Katrina and the Constitution: The Rules Have Changed

Katrina and the Constitution: the Rules Have Changed

September 9th, 2005

Brian Williams, writing for MSNBC: “While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won’t be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.”

Williams may not know it, but New Orleans is “separate from the United States.” It is now a testing ground for the sort of incremental military dictatorship our elitist rulers have in mind for us. In the new New Orleans, parts of the Bill of Rights were hacked off over the last week—first the Fourth Amendment (cops and National Guard kicking in doors) and then the Second Amendment (same bunch confiscating guns) and, as Williams reveals, finally the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, here in Old America, where the Constitution is supposedly inviolable, the Sixth Amendment was shot down today: “A federal appeals court today sided with the Bush administration and reversed a judge’s order that the government either charge or free ‘dirty bomb’ suspect Jose Padilla,” the Associated Press reports. “The three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the president has the authority to detain a U.S. citizen closely associated with al-Qaida,” even if there is no evidence Padilla was “associated” with al-CIA-duh (or if the phantom organization even exists as advertised) and was in fact arrested for entering the wrong search criteria in Google (apparently it is illegal to search for the phrase “dirty bomb” on the internet). The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, according to Padilla’s lawyer, Andrew Patel, means “that the president conceivably could sign a piece of paper when he has hearsay information that somebody has done something he doesn’t like and send them to jail—without a hearing (or) a trial.”

Bush has a track record of arresting people who disagree with him. In April, 1999, not long before he managed to get the Supreme Court to appoint him to the presidency, Bush had “peaceful, non-disruptive environmental protesters” arrested outside the Texas governor’s mansion. “Although prosecutors dismissed all charges against the protestors, the ACLU said the Governor has maintained the right to arrest them, saying in an April 1999 news conference that ‘the rules have changed.’ But despite the ACLU’s repeated requests, state officials have not provided a copy of the ‘revised’ rules—or any rules at all,” notes the ACLU (my emphasis). In other words, according to Bush, the First Amendment was no longer relevant. Other amendments are no longer relevant in the new New Orleans and the rest of America.

Katrina (and al-CIA-duh) have provided Bush and the corporate plutocrats with an excuse to change the constitutional “rules” we once took as our birthright here in America. “Contrary to the court’s opinion, there is very little reason to believe that Congress either anticipated or endorsed the military detention of U.S. citizens arrested in the United States when it authorized a military strike against Afghanistan following 9/11,” the ACLU declared in a statement following the Padilla ruling. I’d have to say that’s rather magnanimous, even naive. Congress is owned by the ruling elite and the neoliberal corporate aristocracy—a

nd plutocrats of all stripes are steadfastly opposed to liberty for the masses, as evinced by Bush’s assertion that he can arbitrarily change the rules when demonstrators get his dander up.

Of course, now that a federal court has ruled Bush can arrest anybody he wants and without charge or deference to the Sixth Amendment, we can expect not only alleged al-CIA-duhites to be kidnapped and thrown in military dungeons, but normal folk with a grudge (or even without a grudge) as well.

FEMA and the Ministry of Homeland Security took copious notes this week on how best to round up thousands of people (after dehydrating and starving them into submission) and throwing them in concentration camps (and have no doubt the Astrodome is a concentration camp). “We have a curfew,” a Katrina evacuee, Irvin Skinner, locked up inside the Astrodome, told Jacob Appelbaum. “We’re being kept inside after 11pm. Forced to stay inside. They threw guns on everyone. Said ‘come inside or your out of here’. Shoved guns, pointed them at adults. I’m a grown man, I have rights. This is an instituion [sic] to us, it’s like a jail. I’m a middle class man with a home being trated [sic] like a criminal because I’m black. If we were white, we wouldn’t have this problem.”

For Mr. Skinner and thousands of other Americans, the “rules have changed.” In due course, the rules will change for all of us as the Bush crime syndicate chips away at the Constitution and erects piecemeal its global forced labor gulag and commences with its thievery of natural resources and undertakes imperial wars designed to shock and awe (or starve and dehydrate) the recalcitrant into submission.

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