"Imperative Security Internee": the new class of people without rights

[muriel_volestrangler]

via a British blog, Unspeak, about the use of language in politics:

The Cato paper, by Timothy Lynch, criticizes the language of “Homeland Security”, “national security”, “enemy combatant” and so on, yet - very oddly - it uncritically adopts the vocabulary of the “war on terror” as an apt description of what is going on. “War on terror” is the Unspeak elephant in the room. Still, some of Lynch’s observations are astute, and I did enjoy learning about a new species of person called an “Imperative Security Internee”, apparently a newly made-up category of enemy within, to whom the government will do anything it likes until the Supreme Court explicitly rules that it can’t.

It seems in general to be a prevalent attitude in the US Administration that novelty defeats law. Simply dreaming up something new on the spot, like a category of prisoner or a method of torture, renders old laws that do not mention the new thing obsolete, and gives the government carte blanche until legislators explicitly criminalize it. As Lynch aptly asks:

Should the Supreme Court rule that the Bill of Rights applies to “imperative security internees,” what is to stop the government from inventing another label for its prisoners?

I think the answer to that is “nothing”.

http://unspeak.net/imperative-security-internee/

A bit about how the phrase is used:

Last year, Cyrus Kar, an American in Iraq making a documentary film about the Persian King Cyrus the Great, was detained for 50 days there by U.S. forces without charges while his family sued to have him released. The government, unable to classify Kar as an enemy combatant, held him as "an imperative security internee."

Timothy Lynch, the director of the conservative Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice, cites the Kar case in his report, Doublespeak and the War on Terrorism.

An imperative security internee?

"That designation apparently means that until the Supreme Court rules that this new category of person retains rights as well, the government will do whatever it wants," Lynch wrote. "Should the Supreme Court rule that the Bill of Rights applies to 'imperative security internees,' what is to stop the government from inventing another label for its prisoners?"

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/shared/news/stories/2006/09/911_CHANGES_0911_COX.html

[Solly Mack]

1. and you just know there are classes of torture to go along with

the classes of detainees

Waterboarding for this one
ripping nails off for this one
rape for this one



Ain't America great?

[acmejack]

2. Spirit of the law & all that sort of thing.

The founders would be so proud.

[teryang]

3. Creating categories of persons without rights

...is a distinguishing feature of developing totalitarianism.