Does breaking the rule of law make doubly sure?

The nonsense that is legality in today’s US of A

An old Irish joke

There’s an old Irish joke that goes like this: an American is walking through some town in the British Isles, and notices that down the side of the road is painted a yellow line. So he stops this little Irishman who happens to be walking by and asks him, “Say, buddy: what does this yellow line down the side of the pavement signify?” The little Irishman immediately has a spark of recognition and tells the American, “Why, begorra, dat means dat you can’t park here at all!” The American drinks this in and then asks, “Well, what do the lines on the other side of the road signify: there’s two of them over there.” At this the little Irishman ponders for a second and then his face lights up with the answer. “Why, sir, dat means you can’t park there at all, at all.”

We have Ireland to thank for a strange way of reasoning logic, and a quaint way with the English language, and a signal lesson in resilience to occupying colonialists, and a streak of backbone when it comes to stating principles that should be second nature but are elsewhere so lamentably absent. To be sure, to be sure.

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The bad and Good

Image: left, Osama Bin Laden;¹ right, Renee Good.²

I have a second conundrum for you. What do Osama Bin Laden and Renee Nicole Macklin Good have in common? And, by the same token, what do Barack Obama and ICE agent (not the radio and television presenter) Jonathan Ross have in common?

Well, what possible answers could we be looking for here? Bin Laden was a terrorist? Was Good a terrorist? They were both law breakers, how about that?

Here’s my own answer: they were both killed by agents of the US federal government without trial or any form of due process. The only difference was that the president of the United States sat and watched Bin Laden being killed, whereas he didn’t watch Mrs Good being killed; not so far as we know in any case, even if he might have seen the bodycam footage. The major difference between Mr Bin Laden’s killing and Mrs Good’s killing is that 90 per cent of the US public was jubilant at the former (the killing of the bad), and a far smaller proportion of the US general public is jubilant at the latter (the killing of the Good, although there is a small proportion who are, indeed, jubilant).

Operation Neptune Spear was an audacious attack aimed at eliminating an enemy of the US state: Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, who founded Al Qaeda and orchestrated the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Renee Good was a housewife who hindered an immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota in 2026. The price the two people paid for their alleged crimes was the same: death by gunshot. The federal officer who killed Mrs Good says she was trying to kill him, as does the government that he works for. In the case of Mr Bin Laden, he was killed not for what he was intending to do, but for what he allegedly already had done, ten years previously (he was killed in 2011).

So, one thing that separates Mr Bin Laden and Mrs Good is that Mrs Good posed a clear and present danger to the ICE officer, Jonathan Ross. But why was Mr Bin Laden killed?

It’s at this point I need you to be equanimous. I know it’s really difficult, but I want you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to clear your minds of any knowledge, suspicion, news reports, Wikipedia articles, news footage and general bumph you may have heard, seen or read about concerning the attacks on New York and elsewhere in 2001. Banish it. Put it away, and turn your eyes to the accused in the dock: Osama Bin Laden. The prosecution will lead evidence that this man was responsible on the date in question for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. If he is found guilty, you will be asked to pass a sentence on him, of either death, or 3,000 sentences of life imprisonment.

That is how it should have been done if the rule of law had been followed. But the rule of law, which the president of the United States vaunts as the bedrock of his country’s legal system, was abandoned in the case of Mr Bin Laden. He never stood trial before a jury of his peers, and therefore he died an innocent man at the hands of state executioners acting on the orders of the US president. Well, he did, didn’t he? Here Mr Obama is, watching it happen:

The view is widely held that the rule of law was not breached in the killing of Osama Bin Laden because the evidence was so overwhelming that he was guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt, and therefore, in addition to posing significant danger for the United States itself, his trial before a court of justice in that country was palpably superfluous. The rule of law is still adhered to when it is breached in cases in which it is obvious to a blind man running for his life that the accused did it, even if an accused always benefits from the presumption of innocence. Well, that is a contradiction, but the US is no stranger to contradictions: it is contradiction that is the bedrock of the US system of exceptionalism. The USA serves justice when it acts in the pursuit of injustice, and that is no new policy or effect that has been ushered in by the administration of Donald Trump, because it was patently in place when Barack Obama was president, 15 years ago. The only thing that Mr Trump has ushered in is the transparency of not denying it.

I was a regular traveller to the United States at the time of 9/11. A friend and I once spent an entire half day on the observation deck of the World Trade Center, climbing the stairs even to take the airs up on the top of the building. It was a chilling feeling I had when, a few years later, I watched the entire edifice crumple to the ground.

My friend and I continued to visit the United States after that, and we immediately noticed the clamp down in security, the queues and delays for checking in to the airport and threading our wending way to the gate to board our aeroplane. The restrictions on what we could and could not take aboard, in terms of shampoo or nail clippers, or even a can of Coke. The Department of Homeland Security sprang up to enforce all these new regulations that were intended to prevent 9/11 ever happening again, anywhere in the world: the US imposed its new rules on every civil aviation authority around the globe. The mantra that air travel is safer than crossing the road was to be upheld at all costs. It was, and is. So, if all these measures were introduced to make air travel so secure and safe, why was Osama Bin Laden killed? Well, the Irish might well say, to make sure it would never happen again at all, at all.

The recent outrage expressed over the killing of Renee Good fails, to my mind, to take account of the fact that the breakdown in America’s rule of law has always been there. For years, decades, centuries, America—and indeed every other country in the world—has been getting away with trashing the rule of law, except that, whether because they inherently knew it to be the case or because their governments carefully moulded the truth or presented the so-called facts in an appropriate fashion, the general public on the whole approved of this bending of the law, because of a perception that doing so was in their best interests.

Mrs Good’s case is illustrative of the fact that the current American administration is happy to endorse breaches of the rule of law for matters that are not just of general public concern, like airplane hijackings, but that are engaged in in pursuance of its own party politics. In that sense, Mrs Good’s killing is not vastly unlike the Watergate affair, or Nixon’s proposal to Kissinger that they should use atom bombs in Vietnam. Nixon, just like Obama, just like Trump, was prepared to use whatever force was required in order to achieve his policy goal. For Nixon, it was putting a full stop to communism. For Obama, it was revenge for 9/11. For Trump, it is to put the fear of God into people generally, first by showing the white liberals what he is prepared to do to the dark-skinned liberals. The next stage will be to set his white supremacist supporters onto the white liberals (and any dark-skinned liberals who happen to remain undeterred).

Modern America is the same as England in 1535

Here are some conversations I had over the weekend. One guy said they would pursue the president with the law (on the grounds of his criminal acts), and that he had no morals.

First, let me say as general background, I don’t live in the US and I am not American. I follow blogs there out of interest and because, despite my having nothing to do with America, what its president does affects me.

Second, I can’t do anything about their president. In the end, only they can. So, what I write is intended to give my perspective on what Americans need to do about Mr Trump, if they feel anything needs doing at all (not everyone does).

Third, they misunderstand me, but they’re not alone. It seems that a lot of people misunderstand me and misunderstand the situation and so I shall tell you how I come to that observation.

This fellow speaks of two things, and I speak of a third. The two things he speaks of are (i) Mr Trump’s moral code and (ii) the law (the criminal law). Neither of these things is relevant to what I mention, which is the incorporation into the constitution of a morality that accords with, not the president’s view or the law, but with an overarching sense of what would be needed to prevent the US republic from being a monarchy.

As an aside, the United States celebrated its bicentenary in 1976. I remember it. But that is not when the US had its bicentenary. Its bicentenary was in 1989. Before that, they had united States. After that they had the United States. When he signed the constitution in 1789, Franklin was asked whether what he’d signed was a republic or a monarchy (like when you would ask if a baby is a boy or a girl), and he replied, “A republic—if you can keep it” (like when you are fearful for infant mortality).

Now, I have no view on how you incorporate morality into a document like the US Constitution. They are contradictions in terms—morals and law, although the US is adept at framing the one as the other, and then tossing its morals to the wind. What it is now doing is tossing its law to the wind along with its morals. (Effectively, if you want morality in a constitution, the only way to do it is to abolish constitutions, and thereby abolish nation-states completely.)

Al Gore acquiesced in George W. Bush’s bullying over the loose chads (in 2000) in order to preserve the decency of American politics. He thought that his courtesy would inculcate courtesy on the other side, but it didn’t. It made the other side realise that it can turn matters on their head in the US and get away with it as long as they achieve the ultimate responsible position of president, because nothing in the US’s constitutional make-up prevents the president from presiding. You want to beat Trump with the law? Forget it. He will declare you seditious and have you executed, like Henry VIII did with Thomas More, who had also staked his safety in the law. Until Henry changed it.

If you ever get control of the US back, it’s not the law you should be cherishing, not the old law, anyway. You have to figure out how to prevent it happening again. And just about the only way to achieve that would be ... to become monarchs yourselves. And then, what would you have achieved?

When Boris Johnson became UK prime minister, one of the first things he did was ask Queen Elizabeth to prorogue parliament: to suspend the democratic machinery of state. Incredibly, she agreed, because she thought it was her bounden duty as a constitutional monarch to agree with what the prime minister wanted. That is where the US is as well.

Elizabeth was a constitutional monarch, not what Trump is, an absolute monarch. It was Johnson, not the Queen, who held the reins of power. If Johnson had asked this of Henry VIII, he’d have been put in the Tower and had his head removed from his shoulders, just for his audacity. The US is currently being administered like England in 1535, when

• it broke away from Rome (thus upsetting the global power structure),

• dissolved its morals (by divorcing Queen Catharine), and

• executed high officers of state (Bishop Fisher, Thomas More) who wouldn’t grant their formalistic assent to these outrages.

Can you see any parallels at all? That’s why you are misunderstanding what the situation is.

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King Henry VIII won. Let that sink in.

Donald Trump is not a traitor. Well, of course, he is a traitor to what some Americans hold as being a good American. But not under the law, he isn’t.

Treason is a criminal charge, alleging that the accused attacked a state authority to which he owes allegiance. Vidkun Quisling was a traitor, because he worked with the Germans in helping them take over Norway in World War II. And there were accusations against Leopold III when he advised Belgium to capitulate to the Germans in 1940. But Trump is not capitulating to anyone: he is the one to whom other people are being forced to capitulate. So, a charge of treason against Mr Trump would require proof that he attacked the presidency of the United States, and he cannot be a traitor to himself.

Everything Mr Trump does is defended by him as being in the best interests of the US and it’s merely a matter of opinion as to whether that is or is not so. If Mr Trump had captured any other office of the United States, treason would be the route to go; possibly. But, as its president, it is preposterous to accuse him of treason. I’d be interested to at least hear how people would frame the charges, without them turning out to be we don’t like him. Because where does elimination of the wealth gap stand in the US constitution?

Epstein, El Salvador, asking why?, and constitutions as insurance

Epstein knows a sort of parallel in Belgium: Marc Dutroux. Dutroux procured children, through abduction mostly. So, he was like the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The children were abused and even murdered at sex parties with rich toffs, which were filmed, and then blackmail kicked in. The scheme worked because the clients reached into the very highest echelons. But who they were is shrouded in “mystery” because Dutroux took the fall for them. He’s now in Nivelles Prison, for the rest of his born days.

So, why isn’t Epstein also taking the fall? Well, because he didn’t just procure the kids, he procured the clients as well, and that was knowledge too far. He had to go. Dutroux never knew who the clients were, so that’s why he’s still alive. If you’re planning to set up a paedophile ring, bear these facts in mind: you need a puffer state between the big bad world you’re creating and the big bad world outside. Epstein was too porous: he’s not a bulkhead, but a bridge.

The El Salvador expulsions were not intended to exact retribution, but to instil fear. It worked. Many migrants have voluntarily left the US. And those who remain and abhor what is being done are also a bit frightened now, as to what will come next.

There’s a lot of talk about whether the military should refuse to follow illegal orders. I think those who advocate for interpreting orders are being too kind. In short, anyone who asks “why?” will be dealt with. Those who do as they’re told will prosper. It is that simple. When Yevgheny Prigozhin told his Wagner men in Ukraine in 2022 to spray a sports hall of civilians and children with bullets, they did it. Because they knew asking “why?” would just put them into the room with the civilians.

Some say that Trump’s administration are degrading their authority. Perhaps they are, but they are confident that, by the time their authority is in tatters, they will have subdued all opposition. I don’t want to be overly cynical, but they just need to degrade to a slightly lesser extent than they degrade their opponents. Then they will have won. That was the Butcher Haig approach to trench warfare in World War I: we have more men than they do, so we will win if the rate of killing remains one to one.

I’ll tell you my view on what constitutions do. Laws tell you what you can’t do. And constitutions tell you what you can do. They don’t especially protect rulers, as opposed to the ruled, except to the extent that they allow citizens to slumber peacefully and not riot in the streets. A constitution is like an insurance policy. The pay-out is the peace it procures, because it is put in place to settle arguments up front, whereas laws often are the basis for arguments to begin with, because there is less tendency to argue about what you can do than about what you can’t.

The best constitution is one that is never litigated upon. But, it will never actually pay out, not as much as the premiums were, even though you will get a good night’s sleep. As long as you believe in the solvency of the insurer.

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“Forcing” Mr Trump

What’s clear is that you can’t force anything with this administration. There’s an act of Congress, actually signed into law by Mr Trump, forcing the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files, and they’ve released 1 per cent, and then with redaction of what the act says they can’t redact. Is that not just wonderful play-acting? Trump signs into law the act that forces the DoJ to inculpate him (potentially), and then the DoJ disobeys the law, and no one can touch them for it. Perfect. Well, it is perfect, isn’t it? Why doesn’t someone force them to unredact the documents?

The US legal system has bound its hands because:

a) it allows anyone, including thugs (but, nota bene, excluding Confederate insurrectionists) to stand for the presidency;

b) a thug was elected to the presidency;

c) the constitution essentially allows the president to ... preside (he can make loopholes in the law whenever he wants);

d) that means he can do as he wishes.

All of which was fine as long as the president was bound by a moral code. And it was the absence of a moral code in the constitution of the US that inclined Benjamin Franklin to reserve judgment on what it was he’d just signed: a republic or a monarchy.

Because the inability to force a morality on the president of the USA turns it from the one into the other.

1. By Hamid Mir - http://www.canadafreepress.com/, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15159070

2. By Jonathan Ross - Alpha News - BREAKING: Alpha News has obtained cellphone footage showing perspecti... - Twitter, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=181536071