal under U.S. law and treaty obligations. Now
torture is, for the first time, legal.

"Over all," reports The New York Times, "the legislation reallocates power
among the three branches of government, taking authority away from the
judiciary and handing it to the president." Bruce Ackerman, professor of law
and political science at Yale, notes that the MCA trashes the centuries-old
right of a prisoner to petition to the courts: "If Congress can strip courts
of jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial
independence is threatened."

How did we get here? Good Germans--and many of them were decent, moral
people--asked themselves the same thing. The answer is incrementalism, the
tendency of radical change to manifest itself in bits and pieces. People who
should have known better--journalists, Democrats, and Republicans who are
more loyal to their country than their party--allowed Bush and his
neofascist gangsters to hijack our republic and its values. They weren't as
bad as Bush. They just couldn't see the big picture.

Just as no single rollback led marked the transition from the Weimar
Republic to the Third Reich, no event is individually responsible for
America's shocking five-year transformation from beacon of freedom to
autocratic torture state. It wasn't just letting Bush get away with his 2000
coup d'