The legislation before the Senate today would ban torture, but let Bush define it; would allow the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant; would suspend the Great Writ of habeas corpus; would immunize retroactively those who may have engaged in torture. And that's just for starters.

Walt Kelly once wrote, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." For fifty years, this country fought against what we saw as the worst countries and idealogies in the history of man, Hitler and Nazi Germany, Stalin and the Soviet Union, Mao and red China, and where force of arms was not an option did things that were pretty damn questionable in the name of the greater good, like the Somozas and the Shah for starters. But it was ostensibly in the name of the greater good.

That is not this. This is moving directly towards establishing the United States as one of those countries that we spent half a century fighting against. Now written and soon to be signed is legislation that says, "if you fall into any of these categories" you no longer exist. We can beat you, torture you, do anything we want, and you cannot challenge it in any way. You no longer have any legal standing, citizen or not, innocent or not, none of that matters.

If you should die in custody, well that's just too bad. There's no standing so they can just say anything they want and that's the end of it. George Orwell missed his date by 22 years.