Everybody got a valid passport?

I think we need to institute a system of fascism alerts. Today is at least an orange alert day, with Kerik replacing Ridge, Nebraska Gov. Michael O. Johanns as the new ag secretary, and most notably, a complete dismissal of due process or human rights in the cases of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners. My buddy yelladog is also sounding the alert this morning; you can get more information from his blog, but here are a couple of tidbits.

Here's a paragraph about our new secretary of agriculture:

Johanns has come under criticism from civil liberties groups for official actions that they said promoted conservative Christian beliefs. In May 1999 he signed a proclamation declaring a March for Jesus Day, and he later endorsed a Back to the Bible Day in honor of a fundamentalist Christian group in Nebraska.

And here's a bit about Kerik:

As police commissioner, he had less than friendly relations with the F.B.I., and occasionally was criticized for his use of power. In writing his memoirs, which touched on 9/11 and detailed his abandonment by his mother, who was a prostitute, he used police officers to conduct research, a move that earned him a $2,500 fine from the city's Conflicts of Interest Board. He was also once accused of dispatching homicide investigators to question and fingerprint several Fox News employees whom his publisher, Judith Regan, apparently suspected of stealing her cellphone and necklace.

In the last few years, Mr. Kerik, 49, has spoken broadly about the lessons of Sept. 11 and the kind of response that terrorism requires.

In an interview earlier this year, he said that one of his most important experiences in Iraq was "to see the hatred for the United States and what certain elements out there thought of the U.S. and how dangerous it could be."

He added that many "say that we have to sort of put 9/11 behind us, move on."

"You can't put it behind us," he said, "and you can't forget about it. Because if and when you do, they're going to come back."

And picking up on the thread that September 11 will now define our approach to security and justice, AP reports on our government's new torture policy:

Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle acknowledged at a U.S. District Court hearing Thursday.

Some of the prisoners have filed lawsuits challenging their detention without charges for up to three years so far. At the hearing, Boyle urged District Judge Richard J. Leon to throw their cases out.

Attorneys for the prisoners argued that some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due process standards. But Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the detainees "have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court."

Leon asked whether a detention based solely on evidence gathered by torture would be illegal, because "torture is illegal. We all know that."

Boyle replied that if the military's combatant status review tribunals "determine that evidence of questionable provenance were reliable, nothing in the due process clause (of the Constitution) prohibits them from relying on it."

Leon asked whether there were any restrictions on using torture-induced evidence.

Boyle replied that the United States never would adopt a policy that would have barred it from acting on evidence that could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks even if the data came from questionable practices like torture by a foreign power.

Let me close this morning's entry with a passage from the Holocaust Encyclopedia:

With the reinterpretation of "protective custody" (Schutzhaft) in 1933, police power became independent of judicial controls. In Nazi terminology, protective custody meant the arrest--without judicial review--of real and potential opponents of the regime. "Protective custody" prisoners were not confined within the normal prison system but in concentration camps under the exclusive authority of the SS (Schutzstaffel; the elite guard of the Nazi state).

The Third Reich has been called a dual state, since the normal judicial system coexisted with the arbitrary power of Hitler and the police. Yet, like most areas of public life after the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the German system of justice underwent "coordination" (alignment with Nazi goals). All professional associations involved with the administration of justice were merged into the National Socialist League of German Jurists.