| |  Not Infinite Justice & Absolute Freedom, but Sufficient Justice & Real Freedom.
Jonathan is correct to see that I do indeed make the distinction between natural rights which all men have, whether they are born under a dictatorship or in a cave, and political rights, which they must act to protect by establishing and maintaining for themselves a proper political state. Once done, the individual gives up his own unfettered natural right of individual self-defense (vigilantism, vendetta, shoot on sight) and submits (with proper caveats and limits) to the political protections of the army and police, the courts, and so on.
 All political states, being finite entities with finite natures and powers, have finite jurisdictions, and the rights they protect are not unlimited in spatial or temporal scope. A state is a finite entity which can and should only be expected to make certain finite guarantees, rather than trying to establish eternal and universal justice. All laws have their jurisdictions in space - once you are in Singapore, don't expect not to get caned for vandalism. All laws have their temporal limits. Don't cry rape 20 years after the fact and expect protection.
If two nations have a treaty establishing the treatment of each other's citizens, that treaty gives the citizens of those countries further guarantees. But contrariwise, the State Department posts travel advisories specifically because it knows that it cannot guarantee the safety of every American everywhere at every time, such as in Lebanon during the Hezbollah War. Of course, Americans who foolishly cavorted there with or among our enemies did scream bloody murder, and our government, lest the Democrats join in a-wailing, foolishly rescued them, making them wait hours - hours mind you! - for poor accommodation in un-air-conditioned cargo holds - the horrors, the horrors! - to get passage out of that land.
I am neither an anarchist nor an absolutist. Both schools make the fallacious argument that because they can come up with an argument - "But Rand said you shouldn't be cutting my throat, Mr. Akbar, gurgle, gurgle" - that they have instantiated something. But political rights can only be established within finite limitations, only at some real cost, and not by mere assertion, whim, or fantasy. Words and arguments alone instantiate nothing. Only effort, war, vigilance and - yes - compromise within a political realm instantiate actual justice and freedom. Not infinite justice and absolute freedom, but sufficient contextual justice and real political freedom.
During war, using powers that have been established by Congress, it is proper for our government to take such actions as monitoring, through overseas conduits, communications with suspected terrorists and enemies, even if the people calling them happen to be calling from the United States. This information could not be used properly in domestic civil or criminal proceedings against citizens for non-war related matters. Even when it is used, it is still subject both to Judicial and Congressional review and oversight, as it should be. The Congress is not ignorant of the NSA program, it established the NSA. The Federal Courts, even when they have been denied jurisdiction under the Constitution and by the Congress, over the disposition of the Guantanamo detainees, have had no problem lording it over the administration, a true abuse of the Court's power which no one in the media cares to bring to our attention, and about which, like the fact that we have indeed found WMD’s in Iraq, the Administration has curiously chosen to remain silent, rather than to protest vigorously.
 Crying wolf over unsubstantiated allegations of abuse and potential abuse makes it all the more difficult to be taken seriously when one has real claims with actual hard facts backing them up to present. (Abu Ghraib is not a counterexample to my arguments either, but a proof of them, since when real concrete abuses are found they are addressed.) The Pinochet example was not meant to advocate a police state within the U.S. It was meant to show that in that case, there were real concrete victims with real names, while in the current argument, no one has named any actual person whose domestic civil rights have been abrogated. We have just heard abstract floating accusations. If someone is a rights violator, then there must be some specific individual whose rights have been violated. One cannot (except, of course, for RICO & Antitrust) simply be called a "criminal" without any specific crime being adduced. But in the current situation we have all sorts of accusations being made about "crimes we don't even yet know to have occurred."
 All I want is a few specific unredressed civil rights violations, such as the Waco & Ruby Ridge raids, the kidnapping of Elian Gonzales by the ATF, the illegal possession by the Clintons of the FBI dossiers of over 700 Republicans, the wiretapping and surveillance of MLK by the Kennedys & J. Edgar Hoover, or any other such concrete cases. Otherwise, allegations that a cabal of Neo-Cons is planning a putsch might make an interesting short story for the New Yorker, but are not claims which rise beyond the arbitrary and thus unanswerable.
Ted Keer, 26 October, 2006, NYC
(Edited by Ted Keer
on 10/26, 7:53pm)
(Edited by Ted Keer
on 10/26, 10:07pm)
|
|
