Imagine a leading American judge going to a foreign country and advocating secret trials for terrorists subjects, and spying on the Muslims communities in America and Canada. You don't have to imagine. As this story courtesy of Truthout makes clear, that is precisely what Richard Posner fo the 7h Circuit just did in Australia.
Below the break I will offer a bit of the piece, specifically what Posner said. I will then offer a very few thoughts of my own.
The article, originally published in the Australian, leads as follows:
A TOP-RANKING US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being "hog-tied" by the US constitution.
Posner's words apparently shocked the assemblied Australian jurists, who were going to make an award to the lawyer of Autralian David Hicks, the man who was released to Australia on conditions that prevent him from talking about his being abused or his rights having been violated, until after the current administration is officially over - this was done as a favor to PM Howard who was having some trouble over the Hicks issue.
There are a number of direct quotes from Posner, but nothing direct on the lead issue about secret trials. The brief selection below will give the tenor of the man's attitude.
"Are there terrorist plots that are at a formative stage among the large US Muslim community of two to three million people? In the 600,000 Canadian Muslim population, are there people planning attacks on the US?
"What we have to do is discover the extent of the terrorist threat to the US. There is a danger, and it demands a rethinking of some of our conventional views on the limits of national security measures.
"We should think of surveillance as preventative, not punitive. We should think of controls that have nothing to do with warrants or traditional criminal justice to prevent abuses."
The article describes Posner as someone considered liberal, which was news to me.
I had trouble deciding how to title this. I threw this diary together to make people aware of Posner's horrific remarks. This displays a mindset that has far too much in common with things like the Bybee memo, the Military Commissions Act, and so on.
We have in the recent opinions of SCOTUS begun to see how the courts can e used to dismantle much of the progress made in the US in the last century. The number of judges lower down whose judicial leanings may be even scarier than Posner may indicate how far things have deteriorated.
The idea that a leading jurist could opine in this fashion while overseas scares the hell out of me.
We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis already. It will not help if there are judges who will abandon our constitutional principles for economic, political or ideological reasons.
And I wonder - by the time my students report back in August, will we still have a democracy about which I can teach them?
I don't feel particularly like my normal ending of "peace."