The Inquisition and the Wizard

Dear Mr. President,

“The war crimes tribunal for the Guantanamo prisoner [Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri] charged in the attack on the USS Cole is going into a closed session dealing with a subject so secret even the defendant can’t hear it.” (SF Chronicle, June 14, p. A2) For reasons of "national security," Col. James Pohl ruled yesterday. The Inquisition has returned and 14^th century religious law now rules American jurisprudence in the 21^st century. It’s not only in Guantanamo; it’s also in the Ft. Meade trial of Bradley Manning where he is not permitted to testify to his motives, where witnesses who knew and supervised him will not be permitted to testify on his behalf and where a witness for the prosecution—a member of Seal Team 6—will remain hidden and unidentified. Kangaroo courts and Show Trials have replaced the rule of law and the Constitution in Obama’s Amerika, a land where secrecy reigns and injustice prevails, where freedom of speech is becoming an anachronism, the security state knows everything about everybody and there is “nothing to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong,” one of the most chilling phrases from George Orwell’s 1984. Also yesterday, the Supreme Court “issued a regulation barring most demonstrations in front of the courthouse” (NY Times, p. A14) and Senator Feinstein’s reaction to the revelations of all-encompassing spying by the NSA is to tighten security even more so low level contractors like Edward Snowden and military analysts like Bradley Manning can’t download classified information from the government’s massive databases onto flash drives and share that information with reporters and WikiLeakers. (But with 1.3 million people having Top Secret clearance, it’s hard to tighten security and still share information among the sprawling intelligence/military network.) It’s a dystopian vision of Obama’s Amerika, but it’s the one our Nobel Peace Prize winning Democratic president brought into being. You have embraced every policy Bush and his neocons created, and continued, expanded and morphed them in ways the neocons never dreamed. You are not Bush Lite but Bush Heavy. You are not the lesser evil but the more effective evil. You are not, as so many argue, a helpless prisoner of a Republican Congress, for your own party is complicit in your endless wars against man and the planet. You are the wizard behind the curtain, the issuer of proclamations, a sideshow for the rich while the evil you do goes on behind closed doors and out of sight.