The Harvard Law Record: Indefinite Detention Under the NDAA: the Great Attack on Civil Liberties

[proverbialwisdom]

10. Can this new law be used as the basis for denying the extradition of Assange to the US?

Not my field, speculating. Senator Levin appears in the Special Features of The Conspirator. The Conspirator advocates support for the US Constitution under all circumstances.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conspirator

The Conspirator is a 2011 historical drama film directed by Robert Redford based on a book by Eliza Ann Dupuy of the same name. It is the debut film of the American Film Company.

Critics have cited it as an analogy to the post-9/11 atmosphere.

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/04/23/are-you-tired-of-9-11-message-movies/

Apr 23 2011 12:29 PM ET

'The Conspirator' is a post-9/11 message movie. Are you as tired of post-9/11 message movies as I am?

by Owen Gleiberman

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The latest of these well-meaning attempts to mold 9/11 and its aftermath into a piece of dramatic entertainment is Robert Redford’s The Conspirator. On the surface, you might not even think that’s so, since the movie is a courtroom drama set 150 years ago, just after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Yet Redford uses that other rending national tragedy as a giant metaphor. The movie is about a young Civil War hero, Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), who is assigned, as an inexperienced Washington lawyer, to defend a woman, Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), who’s accused of being part of a conspiracy to kill the president. It doesn’t take Aiken long to figure out that the proceeding is really a sham, a show trial — that she’s going to be found guilty, regardless of the facts, and that it’s all part of the government’s attempt to give the nation closure through an officially sanctioned act of legal vengeance.

In The Conspirator, Redford goes back to one of the only events in American history that tore at the country’s identity as violently as 9/11 did. And he demonstrates that what happened back then, during the trial of Mary Surratt, amounted to the squashing of rights, the twisting of protocol, the suspension of justice for “the sake of the nation.” Edwin Stanton, played by Kevin Kline, was the Secretary of War under Lincoln, and he makes the argument for why Mary must be found guilty (even though she is, at least in the movie, innocent). He becomes the film’s version of Dick Cheney, taking the low road of force over constitutional safeguard. And Aiken, the last-honest-man hero (played by McAvoy with a lively glint of moral passion), realizes that if he doesn’t fight this bureaucratic railroading, he’s colluding in the destruction of the American system, the American way. The movie’s message is: In America, the ends do not — cannot — justify the means. That, the film says, is the meaning of America. Redford clearly intends this message as a commentary on all the legally dicey things that have gone on in the aftermath of 9/11: the detaining of terrorist suspects, with little or no evidence, and with no representation or deadline, in the prison at Guantánamo; the underground use of torture techniques that violate articles of the Geneva Convention; the willingness to suspend the law for the sake of an anti-terror, we-fight-fire-with-fire absolutism.

More at link.