Glenn Greenwald’s commentary on yesterday’s Supreme Court victory:
In a major rebuke to the Bush administration’s theories of presidential power — and in an equally stinging rebuke to the bipartisan political class which has supported the Bush detention policies — the U.S. Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 decision (.pdf), declared Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 unconstitutional. The Court struck down that section of the MCA because it purported to abolish the writ of habeas corpus — the means by which a detainee challenges his detention in a court — despite the fact that the Constitution permits suspension of that writ only “in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion.”
A radical foreign policy idea put forth by presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has drawn cheers of support from sources as varied as his campaign’s neo-conservative backers to liberal internationalists from the camp of his rival, Sen. Barack Obama. But the idea is not without some surprising detractors.
McCain’s “League of Democracies” would be a new international organisation whose membership is made up of democratic governments that meet certain minimal requirements.
The philosophical basis for the League is German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idea of “perpetual peace”, which argues that democratic governments are less likely to go to war — particularly with fellow democracies rather than autocratic regimes. But democratic nations may be at odds with non-democratic ones.
This is already well underway, according to neoconservative scholar and McCain adviser Robert Kagan, who sees a new “global competition” between democracies and autocracies.
Looks like the neocons are wanting another new pearl harbor:
Shocking excerpts of confidential recordings recently released under the Freedom of Information Act feature former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talking with top military analysts about how a flagging Neo-Con political agenda could be successfully restored with the aid of another terrorist attack on America.
The tape also includes a conversation where Rumsfeld and the military analysts agree on the possible necessity of installing a brutal dictator in Iraq to oversee U.S. interests.