1. Suspension of legal process (internment etc.): The suspension of legal process generally occurs when a government has lost control of a situation and, in a desperate attempt to regain civil power, resorts to the suspension of normal judicial process. The “logic” is that by arresting everyone remotely connected, they are bound to get the real perpetrators. It’s an absurd and ineffective strategy, but it is common amongst desperate governments. Guantanamo provides an even more contemporary example of the manipulative folly of suspending due process of law.
Eleven years after the establishment of this illegal process and institution, the United States is still internationally, considered a pariah nation because of its use of kidnapping, torture and illegal detention without trial. Perhaps, more urgently important is the fact that the obvious breaches of the Geneva Conventions and America’s well documented war crimes have provided extraordinary ammunition and justification to every US enemy in the world. America has effectively shot itself in the foot by failing to respect basic human rights. The country is now in the gun-sights of numerous activist / terrorist groups on the planet, including its own “home grown” terrorists, which justify their actions against the US federal government because it is “out-of-control”. And indeed, the government of the USA is “out of control” in a moral sense. Its lack of moral high ground in war and government has dragged the nation into a violent, militaristic stance and isolated it from the mainstream of humanistic morality.
Here we begin to see the beginnings of the truth emerging about the Pentagon’s role in torture in the Iraq war. But note that much of this documentary information is NOT emerging in the USA but in other countries. The United States is still very much “in denial”: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/mar/06/us-petraeus-torture-iraq-video
and earlier…
and General Petraeus and his hypocritical lies on torture at the same time:
and again