[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 50 (Thursday, April 18, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H3624-H3625]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            GROUNDS FOR OPPOSITION TO THE ANTITERRORISM BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Hawaii [Mr. Abercrombie] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Speaker, I want to elaborate, if I might, on the 
remarks that I made with respect to the so-called antiterrorism bill 
earlier. As members know, we are constrained by time in our remarks, 
and by having 5 minutes today, perhaps I can make a little more clear 
or elaborate a bit on what the grounds were for my opposition.
  Mr. Speaker, let me quote in part from a story written in today's 
Washington Post, as follows, excerpting from the story:

       It marks the first time in more than a century of law on 
     the writ of habeas corpus that Federal judges would have to 
     defer to State court determinations on whether a prisoner's 
     constitutional rights were violated. A writ of habeas corpus 
     is a way for Federal judges to assess whether a defendant's 
     conviction is unconstitutional because, for example, his 
     right to a fair trial was infringed. The writ orders the 
     State to produce the prisoner, the body, or the corpus, so 
     that he can make his case to a Federal court.

  Mr. Speaker, I had indicated in my previous remarks that this past 
weekend my wife and I attended a play, were observers at a play that 
was given in Honolulu in a very small venue. I do not think there were 
20 people there, mostly students. It was a student production, student-
directed. The set was very simple. There are only three characters, if 
you will. The play was called ``Death and the Maiden.'' It comes from a 
work by Schubert and is a beautiful piece, orchestral piece. Death and

[[Page H3625]]

the Maiden was played by a doctor who is a participant in torture in an 
unnamed Latin American country. He plays the symphonic piece as he 
tortures people, to torment them.
  In the play, a lawyer who has been named to a commission to examine 
what has happened in the country previously with respect to those who 
have been arrested and tortured and killed, disappeared, indicates that 
the reason that the regime was able to accomplish this in the first 
place was the abandonment of habeas corpus; that is to say, the 
capacity of the individual to be able to take a case to a Federal 
judge, in the context of the United States, to ask that judge to 
determine whether or not he or she is being fairly held.

                              {time}  1545

  As my good friend from California, Mr. Miller, said to me just very 
recently in discussion about these remarks and positions on the bill, 
the loss of our rights and our privileges do not come in grand sweeps. 
They come by degree, they come by circumstances that are deemed at the 
moment more than sufficient to erode that particular right.
  And so I asked friends at the Library of Congress to provide for me a 
copy of the playwright's essays. Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean writer, is 
the author of the play ``Death and the Maiden,'' and he was written a 
book of essays or compiled a book of his essays called ``Some Write to 
the Future.'' I recommend it to the Speaker and to others who are 
concerned about this. I realize it was an agonizing vote for many.
  But in the process of commenting on Chile, the country from which Mr. 
Dorfman comes, he wrote an essay once called the Political Code and the 
Literary Code, the testimonial genre in Chile today.
  In it he says, in that essay:
       Terror, then, has a public character. As such, it leads to 
     a great ideological operation, which authorizes, in the name 
     of Western, Christian values, a purifying crusade against the 
     forces of the Devil and of the antination. The principal 
     obsession of authoritarian politics is to suppress history 
     and those who could modify it, postulating an unchangeable 
     and superior reality, God, fatherland, family, to which one 
     owes loyalty.
       What is paradoxical about this ideological framework is 
     that it excuses a repression that, in fact, is never admitted 
     by official channels. Memory of the suffering must survive in 
     gossip, in rumor, in the whispering of what they did, and 
     even in official threats, but at the same time, in each 
     concrete case, in each undeniable and undocumented case, with 
     damaged teeth, genitals, and ribs, in spite of each 
     relative's identification, in spite of the cries of pain, the 
     truth of the violence is denied. The people are punished, but 
     in the long run the relationship is made benevolently and 
     paternally innocent, translating it into terms that are 
     almost familial and intimate: expulsion and exclusion of the 
     wayward, the recalcitrant, the disturbers of public order; 
     reintegration, of the misguided and the repentant. Neo-
     colonial fascism takes the bourgeois dream to its 
     totalitarian culmination.

  Mr. Speaker, in that context we see, then, that to eliminate habeas 
corpus does damage to the Constitution beyond repair.

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