On July 31, retired brigadier general Susan K. Escallier signed a pretrial agreement under which Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi would have pleaded guilty to various roles in the terror attacks of 9/11 in return for sentences of life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. On August 1, bending to outrage (real and feigned) over the matter, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin revoked the deal.

The case may seem unrelated to last month’s US Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States, granting presidential immunity for “official acts” — an immunity manufactured from whole cloth in contradiction to both the plain text of  the US Constitution and the entire history of American jurisprudence.  The two stories however, are of a piece.

The three defendants have spent their last two decades in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. If they’d been charged and tried as ordinary criminals in federal court, they’d have almost certainly found themselves quickly convicted, shortly thereafter sentenced to death, and long since dead, like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (about six years from crime to execution).

That’s not a comment on their guilt or innocence; it’s just recognition that finding a jury which WOULDN’T convict them and recommend a sentence of death would have been extraordinarily unlikely given the climate of the time.

But former president George W. Bush just wasn’t having any of this Constitution stuff. Whether or not he actually called the Supreme Law of the Land “just a goddamned piece of paper,” as a later retracted article claimed, he certainly treated it that way.

The US government, under Bush and with the cooperation of Congress and, in parts, the Supreme Court, simply seized power to declare people “unlawful enemy combatants,” try them via military tribunal instead of the constitutionally required court/jury system — if it tried them at all instead of just having them murdered, as Barack Obama and Donald Trump later did — all while holding them indefinitely in violation of the Constitution’s “speedy public trial” requirements and torturing them in violation of its “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibition (as well as international law).

Let me say this again by way of emphasis, because it’s important:

If the constitutional requirements had been followed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi would almost certainly have been killed by lethal injection years ago.

The way these three alleged terrorist masterminds were treated wasn’t about achieving justice.

It wasn’t about “winning the war on terror.”

It wasn’t about preventing future attacks.

It was about implementing George W. Bush’s kingly view of presidential power: “I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.”

The SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity in Trump’s case affirmed that claim, ensuring that neither Bush nor his predecessors or successors need ever fear they’ll face justice — even the kind of justice denied Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi — and that their victims will never RECEIVE justice for crimes committed against them by modern American monarchs.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Thirty-five trillion.

Wow, that’s a really, really big number — big enough that it deserves my exploitation of it as the entire opening paragraph of this column.

OK, so add “dollars” after that really, really big number if you must, or put a dollar sign before it, as in “on July 26, the US national debt pass the $35 trillion mark.”

That feels like a real milestone — around $7 trillion more than last year’s Gross Domestic Product, which supposedly represents the value of all goods and services produced in the US  — but it didn’t generate nearly as much panicked media notice as I’d expected it to.

Maybe the American press is a bit distracted by the weirdest presidential campaign season in decades (and that’s saying something!).

Or maybe the national debt has just grown so large, and its growth accelerated to such speeds, that it’s become the usual and really only merits the “footnote and yawn” treatment these days.

I’m old enough to remember when American politicians engaged in vigorous public hand-wringing about their debt (all the while, of course, pretending it was YOUR debt), occasionally even tinkering with tiny spending cuts or not so tiny tax hikes to “do something” about it.

Those days are long gone. “If we don’t raise the debt ceiling and borrow more money, the world will end!” is the new “if we don’t stop spending more than we bring in, we’re screwed!” Perhaps that’s because the politicians kept spending more than they brought in until the screwing became inevitable.

Personally, I think they’ve taken an often misinterpreted quote from a long-dead economist to heart and turned it into their plan of action.

“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1923. “In the long run we are all dead.”

Keynes meant that as a call for vigorous short-term economic action on the part of government in times of crisis, as opposed to waiting for the ship to right itself over a longer time frame.

Today’s politicians treat it instead as permission to spend like drunken sailors on shore leave and hope they’re dead — or at least retired — before the bills come due and the ship goes down.

And, make no mistake, it WILL go down. The politicians will eventually default on their debt, either openly or with accounting tricks … and do their damnedest to stick you with most of the negative consequences.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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In a July 29 Washington Post op-ed,  president Joe Biden lays out a three-part proposal for reforming the Supreme Court.  With Biden in full-blown “lame duck” status  (he’s no longer seeking re-election), it’s better read as a “think piece” than as a real policy proposal with any chance of adoption. But it’s still food for thought, so let’s think.

Biden’s proposal comes in three parts:

First, a constitutional amendment to “make it clear” (as if it wasn’t already) that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.

No such amendment should be necessary, nor is any amendment likely to garner 2/3 support in both houses of Congress and ratification by 3/4 of state legislatures at this time, nor would it likely matter anyway even if ratified. After all, the Supreme Court’s majority simply ignored the text, meaning, and history of the US Constitution to get the magical immunity outcome it wanted for former president Donald Trump. Why would we expect the court to respect a new amendment when it won’t respect the existing law?

Second, term limits of 18 years for Supreme Court justices. Biden doesn’t mention that those term limits would likewise require a constitutional amendment, or that they wouldn’t solve the court’s “politicization” problem (his proposal would still retain presidential appointment and Senate confirmation of justices).

Third, a “binding code of ethics” for the court.  But again, absent a constitutional amendment creating some other process, the court (or Congress, via impeachment) would themselves remain the ultimate arbiters of whether that code was violated.  Neither the court nor Congress has taken action on (for example) justice Clarence Thomas’s flagrant acceptance of bribes under the current system. How would a new “code” fix that?

The three proposals all fail right at the starting point. They’re not going to enjoy adoption before Biden’s retirement next January, if ever.

So why not aim for the stars instead and propose REAL reforms that would be just as difficult to pass but that might solve the biggest problems — the partisan/political nature of how the court is chosen and the lifetime tenure that gifts the justices with impunity for poor or corrupt decision-making?

My proposal:

First, one-year terms for a Supreme Court composed of an odd number of randomly selected US citizens (the process is called “sortition”) who, after their names are drawn, demonstrate a standardized test IQ of greater than 100. No conscription — any citizen can refuse to serve. No presidential appointments allowed and no Senate confirmation needed.

Second, sequestration from the beginning to the end of each term. The justices live in a barracks facility. No phones. No email. Recreational television, but no news programs. A well-stocked law library, with classic novels for recreational reading, but no current events punditry allowed.

One year in total isolation with no sensory input other than the Constitution, the law, and the filings to affect rulings. Then a new court takes over.

About as likely to pass as Biden’s proposals, but at least worth the effort.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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