Reply #19: Treaty law, schmeaty law. [View All]

[sofa king]

That, supposedly, is the key to the whole decision, that the treaty obligations of the Geneva convention compel the U.S. to follow those agreements with regard to al Qaeda.

However, I have spent a good part of my adult life watching the United States abrogate its treaty obligations as a matter of policy with respect to American Indians. Those treaties that were agreed to in perpetuity by the United States with American Indian tribes are supposedly just as strong, valid, and airtight today as the Geneva convention is, and until recently the Supreme Court occasionally reminded the United States of it. But the fact of the matter is that nobody gives a damn, and not giving a damn is all the justification the United States needs to keep doing whatever it wishes.

No, wait. People do give a damn. As long as there's a nickel to fleece from the Indians, there's someone working long paralegal hours finding ways to erode the sovereignty of Indian tribes, and to facilitate that end they've steadily been rubbing away at treaty law itself, day after day, for centuries. Now there are dozens of ways to rip off Indians and keep their stolen property, even though there are treaties which explicitly say you can't do that and never could.

The simplest way to avoid the Supreme Court's decision is to ignore them, and I fully expect that's what the White House will do. Should the Supreme Court get angry about that, the White House will get Congress to intervene in this one particular case, to ensure another five years of breathing room. Then this one case will be held forth as a precedent by the Attorney General in a secret and legally weightless opinion, and the AG in turn will pull every bureaucratic and legal trick in the book to prevent the case from ever returning to the Supreme Court.

Mark my words: those same rules will be applied to this case.

Somewhere along the line, after the last of the Guantanamo prisoners have died of old age--in prison--the argument will be put forth that there is nobody left alive who suffered damages, and it would be unfair to punish the United States now for something the United States did way back when, and that will be the justification for doing it again the next time.

All that assumes that the Constitutional United States survives the next eighteen months, which I doubt. Most of you don't realize how far down the tubes we've already gone.