The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. But I cannot conceive any existence under heaven (which in the depths of its wisdom tolerates all sorts of things) that is more truly odious and disgusting than an impotent, helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness of any other qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion which he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others contemptible and wretched.

I think for instance of Edmund Burke's Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, a minor masterpiece which is not read and appreciated as it should be today. And reading Judge Allred's opinion, for some strange reason, I kept hearing the words of Edmund Burke in the background, growing louder and louder with each subsequent paragraph.

The Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol is a simple document—the transmission to two law-enforcement officers of his constituency of an act that the government of Lord North has put to Parliament. The act suspended the great writ of habeas corpus—not for the good burghers of Bristol, of course, but only for a group of murderous insurrectionists who then stood in open and bloody revolt against their lawful sovereign. And the act went further, namely, it provided that these miserable wretches, whose insolence and defiance now extended to the seas, could be labeled pirates at the King\ufffds discretion, and thus robbed of the right to be tried in courts. They would be dealt with in a summary fashion by the King\ufffds military. And the act also provided that these miscreants could be transported across the ocean to England and held there to await their summary disposition—a step which justified the suspension of habeas corpus, since otherwise an English court might demand an accounting for their brutal treatment and incarceration. And there was no doubt as to the brutality of that treatment—these wicked enemies were left rotting in ship hulks and were succumbing to pestilence and malnutrition by the hundreds already.

Burke was not a man to be taken in by such demonization, least of all by the likes of Lord North, and he registered his sharpest opposition to what was being done. He railed against the suspension of habeas corpus and he called the whole project wicked and unjust. At the time this was a perilously unpopular thing to do, since these insurgents were viewed by the populace as vermin. And what was his counsel to the law enforcement officers? Use your skills and the genius of the English law to subvert this injustice, he said:

I therefore could never reconcile myself to the bill I send you, which is expressly provided to remove all inconveniences from the establishment of a mode of trial which has ever appeared to me most unjust and most unconstitutional. Far from removing the difficulties which impede the execution of so mischievous a project, I would heap new difficulties upon it, if it were in my power. All the ancient, honest, juridical principles and institutions of England are so many clogs to check and retard the headlong course of violence and oppression. They were invented for this one good purpose, that what was not just should not be convenient. Convinced of this, I would leave things as I found them. The old, cool-headed, general law is as good as any deviation dictated by present heat.

Let the Great Writ stand, said Burke, and from this point be suspicious when the Government employs the label "pirate" to shorten the rights of those it sees as enemies. These words reflect the sum and the spirit of the rulings out of Guantanamo. They reflect the spirit of liberty.

And today, in the Military Commissions Act, what has Bush and his crew done that can be distinguished from Lord North's measures? Very little, in fact. The past echoes in tyrannical excess. The Bush program is indeed more ruthless, more comprehensive in its drive to extirpate the great principles of our nation and its constitution.

Oh yes. Exactly who were those vermin insurgents who by Lord North's design were to be stripped of habeas corpus, subjected to military trials with no rights and held in the crudest and most abusive conditions? They were the Americans, and the conflict was our Revolution.