This torture bill is a perfect example of why I’m a such fervent Jungian. I accept the inevitabilities of our dark sides, I don’t ever assume “it can’t happen here.” I’ve been observing human nature much too long for that.

And I’ve never supported legislation that, under the right set of circumstances, could be twisted to be used against me. It just seems like common sense.

And yet, it isn’t “common” sense at all.

As Eric Alterman pointed out recently, this is an ahistorical country. As a nation, we see no historical context - much like a college freshman, we’re utterly incapable of grasping anything that hasn’t happened to us personally. We laugh at the idea of tyranny or a right-wing coup, because we’re so conditioned by old black-and-white movies to expect a specific set of cues: Curfews. Men with machine guns. Tanks in the streets.

We’re really stupid that way.

Any student of the theater knows that a gun on the table in the first act will go off by the end of the second, and any student of history knows tyrannical powers granted to a country’s leader will be used. It’s human nature, it’s inevitable.

Look at all the weasle words in this legislation. Look at it from the perspective of a regime that’s decided that mere criticism is “aiding the enemy.”

And then, tell me how you can sleep.

Glenn Greenwald:

Opponents of this bill have focused most of their attention — understandably and appropriately — on the way in which it authorizes the use of interrogation techniques which, as this excellent NYT Editorial put it, “normal people consider torture,” along with the power it vests in the President to detain indefinitely and with no charges all foreign nationals and even legal resident aliens within the U.S. But as Law Professors Marty Lederman and Bruce Ackerman - - each point out, many of the extraordinary powers vested in the President by this bill also apply to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil.

As Ackerman put it: “The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.” Similarly, Lederman explains: “this [subsection (iI) of the definition of "unlawful enemy combatant"] means that if the Pentagon says you’re an unlawful enemy combatant — using whatever criteria they wish — then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to “hostilities” at all.”

This last point means that even if there were a habeas corpus right inserted back into the legislation (which is unlikely at this point anyway), it wouldn’t matter much, if at all, because the law would authorize your detention simply based on the DoD’s decree that you are an enemy combatant, regardless of whether it was accurate or not. This is basically the legalization of the Jose Padilla treatment — empowering the President to throw people into black holes with little or no recourse, based solely on his say-so.

There really is no other way to put it. Issues of torture to the side (a grotesque qualification, I know), we are legalizing tyranny in the United States. Period. Primary responsibility for this fact lies with the authoritarian Bush administration and its sickeningly submissive loyalists in Congress. That is true enough. But there is no point in trying to obscure that fact that it’s happening with the cowardly collusion of the Senate Democratic leadership, which quite likely could have stopped this travesty via filibuster if it chose to.

I fully understand, but ultimately disagree with, Hunter’s well-argued position that this bill constitutes merely another step on a path we’ve long been on, rather than a fundamental and wholly new level of tyranny. Or, as Hunter put it: “So this is a merely another slide down the Devil’s gullet, not a hard swallow.” But even with the extreme range of abuses the Bush presidency has brought, this is undeniably something different, and worse, by level, not merely degree.

There is a profound and fundamental difference between an Executive engaging in shadowy acts of lawlessness and abuse of power, and having the American people, through their Congress, endorse, embrace and legalize that behavior out in the open, with barely a peep of real protest. Our laws reflect our values and beliefs. And our laws are about to explicitly codify one of the most dangerous and defining powers of tyranny — one of the very powers this country was founded in order to prevent.