Sentence First, Trial Never (Will Grigg)

Will Grigg on the U.S. system of "justice":

A hoary truism teaches us that crisis reveals character, rather than shaping it. To the extent the word "character" applies to the government ruling us, that maxim certainly applies with respect to the state of permanent crisis we have experienced since 9-11.

The tyrannical practices and powers exhibited in the name of Homeland Security -- from aggressive war to torture -- are not foreign to the Regime that rules us. The open-ended "war on terror" simply provided an opportunity for the State's agents to institutionalize official crimes that had been committed on a more informal basis prior to The Day Everything Changed.

At the malignant heart of this system we find the extraordinary claim -- now embraced, to the surprise only of the professionally gullible, by Obama the Blessed and his ruling clique -- that the president has the power to order the open-ended detention of anyone he designates an "enemy combatant."

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