Have you ever had a day…

September 29th, 2006

…when you were shocked into absolute stillness — when your loved one died, or your mate demanded a divorce, or your child was seriously hurt, or you were diagnosed with a frightening disease? A day when all the easy flow of thought and process swimming in your brain simply ground to a wrenching halt in the wake of disaster. A day when shock spread through you in waves, even though you’d seen it coming, half expected it. A day when there was no comfort to turn to in “normal” — normal was no longer a blip on the radar screen.

Have you ever had a day when you looked around you, in pain and wonderment, at the uninterrupted hum of activity and realized the hamster wheel was still turning, turning and the hamsters mindlessly running, running — oblivious, unruffled — not understanding that the World Had Collapsed … not knowing that they were no longer who they used to be … not aware that all the tomorrow’s would be heavier.

Yesterday was such a day. Infamy.

I have had many days in the last years when I was angry, shocked, sorrowful — days I raged, days I cried. I’ve been ashamed of my governance, felt desperate for my country and fear for its future — I’ve observed and reported great injustice and victimization’s and mindless cruelties. But I’ve never had a day in which I watched a Divinely-inspired two-hundred and thirty year pursuit of “liberty and justice” shatter into pieces before my very eyes … and neither have you.

Everything is different now, in a [small a]merica that has lost it’s ethical center. Some few have noticed. I post them below.

This will be my only post today — we’ll meet up again tomorrow; I need some time with this. Some grieving time … and, again, so do you. Give yourself some space to feel every wretched bit of this. Don’t let anger get in the way of that — what we hold within us unexpressed, do not allow to move through us and out, will poison us into lethargy and despair. And clearly — we have much work ahead.

We must meet fear and sorrow head on if we are to create tomorrow in hope.

Jude

“When the Muslims Come…”
Cotty Chubb
09.29.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cotty-chubb/when-the-muslims-come_b_30558.html

Okay I was ranting this morning, just a little, in the space by the door of the Le Pain Quotidien on Little Santa Monica Blvd. in Beverly Hills, putting milk and sugar in my tea and ranting, really just a little, with Debbie and Dale about the spinelessness and cluelessness of our Democratic senators (imagine, allowing John McCain to pretend to stand up bravely to the President when truthfully he’s running so hard for President himself, it’s next stop Bob Jones U.), and about how yesterday was perhaps the darkest day of my lifetime in this the republic I cherish, and enumerating the manifold sins and wickednesses of the bill.

Nothing too much, just dictatorial powers for the President, amnesty for torturers, abandonment of the writ of habeus, etc.

This naturally, or so it seemed to me, led to how the German Parliament allowed itself to get steamrollered into passage of similar laws by Hitler, who promised to use his new powers, insisted on as necessary, with discretion.

Okay well I went on a little longer than that, with passion and wit and every rhetorical tool at my command but brevity, when a patron, exiting, paused in the doorway and said:

“When the Muslims come, you’ll be the first in line. That’s what’s wrong with the people who take your position.”

He was a medium-built man, maybe forty, well-fed but not too heavy, in a green-brown shirt and dark slacks. He shook his head as he walked out onto the sidewalk, heading for a grey Mercedes, seeming to lament the tragic foolishness of some Americans.

“When the Muslims come…”

There are so many things wrong with that, that I had to stop talking.

Bush: Dems’ ‘argument buys into enemy’s propaganda’
Raw Story
http://tinyurl.com/edjna

In Case I Disappear
William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 29 September 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092906J.shtml

I have been told a thousand times at least, in the years I have spent reporting on the astonishing and repugnant abuses, lies and failures of the Bush administration, to watch my back. “Be careful,” people always tell me. “These people are capable of anything. Stay off small planes, make sure you aren’t being followed.” A running joke between my mother and me is that she has a “safe room” set up for me in her cabin in the woods, in the event I have to flee because of something I wrote or said.

I always laughed and shook my head whenever I heard this stuff. Extreme paranoia wrapped in the tinfoil of conspiracy, I thought. This is still America, and these Bush fools will soon pass into history, I thought. I am a citizen, and the First Amendment hasn’t yet been red-lined, I thought.

Matters are different now.

It seems, perhaps, that the people who warned me were not so paranoid. It seems, perhaps, that I was not paranoid enough. Legislation passed by the Republican House and Senate, legislation now marching up to the Republican White House for signature, has shattered a number of bedrock legal protections for suspects, prisoners, and pretty much anyone else George W. Bush deems to be an enemy.

So much of this legislation is wretched on the surface. Habeas corpus has been suspended for detainees suspected of terrorism or of aiding terrorism, so the Magna Carta-era rule that a person can face his accusers is now gone. Once a suspect has been thrown into prison, he does not have the right to a trial by his peers. Suspects cannot even stand in representation of themselves, another ancient protection, but must accept a military lawyer as their defender.

Illegally-obtained evidence can be used against suspects, whether that illegal evidence was gathered abroad or right here at home. To my way of thinking, this pretty much eradicates our security in persons, houses, papers, and effects, as stated in the Fourth Amendment, against illegal searches and seizures.

Speaking of collecting evidence, the torture of suspects and detainees has been broadly protected by this new legislation. While it tries to delineate what is and is not acceptable treatment of detainees, in the end, it gives George W. Bush the final word on what constitutes torture. US officials who use cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment to extract information from detainees are now shielded from prosecution.

It was two Supreme Court decisions, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that compelled the creation of this legislation. The Hamdi decision held that a prisoner has the right of habeas corpus, and can challenge his detention before an impartial judge. The Hamdan decision held that the military commissions set up to try detainees violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions.

In short, the Supreme Court wiped out virtually every legal argument the Bush administration put forth to defend its extraordinary and dangerous behavior. The passage of this legislation came after a scramble by Republicans to paper over the torture and murder of a number of detainees. As columnist Molly Ivins wrote on Wednesday, “Of the over 700 prisoners sent to Gitmo, only 10 have ever been formally charged with anything. Among other things, this bill is a CYA for torture of the innocent that has already taken place.”

It seems almost certain that, at some point, the Supreme Court will hear a case to challenge the legality of this legislation, but even this is questionable. If a detainee is not allowed access to a fair trial or to the evidence against him, how can he bring a legal challenge to a court? The legislation, in anticipation of court challenges like Hamdi and Hamdan, even includes severe restrictions on judicial review over the legislation itself.

The Republicans in Congress have managed, at the behest of Mr. Bush, to draft a bill that all but erases the judicial branch of the government. Time will tell whether this aspect, along with all the others, will withstand legal challenges. If such a challenge comes, it will take time, and meanwhile there is this bill. All of the above is deplorable on its face, indefensible in a nation that prides itself on Constitutional rights, protections and the rule of law.

Underneath all this, however, is where the paranoia sets in.

Underneath all this is the definition of “enemy combatant” that has been established by this legislation. An “enemy combatant” is now no longer just someone captured “during an armed conflict” against our forces. Thanks to this legislation, George W. Bush is now able to designate as an “enemy combatant” anyone who has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.”

Consider that language a moment. “Purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States” is in the eye of the beholder, and this administration has proven itself to be astonishingly impatient with criticism of any kind. The broad powers given to Bush by this legislation allow him to capture, indefinitely detain, and refuse a hearing to any American citizen who speaks out against Iraq or any other part of the so-called “War on Terror.”

If you write a letter to the editor attacking Bush, you could be deemed as purposefully and materially supporting hostilities against the United States. If you organize or join a public demonstration against Iraq, or against the administration, the same designation could befall you. One dark-comedy aspect of the legislation is that senators or House members who publicly disagree with Bush, criticize him, or organize investigations into his dealings could be placed under the same designation. In effect, Congress just gave Bush the power to lock them up.

By writing this essay, I could be deemed an “enemy combatant.” It’s that simple, and very soon, it will be the law. I always laughed when people told me to be careful. I’m not laughing anymore.

In case I disappear, remember this. America is an idea, a dream, and that is all. We have borders and armies and citizens and commerce and industry, but all this merely makes us like every other nation on this Earth. What separates us is the idea, the simple idea, that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are our organizing principles. We can think as we please, speak as we please, write as we please, worship as we please, go where we please. We are protected from the kinds of tyranny that inspired our creation as a nation in the first place.

That was the idea. That was the dream. It may all be over now, but once upon a time, it existed. No good idea ever truly dies. The dream was here, and so was I, and so were you.

Rogue State
Lawbreaker and torturer — that’s America, loud and proud.
Matthew Yglesias
09.26.06
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12060

“The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture,” George W. Bush explained in a June 2003 speech, “and we are leading this fight by example.” Oh, the irony!

Intriguingly, at the time he seemed to have a good grasp of the relevant issues. “Freedom from torture,” he said, “is an inalienable human right.” True. “The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States and more than 130 other countries since 1984, forbids governments from deliberately inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering on those within their custody or control.” Also true. And lastly, a straightforward recognition of who the torturers of the world are, and why they do it: “Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit.”

Last week, we learned that among those spirit-crushing rogue regimes was the government of the United States of America, which is now “leading by example” in the field of hair-splitting and wink-nod authorizations of torture. Thanks to the recent “compromise” between the hard-core torturers in the Bush administration and “moderate” Republican torture opponents, we continue to live in a country that does not officially endorse the infliction of “severe pain.” That would be torture, you see. “Serious pain,” however, is fine. That’s merely cruel and degrading treatment. (The president used to be against that, too, but, well, things change.)

The interesting thing, as David Luban points out, is that the compromise defines “serious pain” as “bodily injury that involves … extreme physical pain,” so the ultimate significance of this distinction between serious and severe might be called into question. More to the point, the law simply shreds the very concept of law, as Jack Balkin explained with this rundown of the components:

Eliminating the writ of habeas corpus, denying anyone the right to invoke rights guaranteed by Geneva in judicial actions, prohibiting the use of any foreign sources in construing the meaning of the Geneva Conventions, proclaiming that the president is the authoritative source of the meaning of Geneva with respect to the War Crimes statute, amending the War Crimes statute with language that allows the president to continue to engage in torture-lite (after all, he is now the authoritative source of its meaning), and finally, making all these amendments retroactive to November 26, 1997.

Other countries, of course, practice torture in violation of international law. As has now been clear for a while, we have been in their company for some years. The latest twist, however, is that we now won’t show any shame about it. Rather than simply violating the laws to which we have agreed to adhere, we’re repudiating them, simply denying that the standard by which civilized nations operate apply to us.

The problems here will be widespread. One of the strengths of democracies on the international scene is precisely that it’s much harder for liberal states to violate agreements. Dictatorships can say one thing and do another with ease. Democracies feature free presses, free speech, the rule of law, independent judiciaries, legislative oversight, and other measures to ensure that laws and treaties are followed. This is, to the conservative mind, a weakness. In their view, cheating is a good thing, and America’s historical difficulty in cheating constitutes a problem. They’re dead wrong. Cooperation is a good thing — the best ticket to prosperity, security, and international peace. Democracies can cooperate with other countries — and especially with other democracies — more credibly and effectively, and that’s one of the reasons the world’s democratic block is so much stronger and more prosperous than the rest of the world.

But the rule of law is now off the table as far as Bush is concerned. What’s more, insofar as national-security policy is at issue, the United States increasingly doesn’t look like much of a democracy. As the congressional Republicans march in lockstep behind the White House’s torture agenda, they don’t even know what that agenda’s composed of. The Boston Globe reported Saturday that 90 percent of members of Congress don’t know “which interrogation techniques have been used in the past, and none of them know which ones would be permissible under proposed changes to the War Crimes Act.” Which is just to say that, in practice, absolutely everything would be permitted, since the only people capable of overseeing the interrogation program haven’t done it, won’t do it, and have no intention of doing it in the future.

Consequently, the United States now presents itself as what amounts to the globe’s largest and most powerful rogue state — a nuclear-armed superpower capable of projecting military force to the furthest corners of the earth, acting utterly without legal or moral constraint whenever the president proclaims it necessary. The idea that striking such a posture on the world stage will serve our long-term interests is daft. American power has, for decades, rested crucially on the sense that the United States can be trusted and relied upon, on the belief that we use our power primarily to defend the community of liberal states and the liberal rules by which they conduct themselves rather than to undermine them.

An America prepared to casually toss out the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian diplomacy — along with basic human decency and the rule of law as side helpings — is not a country others are going to want to cooperate with. It will constitute a threat to their own interests and values. Nor will it be a country blessed with a lot of accurate intelligence. As Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has pointed out, an intelligence service shot-through with demands that it torture people “degenerates into a playground for sadists,” the service itself “an army of butchers” skilled at terrorizing its victims but hardly capable of unraveling complicated investigations.

It’s a grim future brought to us by grim and deranged men — by people who seem to have developed an unhealthy level of admiration for America’s enemies. (They want the country they run to transform itself into a facsimile of its evil adversaries.) It’s a future in which it may become increasingly hard for decent citizens of this country to say truthfully that they’re proud to be Americans.

Even Timothy McVeigh Was Afforded Constitutional Rights
The Flaws in the Military Commissions Act
Sen. RUSSELL FEINGOLD
September 28, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/feingold09282006.html
open link for full statement

I am also very concerned about the definition of unlawful enemy combatant that is included in this legislation, and about the corresponding issue of the jurisdiction of the military commissions.

This legislation has been justified as necessary to allow our government to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other dangerous men recently transferred to Guantanamo Bay. Yet if you look at the fine print of this legislation, it becomes clear that it is much, much broader than that. It would permit trial by military commission not just for those accused of serious terrorist crimes, but also individuals, including legal permanent residents of this country, who are alleged to have “purposefully and materially supported hostilities” against the United States or its allies.

This is extremely broad, and key terms go undefined. And by including hostilities not only against the United States but also against its allies, the bill allows the U.S. to hold and try by military commission individuals who have never engaged, directly or indirectly, in any action against the United States.

Not only that, but the bill would also define as an unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by military commission, anyone who “has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.” This essentially grants a blank check to the executive branch to decide entirely on its own who can be tried by military commission.

If we are going to establish military commissions outside of our traditional military and civilian justice systems, at a minimum we should explicitly limit their application to the worst of the worst, those who pose a serious threat to our country. We shouldn’t leave it up to just one branch of government to make these incredibly important decisions.

Terror 2016
Aziz Huq
September 29, 2006
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/29/terror_2016.php

This week, Republicans—aided by Democratic fecklessness—bargained away both liberty and decency in the name of partisan security

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives enacted the Military Commissions Act , a law that strikes harder at American liberties and at the fundamentals of American government than any since the authorization of the Japanese internment. Thursday, the Senate passed the same bill , and President Bush is expected to waste no time and sign it today.

Because the Act gives the president almost ultimate authority to detain, degrade (physically and psychologically), and detain forever both citizens and non-citizens, perhaps Bush will not issue a signing statement. He has used signing statements in the past to signal noncompliance with a duly enacted limit on his power. But the Military Commissions Act of 2006 places no limits on his power. It is a blank check cashed in the liberties of the country’s citizens and in the wasted lives of the unfortunate innocent people swept up in America’s global detention system.

Here’s what happens next:
* * *

Ten years after the Military Commissions Act of 2006, they came for Bobby Jaffar and his family. Officers from a Joint Terrorism Task Force, clad in Kevlar and wielding assault rifles, didn’t knock: They cracked the door down. Ten-year old Bobby and his 17-year old sister were seized. His father—Brooklyn-born with roots in Djibouti—and his mother—a Yemeni Green Card-holder—were taken away separately. It was the last time Bobby was to see them for many years.

Bobby’s father, he later learned had been declared an “unlawful enemy combatant” under the Military Commission Act of 2006. Under a last-minute amendment to the MCA, the President had power to designate any person—citizen or non-citizen—as someone who “purposefully and materially supported hostilities.”

But, asked Bobby, why them?

Bobby’s parents ran a bodega in Brooklyn. They sometimes handled money transfers for members of the Middle Eastern community there. Speaking to a lawyer many years later, Bobby learned that Lebanese immigrants had used the bodega to send money back to West Beqaa, an area within the Hezbollah protectorate. Because Bobby’s father knew what part of the world the money was going to, the feds concluded he had “purposefully and materially supported hostilities.” And that was enough: He could be detained indefinitely.

Before Congress passed the sweeping legislation in 2006, a lawyer ruefully told Bobby later, “material support” had been a criminal statute. People were prosecuted. They had juries. The chance to view and challenge the evidence against them. The chance to learn whether the government had exculpatory evidence about them. But that was in the day. Now, Bobby’s father had a cursory hearing at which he barely had the chance to make his story known.

Back in the day, the lawyer laughed, civil libertarians had expressed concerns about the breadth of the criminal material support prohibition and like statutes. Indeed, mere months before the MCA passed, there had been expressions of outrage about the indictment of a Staten Island man for allegedly broadcasting an Arab TV channel owned by Hezbollah, Al Manar. Surely that was speech, squarely protected by the First Amendment?

Ten years later, the federal government wasn’t even bothering with criminal charges: Federal and state agents swept in during the middle of the night, seized a person, and transported him to military brigs in Wallabout Bay, off Brooklyn. Ten years earlier there had been only two people designated as “enemy combatants” within the United States and they too had been held in military brigs in South Carolina. (Ironically, Bobby learned, Wallabout Bay was also where squalid British prison ships had anchored during the Revolutionary War, and where more than 10,000 Americans died in wretched, fetid cells).

Bobby never did learn what happened to his mother. She was probably taken to the swollen internment camp at Guantánamo Bay along with tens and then hundreds of other non-U.S. citizens. At first, Guantánamo held non-citizens seized abroad. There had never been much fuss about the fact that the camp held many people who were not picked from an actual battlefield, but were swept in from the streets of Pakistan or further afield. Despite an increasing accumulation of evidence that many of these people were wrongly detained , the MCA had stipulated by fiat that they all were “unlawful enemy combatants.” Locking up innocent people, it seemed, won votes in 2006—at least if those people had a different color skin and came from far away.

Until 2007, Guantánamo contained no one arrested in the United States. But the MCA signed off on an executive power to seize people within the States and detain them indefinitely. Before 2006, the executive branch had only tried this in two cases, most famously against Jose Padilla —although it had considered using it against citizens in at least two other criminal investigations in Detroit and Lackawanna, New York. Now, there was statutory authorization for these detentions in the MCA.

Domestic detentions did not start immediately. The first arrest of a non-citizen in the United States came a year after the Military Commission Act’s passage. It hardly received mention in the press. Indeed, Bilal Milos—an undocumented immigrant from Bosnia—never had a chance to press his case in any court—let alone the court of public opinion. He was seized in the dead of night and carried off to Guantánamo. Thanks to the MCA’s suspension of habeas corpus, he had no meaningful way to challenge the allegations against him. He slowly rotted away with the other detainees. Once that precedent was established, the government hurried more non-citizens down the same path. Fear settled like a choking fog around Arab and Muslim communities throughout the country.

To the best of Bobby’s knowledge, his mother was never designated an “unlawful enemy combatant” when she was seized and taken to Guantánamo. Still, she could not challenge her detention in the courts. The MCA did not just take jurisdiction away from the claims of all “enemy combatants”: It also applied to anyone “awaiting such determination.” So far as Bobby knew, his mother had waited and waited for her hearing, her hope and her sanity seeping slowly away in the withering Cuban heat.

What was done to Bobby’s mother to make her talk—well, Bobby tried not to think of that. He heard rumors. Days of confinement in a freezing pitch black cell. He heard about “long-time standing.” Innocuous-sounding enough, this technique had been pioneered by the KGB. After 18 to 24 hours of continuous standing, fluid accumulates in the legs. Ankles and feet swell. The skin becomes tense and intensely painful. Large blisters develop. Eventually, urine production ceases. Then, renal shutdown.

At least, Bobby thought, she was likely still in Guantánamo. Without judicial supervision, detainees were routinely handed over to Egyptian or Syrian hands, where they were subjected to even worse tortures. (Congress and the public ignored the warning bell sounded by the case of Maher Arar , a Canadian citizen mistakenly rendered to Syria for torture, simply because he happened to have lunch with the wrong person years before).

Bobby was baffled to learn later that most legislators didn’t even know what they were voting for when they cast “ayes” for the MCA. President George W. Bush, he learned, had barred all but a handful of legislators from even learning what interrogation measures they were decriminalizing. In the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans ran on a platform of fear and loathing. Democrats, frantic not to look weak on security, gambled away a historical heritage of anti-torture rules and accountable government, with virtually no outcry. But how, Bobby asked, can such vast and terrible powers be vested in one man—without any checks or restraints to make sure they were used wisely? Was this really how democracy was supposed to work? Did no one try to fix it?

The more he learned, the more he understood how a democracy could indeed enact laws that fly in the face of the fundamental values of fairness and decency that any law-abiding society requires. Ignorance and fear flow powerfully. It proved easy for Congress to blind itself to the facts. When a group of legislators visiting Belgium in 2009 were indicted and arrested for war crimes for their sanctioning of treatment illegal under international law, they found it harder to ignore the facts. But that was little comfort for Bobby, his mother or his father.
* * *

The final version of the MCA is as bad as this short tale suggests. Enacted out of selfish and stupid partisan motives, fuelled by fear and blind ignorance on both sides of the aisle, it is a shameful law. It will harm many innocent people and it will make the nation not a jot safer.

And any candidate for federal office who does not endorse its repeal—like every person who voted for its passage—is a candidate not fit to govern.

Integrity, Moral Authority, and Some Inconvenient Truths
Stacy Bannerman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 28 September 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092806F.shtml

“The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts.” General Colin Powell’s statement came after a Congressional “compromise” that would legalize torture and condone trials with secret evidence, among other things. The nation whose Constitution [1] includes the “right to a fair and speedy trial,” the country that crows about its moral values and commitment to human rights, the government whose leader repeatedly states that “we do not condone torture,” is preparing to sign off on a document that makes those policies, protections, and professed moral values a lie.

There is no moral authority without integrity.

We cannot be a beacon of light for the world while shrouded in shadows. America is not who we have said that we are. And the world is becoming wise to what we have tried to hide.

We have tried to hide the hideously uncomfortable fact that America has pursued an unscrupulous foreign policy predicated upon pre-emptive strikes, and initiated a deadly, seemingly interminable, conflict as a matter of first choice rather than last, necessary resort.

Self-proclaimed patriots have parroted the phrase about supporting the troops while sending them to die in a war based on lies. Those same summer patriots have borne false witness, standing silently by as the Veterans Administration has broken every promise that’s been made to take care of the troops when they get home.

The Bush administration is now asserting that the mission in Iraq is to bring democracy to that nation, while methodically stripping away the very basis of democracy in America. We have acquiesced to the unprecedented destruction of civil rights and liberties, and the invasion of privacy, which seems not to matter much to most in the “home of the free.” Not enough to get them involved, anyway, which has become par for the course. Never before has the silent majority been quite so mute.

At last tally, about 63% of Americans said they don’t support the war in Iraq, but are nonetheless (a)pathetically condoning it by refusing to engage democracy, failing to vote, to protest, and to mobilize. I spoke with one of them this summer, when I spent six weeks in Washington, DC, meeting with congressmen and senators, and conducting Operation House Call, a project of Military Families Speak Out. One day, when the heat index soared to 110 degrees, hot enough to melt the tar between the steps in front of the Russell Senate Building, a family passed by our vigil of empty combat boots. The distraught mother of two talked about how upset she was about the war, and asked why more people weren’t doing something.

When I asked her what she was doing, she replied, “Me? Nothing. I’ve got responsibilities. I’m on vacation.”

You do your children no favors by taking them on a tour of the political house of horror that Capitol Hill has become while being an absentee citizen yourself.

If we really cared about children, if we were truly a nation immersed in family values, we would recognize that when we consent to torture, we create a standard of legalized brutality that flies in the face of everything we’ve ever told our kids about who we are, and who they should become. We would know that when we tacitly agree to keep sending soldiers to fight in a war we don’t support - an unnecessary, illegal, and immoral war, according to the overwhelming, condemning evidence - then we, too, are culpable, and damned.

We have hawked our moral compass for the illusion of Homeland Security. We have become a nation that easily excuses violations of law, democracy, and morality, invoking the free pass that we purchased with World War II, and guaranteed with the Marshall Plan and the Good Neighbor policy. For decades, though, we’ve made payments drawn from the account of power and privilege.

With the profligate spending of the politically insolvent Bush administration, and the war in Iraq, this nation is on the verge of moral bankruptcy. And now Congress is moving to ratify the revisions to Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, along with the Wiretapping bill. This would change the War Crimes Act of 1996 to provide retroactive immunity from prosecution for wrongdoing, thereby giving President Bush and his administration a personal “get out of jail free” card.

We have no moral basis whatsoever to congratulate ourselves for what we’re doing to win the unwinnable war on terror. Of course the world is “beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.” The only question is: Why aren’t we?

[1] The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is one of the post-Civil War amendments, and it includes the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. It requires the states to provide equal protection under the law to all persons (not only to citizens). - Wikipedia

How did we sink so low in just 6 years?
Mike Whitney
09/28/06
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15143.htm

“This is how a nation loses its moral compass, its identity, its freedom.”
~ Rep Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)

How did things get this bad? The “Military Commissions Act” which passed the Republican-led Congress yesterday is a bigger blow to the Constitution and our core values than any piece of legislation in our 200 year history. It is 100 times worse than Bin Laden’s crimes on 9-11.

In a 253 to 168 “party-line” vote, the congress repealed habeas corpus and approved the torturing of prisoners in American custody. It is breathtaking assault on human rights and personal liberty and puts the United States well-outside the community of civilized nations. It will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether to strike down this “affront to democracy” or let the law stand as is.

If the bill passes the Senate, the administration will be able to arrest whomever it chooses and lock them up indefinitely without due process. Suspects in Bush’s war on terror will no longer have the right to challenge the terms of their detention or to even know why they have been incarcerated.

The congressmen who supported this mockery have put their contempt for freedom on full display. They have rescinded the oldest and most treasured principle in American jurisprudence dating back 800 years to the Magna Carta. Habeas corpus is the fundamental protection that the one has from the tyrannical and erratic actions of the state.

The proposed legislation allows the president to apply the moniker of “enemy combatant” to any terror “suspect” taken into US custody and strip him of all his human rights. The president is under no obligation to file charges or provide evidence of guilt. The arrest is completely arbitrary and depends entirely on the discretion (whims?) of the executive. It is a flat rejection of the basic belief that “men are innocent until proven guilty”.

Here’s what Winston Churchill said about habeas corpus, “The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”

The bill is another example of Bush’s lawyerly “hairsplitting” which is aimed at gutting the clearly articulated provisions of the Geneva Conventions so that he can carry out his torture-regime with impunity. There is nothing “vague” about “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment. It is a standard that has never been challenged in its 57 year history. Until now.

According to the Washington Post the bill “would give the executive branch substantial leeway in deciding how to comply with treaty obligations that fall short of ‘grave breaches’ of the conventions.”

Geneva was designed to protect prisoners from physical or psychological harm. It is intentionally broad to prevent any punishment that involves the inflicting of pain on detainees. Bush has turned Geneva on its head in an effort to maximize detainee suffering while complying with the letter of the law. To that end, the administration has said that “the term ‘cruel and inhuman’ should only apply to techniques resulting in ’severe’ physical or mental pain….The abused detainee’s symptoms would have to include ’serious and non-transitory mental harm.”‘ (Wa Post)

There’s no reason for Bush to pursue this particular track except to expand his personal power and put himself above the law. Injustice only fuels radicalism and undermines the stated goals in the war on terror.

The congress fully understands the implications of their support. They’re giving Bush a free pass to torment and abuse as he sees fit while providing him with the legal cover he needs for his “alternative techniques” (”outrages to human dignity”) Their vote makes them equally complicit in the inevitable hooding, sense deprivation, hypothermia, stress positions, isolation and water-boarding of countless victims of Bush’s deplorable war of terror.

Like Lady Macbeth the Congress’ avers:

“I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” (Macbeth 3. 4)

The country is in the advanced stages of moral decay. The Military Commissions Act is not a law at all; it is an expression of Congress’ intention to carry out war crimes against defenseless victims in their charge. The men who supported this bill should be held accountable for its inevitable and appalling consequences.

This Ain’t Yer Grandpa’s Democracy
by tristero
Friday, September 29, 2006
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

Well. Now what?

The first thing to do is apparently quite controversial, why, I have no idea. But it is imperative that we fully recognize how seriously godawful the situation is.

I’ll say it again: Americans are living in a fascist state. Don’t like the word “fascism?” Neither do I. So what? It’s ludicrous to call the gutting of habeas corpus, etc, etc, by near unanimous consent merely “authoritarian.”* We are living in a fascist state.

Some commenters in the post below said I am being too discouraging. Hardly. This country’s government has been transformed and is no longer recognizable as a working democracy. That’s simply a fact and we better accept it.

Because when you’re dealing with fascism, “We can beat this, people if we just fight harder!” is naive win-one-for-the-Gipper fantasy-land. It’s gonna get a lot worse than it is now before it gets better. We’re gonna be lucky if more of us don’t end up “persons of interest” to the Bush administration. Remember, if you’re not with Bush, you’re objectively pro-terrorist and I can’t tell you how many times when commenting on rightwing blogs I’ve been accused of “aiding and abetting” the terrorists.

Does that mean not to resist Bush as some people suggested yesterday? I have no idea where that comes from. It never occurred to me.

I fail to see the connection between being realistic - that the situation is absolutely godawful - and giving up. Perhaps it’s my experience as a composer, where confronting literally intractable obstacles - aesthetic, personal, and professional - are often an hourly occurrence. Of course, it’s difficult to stick with it. Of course, it’s discouraging, probably impossible with the odds of failure 10 to 1 or worse. Understanding that - truly understanding that - is the first step towards fighting with competence. You still very well could fail, but at least you’re reality based.

And that makes you a lot more agile and street-smart than most of the folks you have to fight. And that increases the odds in your favor. And your chances of capitalizing on luck. Maybe not enough, but there’s something downright satisfying about giving the bastards the worst possible time you can give them.

But in order to resist Bush, it’s not enough to understand that we are in the early stages of a major catastrophe. We must also recognize exactly how it is bad, awful, dangerous, and the full extent of it before we can craft an appropriate resistance. What is clear is that the strategies used by the Democratic party to resist Bushism are useless.** We need much better ones.

Finally, we must realize that we will be fighting what this unspeakable bastard has done to the country and the world for a very long time.

*Only Republican votes count. And even then, a signing statement can easily finesse where they deign to restrict the god-inspired power of Oedipus Tex to do whatever he wants.

**Of course, you have to vote and of course you must vote for Democrats. Why? Because.

You think that’s no answer? In the amount of time it would take for you to type out all the reasons you and I shouldn’t bother, including gleefully pointing out that in the footnote above, I “admitted” it doesn’t make a difference (which I didn’t, btw), you could have saved yourself all that tedious effort and just voted. So grow up and just do it.

That’s the least you can do. But if you’re serious, you have to find ways to resist Bush in addition to voting that are less futile.

BTW, don’t waste valuable electrons telling us how voting legitimizes a corrupt system, blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard it all before and it doesn’t sound any more plausible the more it gets repeated. And yes, I know full well that the machines are rigged and it is not a paranoid fantasy to think that. It doesn’t matter. Get off your lazy ass in November and vote for Democrats.

Don’t wanna vote for Democrats who voted for torture? Agreed. Don’t vote for them. Vote for other Democrats.

Rogue Presidency
by tristero
Thursday, September 28, 2006
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

Yes, the NY Times gets it. But it’s not telling the whole truth.

The truth is that the United States government is presently holding, torturing, and even murdering countless numbers of people who have no chance in hell of obtaining a lawyer, let alone anything resembling a trial. The government is doing this under the direct orders of George W. Bush. There is no law, no bill, and no legislature who can stop him. If Congress were to pass a law unequivocably banning torture and send it to him, he’d use it for toilet paper. If the Supreme Court were to rule against Bush in the harshest and bluntest language, he’d yawn.

The truth is that there is a rogue presidency and there has been, since January, 2001 (earlier, if you count the stolen election). Certainly, everyone in Washington knows it, but no one dares to admit it. The bill legalizing torture merely enables Congress to pretend they still have some influence over an executive that from day one was governing, not as if they had a mandate, but as if Bush were a dictator. If, for some miracle, the bill didn’t pass, every congress-critter knows Bush would keep on torturing.

Better to vote to pass and preserve the appearance of a working American government, the thinking goes. For the very thought that the US government is seriously broken - that the Executive is beyond the control of anyone and everyone in the world - is such a truly awesome and terrifying thought that it can never be publicly acknowledged. If ever it is, if the American crisis gets outed and Congress and the Supremes openly assert that the Executive has run completely amok and is beyond control, the world consequences are staggering. It is the stuff of doomsday novels.

And this brings up the dilemma of a post Nov. 7 world. Apparently, one if not both houses of Congress may be controlled by Democrats. Now what? You think Bush is gonna get impeached? Put on trial for war crimes? Forget it. You think they’re gonna repeal the pro-torture law they’re about to pass? You can almost certainly forget that, too. Remember: it is crucial to maintain the illusion that Congress still has some say, as it was in November of 2002 about the Bush/Iraq war.

If, for some reason, Congress does decide to move against Bush in some substantive way, there will be hell to pay. Those of us who well remember Watergate remember that while it was genuinely thrilling to have Nixon caught, disgraced, and removed, it was also a time of extreme tension. Would Nixon tough the impeachment trial out, causing the country incalculable harm? It looked for quite a long time that he would. About Bush, there is no doubt.

Since the day after the 2000 election, Bush and his goons have been playing chicken with the very structure of the United States Government, double-daring anyone to try and stop them. If Congress does try - and I’m not talking little things like wrecking Social Security, that’ll happen and a dictator can afford to let things like that wait a while, I’m talking atomic bang bang and thumbscrews - he will force the private Constitutional crisis into the open. And there is no guarantee that Bush will lose.

And that is the truth. The Congress has been given an awful choice: Vote to approve torture and the suspension of habeas or show the world that yes, you really do have no genuine power to check Bush.

Of course, all of Congress should vote against the bill anyway. But they won’t. And to themselves, they will justify the vote as saying they made a hard choice but made the best one they could for their country.

Me, well…I’ve gone on record numerous times about how much I dread radicalism and serious national crises (which are two reasons Bush scares the hell out of me). The prospect of an open Constitutional confrontation, Bush vs. the Congress plus the Supremes…Jesus Christ. Perhaps I should understand the Congress had no real choice?

Absolutely not. The time truly is long overdue where there simply is no choice but to say “enough.” It should have been enough over the stolen election, or the neglect that led to 9/11, or Schiavo, or the filibuster.* But voting to permit the US government to sidestep Geneva? To suspend habeas? What the fuck is Congress thinking, for crissakes??? Has fascism moved so slowly that only a few bloggers can perceive the inevitable progression? I don’t think so.

There’s no question about it. Any person in Congress who votes for this - listening, Hillary? [UPDATE: Apparently, she was.] - will never get my vote again. Ever, not even for dogcatcher, let alone president. If there is going to be a public Constitutional crisis over Bush’s rogue presidency - and there will be sooner or later, guaranteed - bring it on now.

[Update: * To those hardy souls amongst you who feel that I, an appeasing liberal, advocated "going along" with Bush during those earlier moves towards fascism, please read what I wrote. I have been consistent in actively opposing all his stunts of Constitutional chicken and of calling his bluff. Before I started blogging, I was quite active as well. Regarding the Iraq war resolution, I wrote a post long after the resolution passed examining Clinton's motivations for agreeing to it (I am a New Yorker, by the way). Whatever remaining willingness I have to give her a pass will evaporate for good if she votes for torture. She would be sending a strong signal that she simply isn't serious about responsible governance in a time of internal crisis. ]

[UPDATE 2: John Kerry and other Democrats speak out today against USA Mengele Act:
http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/09/28/truth-and-patriots/#comments

[Kerry] Let me be clear about something—something that it seems few people are willing to say. This bill permits torture. It gives the President the discretion to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions. No matter how much well-intended United States Senators would like to believe otherwise, it gives an Administration that lobbied for torture just what it wanted.

The only guarantee we have that these provisions really will prohibit torture is the word of the President. But we have seen in Iraq the consequences of simply accepting the word of this Administration. No, we cannot just accept the word of this Administration that they will not engage in torture given that everything they’ve already done and said on this most basic question has already put our troops at greater risk and undermined the very moral authority needed to win the war on terror.]

[UPDATE 3: From a letter that was sent to me and others by ARIS:

My wife and I have been lifelong Democrats and have contributed and worked on national and Ohio campaigns for the Democratic Party since 1988. This year we were actually looking forward to winning Ohio for the Democratic Party.

No longer. We're livid. We will not work, support or even vote for either Brown or Strickland. Judging from the reaction of many fellow Democrats, we're not alone.]

Looks like I’m not the only person for whom this bill represents a line that cannot be crossed.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.) al abdul mp3 sudais rahmancom 6rb mp3abracadabra mp3 midisweet mp3 70sred mp3 128mbdownloadable sr 71 mp3mp3 fannypack 718mp3 16gb sandisk Mapmovies teenie hardcoremovie upcoming premierswmv porn movies freemovie 1999 releasesadult movie freeasian movie anal samplegallery movie assmoi baise movie Map

Entry Filed under: Political Waves