STATUS: Mostly incomplete.
Chapter 3 -- Establish Secret Prisons

    No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...
        The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution

    In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury... and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
        The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution

The Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Since then, our Western legal tradition has held that everyone deserves some kind of judicial process before being thrown into prison. This simple yet radical notion that you cannot be unaccountably imprisoned is the cornerstone of all democracy. We Americans expect that we can't be thrown into jail without hope of getting out. That faith is so essential a part of our liberty that we scarcely think about it.

This guarantee that you can't be randomly jailed is strengthened by the concept of habeas corpus.  This is the law, dating from 1679, that undergirds our freedom as Americans. The phrase comes from the Latin; it is a writ "to have the body." Having the right to habeas corpus means that if they grab you and throw you in jail, you have the right to see the evidence against you, face your accusers, and have a hearing before an impartial judge or jury to establish whether you actually committed the crime of which you are accused. In short, it means that if you are innocent, there is hope that you can prove that you are, and hope that you can eventually get out. It means your innocence protects you.

Your innocence does not protect you in a dictatorship.

Just as habeas corpus, or some equivalent procedure, is the cornerstone of virtually every democracy, so a secret prison system without habeas corpus is the cornerstone of every dictatorship.

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In the wording of the 2002 "torture memo,"--Bybee-Gonzales August 1, 2002 memo re: Standards of conduct for interrogation--torture is laboriously underdefined.[34]

(When you are looking at suggestions of a fascist shift in a democracy, intention is important; drafts and memos reveal what the regime seeks, if it could be unconstrained.)

The "torture memo" also shows how far back this White House has sought to legalize abuse and how hard it has worked to do so. The memo is forty pages of densely worded legal argument in favor of allowing all kinds of horrific treatment of human beings. It concludes that:

     [Torture] covers only extreme acts. Severe pain is generally of the kind difficult for the victim to endure. Where the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure. Severe mental pain requires suffering not just at the moment of infliction but it also requires lasting psychological harm, such as seen in mental disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder. Additionally, such severe mental pain can arise only from the predicate acts listed .... Because the acts inflicting torture are extreme, there is significant range of acts that though they might constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment fail to rise to the level of torture."[35] [Italics mine]

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MILITARY TRIBUNALS

Military tribunals are the enablers of a fascist shift.

Lenin responded to an assassination attempt by setting up secret military tribunals that bypassed the established court system." Mussolini set up military tribunals to dispense summary justice. Stalin used a revived system of secretive military tribunals that also bypassed the judiciary.

The Nazis also setup a tribunal system, "People's Courts," that bypassed the formal legal system. These courts had originally been established as "an emergency body set up to dispense summary justice on looters and murderers" in 1918. These "courts" were able to sentence those charged with "treason" and were characterized by "the absence of any right of appeal against their verdicts." The "will of the people" took the place of the rule of law.[70]

When the Nazis first came to power, not only was there still an independent judiciary in Germany-there were still judges outraged at SA and SS abuses of prisoners, and human rights lawyers who shared their outrage. Earlier, one of these independent lawyers had actually sought to prosecute the SS for prisoner abuse. It was at that point that the "People's Courts" went after the lawyers, the military tribunals were strengthened, and Hitler sought legislation that retroactively protected the SS from prosecution for acts of torture.[71] (The Bush administration seeks to shield interrogators from prosecution for war crimes.)

This too opened the door for what followed.

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