the ceremony of innocence, drowned

I spent much of the end of last week in a state of bleakness, set off partly by the ignominious passage of HR 6166 by the U.S. Congress. All around the internet there were little requiems: for habeus corpus ad subjiciendum, for the belief that the law, if not the practice, of this country rejects torture, for the nation of laws we still had faith in. The best do, in fact, have a great deal of conviction--but they are too small in number, and too few are listening to them now.

The New York Times saw this coming, and for once actually produced an editorial worthy of a "newspaper of record":

Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.

[....]

Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.

They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

I have little to add, save that if you have the right to vote in this country I hope you plan on exercising it in November. And that you will do what you can to help tear down this law, with work or writing or money or strident argument. I'm lucky that my job has affords some small opportunities to do so, but I'll be making spare time to do more. So can you.

Oh, and this is probably the only time you will ever hear me say this, but I agree with Niall Ferguson.