Health of the Republic: Down 3% to 12%

Calling Orwell…. Calling George Orwell… Or maybe Kafka is a better target. US military prosecutors have asked for — and now have been granted — a blanket order preventing the defense counsel of a Gitmo detainee from discussing the identity of any prosecution witness with anyone, the defendant included. The defense argues (correctly!) that this contrary to typical process in American courts, not to mention an affront to the values embodied in the Constitution. The prosecution argues that there is absolutely no attempt to hide the operation of the trial from public scrutiny.

This would be more convincing if the prosecution hadn’t made that argument via a series of emails explicitly meant, themselves, to be secret.

Secret trials. Secret witnesses. Collusion between judge and prosecutor to achieve a result result politically useful for the present party. Prisoners whisked off to a legal limbo far removed from the usual apparatus of justice. I would have sworn that the Unites States had beaten the USSR in the Cold War. Now it turns out we just stole their methods. Yay, democracy!