Author Archive for thomas-crocker
Hamdan, Human Rights, and John Edwards
posted by Thomas Crocker
Last week Salim Ahmed Hamdan was sentenced to 66 months in prison pursuant to his conviction for providing “material support for terrorism” before a military tribunal. His material support was comprised of driving Osama bin Laden around and serving as one of his body guards. Hamdan’s relatively short sentence, which will include time already served in detention at Guantanamo, will advance the issue of whether detainees who have served their punishment after conviction in the Administration’s military tribunals will be released, or will continue to be held as enemy combatants. Hamdan will likely complete his five and a half year sentence before a new administration is inaugurated. If President Bush does not release him immediately on completion of his sentence, that will leave the next administration with one more complicated problem to resolve. The NY Times reports that a Pentagon spokesperson “would not speculate’ on whether Hamdan would be released after completing his sentence.
Would it not violate Due Process to hold Hamdan indefinitely after completing his sentence for a criminal conviction? Under the reasoning provided by the Supreme Court in Hamdi, perhaps not.
August 11, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Politics, Supreme Court
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Do We Need an “Arresting Afflatus”?
posted by Thomas Crocker
First of all, I would like to thank Dan for inviting me to join the Concurring Opinions community this month.
In a recent conversation I was reminded of this article about post-cold war conservative defections which appeared in Lingua Franca (a now-defunct magazine of ideas in which Alan Sokal revealed his hoax). In it, William F. Buckley, Jr. is asked in an interview to imagine who he would be if he were graduating from college in 2000. “What kind of politics would this youthful Buckley embrace?” He responded: “I’d be a socialist . . . [a] Mike Harrington socialist. . . . I’d even say a communist.” One reason for this rather stunning admission is that once the market ideal is entrenched as the dominant way of thinking, not only does it become “boring” as Buckley says, but it is also totalizing. One of the primary objections to old-style communism is the way that individual lives got processed in the totalizing system for the good of the class, the state, or the inevitable unfolding of historical dialectics. But is the emphasis on the market any less totalizing? Is the all-knowing and ever powerful market any less “boring” from the standpoint of human freedom than its vanquished communist counterpart? Similarly, in the market system, individual lives are constrained for the good of market efficiency. One should not complain about lost jobs or tightened credit we are told, because these are necessary to achieve overall market efficiency. After all, the constant, unthinking refrain today is that the market will solve everything. For the hypothetical young Buckley, this is a problem.
August 6, 2008 at 10:48 am
Posted in: Politics
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