Legally above all laws?

Many national rulers have violated national and international laws during wars. Few have admitted doing so, and even fewer have apologized.

Yet no previous U.S. President has been so megalomaniacal as to claim he is legally above all laws.

That's the surreal, or "surlegal", doctrine revealed in secret memos by lawyers in the non-elected Bush Regime. For details, please see
report by Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt. [below]


Elevating Bush above all laws is the mirror image of another "surlegal" strategy -- lowering so-called "unlawful combatants" below all laws.

In Bush's view, such persons have no rights as supposed POWs, no rights as accused criminals, and no human rights of any kind. Therefore, if he refrains from torturing "unlawful" captives in "the black hole of Guantanamo", that's an act of mercy on his part.

Bush claims to model his presidency on the example of Ronald Reagan. But in practice, Bush imitates a fictional ruler --- Big Brother, who used eternal warfare to justify tyranny as mere martial law, which will end whenever the war ends.

At first, queers and progressives mistakenly laughed at Bush, seeing him as a mere buffoon. We didn't realize how forcefully and quickly he would move toward totalitarianism. Now queers, and all friends of freedom, must struggle to remove this neo-Stalinoid from the White House. The November election is an opportunity, unless he "postpones" it during a "state of emergency"....

Tortuga Bi LIBERTY,
San Francisco
8 June 2004
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SFGate:
Bush lawyers' '03 memo gave nod to torture
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/06/08/MNG0N72H2C1.DTL
---
Tuesday, June 8, 2004 (SF Chronicle)

Bush lawyers' '03 memo gave nod to torture

[by] Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt,
New York Times


Washington -- A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an
international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal anti-torture law
because he has the authority as commander in chief to approve any
technique needed to protect the nation's security.
The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons. One reason would be, the lawyers said, if military personnel believed they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful."
"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to
manage a military campaign," the lawyers wrote in the 56-page confidential memorandum, the prohibition against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his
commander-in-chief authority."
[et cetera ]
.........