Neil Abercrombie: “I ask that this bill be defeated, and I am sorry to say that I have to disagree with my friend from Illinois, Mr. Hyde…”

“I ask that this bill be defeated, and I am sorry to say that I have to disagree with my friend from Illinois, Mr. Hyde, on this. I speak to him personally now and request this, a reconsideration with respect to habeas corpus. This past weekend I saw a student production, in an attic in a home in Honolulu, of ``Death and the Maiden,'' Ariel Dorfman's play about Chile. The principal theme was when habeas corpus is absent, there we have authoritarianism and dictatorship. It leads to torture. In Dorfman's essay on political code and literary code, and I am quoting from it: 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 anti-Nation. He goes on to say: The principal obsession of authoritarian politics is to suppress history and those who could modify it, postulating an unchangeable and superior reality, God, father, and family, to which one owes loyalty. This is the difficulty. If we abandon habeas corpus, we abandon one of the foundation stones of the United States of America.”