Between Tyranny And Anarchy

I had this argument in my head, and now the most likely source of it, George Kenney and his Electric Politics podcast, has given me 102 pages of a 1998 law review article and an interview with its author, Carl T. Bogus, to lend it support.

 

Professor Bogus argues that there is strong reason to believe that, in significant part, James Madison drafted the Second Amendment to assure his constituents in Virginia, and the South generally, that Congress could not use its newly-acquired powers to indirectly undermine the slave system by disarming the militia, on which the South relied for slave control. His argument is based on a multiplicity of the historical evidence, including debates between James Madison and George Mason and Patrick Henry at the Constitutional Ratifying Convention in Richmond, Virginia in June 1788; the record from the First Congress; and the antecedent of the American right to bear arms provision in the English Declaration of Rights of 1688.

One way of reading the Constitutional debates of 1787 through the Federalist–Anti-Federalist exchanges, and finally to the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788 is to brace oneself for some of the most erudite philosophical discussions on politics ever compiled. It’s also a running debate with its own politics and personalities. Or, one can lift arguments from this newspaper editorial or that speech, and use that to interpret the whole. Bogus takes the first approach, and argues that gun control opponents, or insurrectionists, adopt the second.

The Inside War On Terror

Just listening to Jess Bravin or Stuart Couch talk about torture at Gitmo is harrowing enough, and I hope no one regardless of his/her ideological leanings is jaded enough not to be moved emotionally by these accounts of how “justice” is practiced in citizens’ names.

And so, over the subsequent eight or nine months, it became clear that this information—that what had been done to Slahi amounted to torture. Specifically, he had been subjected to a mock execution. He had sensory deprivation. He had environmental manipulation; that is, you know, cell is too cold, or the cell is too hot. He, at one point, was taken off of the island and driven around in a boat to make him believe that he was being transferred to a foreign country for interrogation. He was presented with a ruse that the United States had taken custody of his mother and his brother and that they were being brought to Guantánamo. It was on a letter with fake letterhead from the State Department, I believe it was. And in the letter, there was a discussion that his mother would be the only female detainee held at Guantánamo and concerns for her safety.

So, any one of these individual things, I don’t believe, as a legal matter, rose to the level of torture, until I got evidence of an email between one of the officers responsible for the—for the guards that were guarding Slahi and a military psychologist. And there was this discussion over this email about the fact that Slahi was experiencing hallucinations. And then—and the psychologist, as she was giving her opinion as to this concern raised, it was clear to me that she was aware that the circumstances of Slahi’s detention had been set up to such a point where he would experience these types of mental breakdown.