Introduction

This portrait is but a slight exaggeration. Events, past and present, speak to both the exaggeration and its qualifier “slight.” The lenses through which we view the world invariably condition where we place the emphasis. But the tension between the two is not merely theoretical. Take Monday, 28 June 2004, for example. Early that morning, the United States announced that it had transferred formal sovereignty to a new interim Iraqi government in a secret ceremony two days ahead of schedule. Hours later, the US Supreme Court rejected the Bush Administration’s legal grounds for denying approximately 600 enemy combatants imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba the right to challenge their detention. In two separate judgments, the court extended habeas corpus to both the American and non-American detainees. Writing for the majority in Hamdi et al. v. Rumsfeld (2004: 29) Justice Sandra Day O’Connor rebuked the administration’s interpretation of sovereignty by declaring that “a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.” In a separate opinion for Rumsfeld v. Padilla (2004: 11f.), Justice John Paul Stevens emphatically declared:

[what is] at stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society . . . For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.