Blue skies thinking. posted by Richard Seymour

John Yoo, the Bush administration's Schmittian academic behind the construction of legal justifications for Guantanamo and torture at Abu Ghraib, has bemoaned the decision by the Supreme Court on Hamdan v Rumsfeld in the following terms:

What the court is doing is attempting to suppress creative thinking ... The court has just declared that it's going to be very intrusive in the war on terror. They're saying, 'We're going to treat this more like the way we supervise the criminal justice system.'

It is as if Yoo was a rising young star in the corporate firmament who, having only now presented a flipboard presentation replete with phrases like 'pushing the envelope', 'reinventing the wheel', 'thinking outside the box', 'unlocking resources' and 'synergy', has to watch resentfully as it is dissed by some of the crustier old-timers.

What is even more curious is the spectacle of newspaper editors and so on glorifying the decision of the Supreme Court, which only upheld a fairly conservative interpretation of the law of the land, in these blushing terms:

The Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision and the reaction to it form a neat encapsulation of the beauty, simplicity and hazards of the independence and the form of government those 18th century lawyers, gentlemen, innkeepers and farmers gave us.

On this apparently auspicious day for Americans, what is being celebrated is the "beauty" of a self-rectifying system, one which - sure - is flawed, can lead to mistakes, but which is ultimately the best damned system in the world. Yeah - like hundreds of innocent people detained without trial and tortured by the US military are quietly thinking "well, fuck, the system works!" simply because they may now lodge a very tortuous appeal through lawyers with American courts.

Bush has already codified in law the resources that the state will need for future conduct of this kind: the Detainee Treatment Act - supported overwhelmingly by both Republicans and Democrats - simply denies the authority of any domestic court in this province. The Supreme Court's decision was able to overcome this only because the case was pending when that law was introduced. The new law allows 'interrogation' treatment that is actually classified - ten pages of new 'techniques' that are controversial enough to turn a previously public army manual on interrogation methods into a protected document.

The political establishment may have been alarmed by the Bush administration's haste, its dogged insistence on being brutally offensive to what it invariably calls 'American values', its ruthless disposal of opposition - but the consensus among American lawmakers is more reactionary and extreme than it has been for some time, and in an era where the global consequences are much greater than ever. Essentially, there is a great bipartisan middle finger raised to the rest of the world: fuck you, we will kidnap you, torture you and even kill you and take pictures and no one will do a thing about it, least of all you. Stock markets rallied at the news.