There's a question I've been toying with for a while. Which is to say that I ask myself the question, think, "Huh, that's really interesting, I wish someone would write a book about that" and then go on my merry way and don't examine it.

The question, like so many things in my intellectual life, is provoked by Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Since I don't carry this book around with me at all times (contrary to popular belief), I can't quote it exactly, but in it she wrote something which was worded differently but basically meant this:

What it ultimately means to be deprived of human rights is to have the events that befall you depend on what you are rather than what you do. Your opinions are irrelevant, your acts without consequence or effectiveness. Your life is determined by race, class, gender, nationality, etc. rather than by those things that you do--unless you commit a crime.

(The crime part is because those actions are already codified as criminal and there is a prescribed process and series of events that follow criminal acts. So by committing a crime you enter yourself into that system. That is the only action that one who has been deprived of their human rights and humanity can commit that is fully and properly connected to consequences.)

Now, I think this is a powerful definition because it gets at what human rights are really about: humanity. Being treated as an equal being. Not being generalized, stereotyped, discriminated against.

So here's the thing I've been thinking about. The people who have been running the country of late--the white, male, Christian Republicans, in the White House, the media, and the megachurches--are, by this definition,lacking in human rights. They do badly or are demonstrably incompetent, and yet they continue to rise in stature (William Kristol somehow got a job at the NYT despite being, well, wrong about everything ever) or suffer no consequences (President Bush, Michael "heckuva job" Brown, Scooter Libby, etc. etc. etc.). Their actions have no relation to their fates; rather, their fates are tied to their positions in life--being a certain kind of person born into a certain kind of family.

At the same time, can you really say they don't have their human rights? I mean, they're doing pretty well for themselves up there.

The question that follows is: Do they keep acting so egregiously badly, in the case of the government types, in some kind of weird effort to get their "normal being" status back by becoming criminals? Is it sort of the equivalent of a tantrum/cry for help, since they live in worlds of such profound unreality? Or is it less personal than that--more that every form of extremism inevitably oversteps itself, and is righted by the backlash?

I suspect that if I were to examine enough backgrounds, the applicability of the definition might break down--George Bush and, maybe, Bill Kristol, are the only ones here who were quite literally born into this situation--but it might be interesting to apply to monarchs of the past.

The larger question here is this: Is it possible for this particular human rights knife to cut both ways? If your actions have no consequence on your fate in a "positive" rather than negative way, are you still lacking your human rights? Do we care? Do you?

Okay, so according to a story that the NYT decided to bury on page 11 (because what we really need on the front page is a touching story about the harrowing links of death and violence between an Israeli and a Palestinian family--not saying it's not worthy material, but I think what I'm about to describe is a weensy bit more of an action item), the federal appeals court (fourth circuit) ruled 5-4 that the president can legally detain civilians in the U.S. as enemy combatants--indefinitely, without trial.

[That's military detention, by the way, not criminal or immigration-based. Someone should tell the government they can let go all the people they're holding for months and years for not having the right paperwork. Maybe that way fewer of them would die.]

From the NYT:

The decision was a victory for the Bush administration, which had maintained that a 2001 Congressional authorization to use military force after the Sept. 11 attacks granted the president the power to detain people living in the United States.

And a quote from one of the lawyers for the only person currently being detained in the U.S. as a military combatant:

"This decision means the president can pick up any person in the country — citizen or legal resident — and lock them up for years without the most basic safeguard in the Constitution, the right to a criminal trial,” Mr. Hafetz said.

However, it's apparently not that simple. The decision included seven different opinions, none of which constituted a majority. The VA appeals court is considered one of the most conservative in the nation, so this was surprising, but part of what makes this so complicated is that the man in question, one Ali al-Marri (a citizen of Qatar--I'm amazed they haven't been yelling about this) was here lawfully before being detained. The judges mainly differed on their criteria for whom the government could detain indefinitely:

1 opinion: members of organizations or nations against which Congress has authorized the use of force who also mean to harm people or property to further military goals.
1 opinion shared by four judges (minority decision): Indefinite detention by the executive is not lawful without a trial. Doesn't matter who you are, you get a criminal trial and then we figure out what to do with you.
1 opinion argued that if the government's accusations were true, al-Marri would be subject to detention, but that he had not received adequate process (others thought he had).

Things are currently very unclear as to what kind of precedent this case sets, but I suppose it's worth noting that every judge that wanted al-Marri still incarcerated was appointed by a Republican, and every judge in favor of his release was appointed by a Democrat.

Regardless of your opinion, elections certainly matter.


Side note: "al" in Arabic means "the." When it's part of a name, like for example "al-Asad," it forms a phrase ("al-Asad"="the lion"). You can't disconnect the two any more than you can disconnect Mc from Intosh--it doesn't mean the same thing in the original language and it's not the same name by any measure. (Or so my Arabic Lit professor taught us.)

So if the NYT could PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD figure that out, it would make me very happy. I don't want to hear them talking about "Mr. Marri" or "Mr. Bashir" when their names are al-Marri and al-Bashir. Thank you.