As you may know, I have been fighting the FISA “compromise” ever since it was dreamed up by Jay Rockefeller, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Unfortunately, it appears that you have drunk the “Kool-Aid” that Rockefeller has been drinking ever since he was included in the secret briefings that the Bush Administration held shortly after 9-11. Key Democrats, including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former ranking House Intelligence Committee member Jane Harman, and several others were extensively briefed on both the illegal wiretapping and NSA data-mining programs, as well as the illegal torture-rendering that was going on at Guantanamo. While they did not actively formulate and create these illegal activities, since they were advised of them, they are at least complicit co-conspirators.

As far as I know, one of the weights behind the Obama candidacy is Daschle.

e.g., see http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18040719/

(or click on signature).

That would help explain Obama's vote.

Honestly, Shooter, when you make your nincompoopish blanket statements to argue your indefensible positions, use the Google.

The Google has a liberal bias.

:)

Foremost among these is the idea that individual citizens can be held accountable (to the point of deserving death) for the actions of their political leaders.

From Wikipedia:

Collective punishments

Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

Pillage is prohibited.

Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions collective punishments are a war crime. By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World Wars I and II. In the First World War, Germans executed Belgian villagers in mass retribution for resistance activity. In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to "intimidatory measures to terrorize the population" in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices "strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice."

Additional Protocol II of 1977 explicitly forbids collective punishment. But as fewer states have ratified this protocol than GCIV, GCIV Article 33. is the one more commonly quoted.

In the scale of the Iraqi tragedy, Riverbend's is a minor one. Yet one struggles to comprehend why all that has befallen her is somehow justified.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

If Friedman thinks this is somehow justified, it is all for a good cause, then America's unpopularity ought not to bother him; it is an extremely minor sacrifice compared to what else has been lost.

In that way, even President George Bush is more honest than Friedman - the President doesn't seem to be agonizing over his extreme lack of approval at home, it is one of the costs of his policies.

The Anti-Friedman

http://www.lewrockwell.com/scheuer/scheuer10.html

"When we celebrated Independence Day eight days ago, no party leader had the moral courage to tell Americans the truth, which is that in the last 50 years both parties have eviscerated our independence in regard to the single most important foreign policy issue – that is, the decision on whether or not to go to war."

"All of those in attendance here today and the millions more listening or watching across this broad land know that the greatest danger America faces comes not from China, or from Russia, or from global warming, or from Islamic extremism, but rather it comes from the members of our own bipartisan governing elite."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/scheuer/scheuer10.html

I think you miss the point. To Friedman, the case of Zimbabwe is not really horrible, it is excellent because it gives him a chance to preen America's moral credentials. If Friedman had written a Kristof-like column documenting how bad the situation in Zimbabwe is, it would not draw any fire from anyone here.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/022029.html

New Yorker in Trouble?

Posted by Lew Rockwell at July 16, 2008 08:34 AM

Like all magazines - 18th-century dinosaurs sorta surviving in the 21st - the New Yorker is in deep financial trouble. I haven't liked it or subscribed in the Remnick era. Even the cartoon judgement seems off. And now its anti-Muslim smear cover of Obama is hurting it more. Good.

No one would do such a cover of McCain, playing into the most damaging rumors, but imagine this: a jaunty young John, in his pilot uniform, sitting comfortably and chatting with his Vietnamese captors. Two gorgeous gals serve his every wish. He is smoking a cigar and drinking a martini. In th next room other POWs are beeing intensively interrogated. Ha ha, Republicans?

We live in an America where pointing out a simple truth - that McCain's stint as a POW doesn't qualify him to be President (any more than it qualifies him to be network news anchor) is forbidden; unleashes firestorms of condemnation - and in such an America we are supposed to find humor in the New Yorker cover.

Maybe Gary Kamiya needs to wake up and take a look at the world we actually live in.

Of course, we can unshit this bed. After all, we did get from the 12th century liberty and law to the 20th century.

The two things to lament are - why did we lose what we had? What will be the cost of regaining it?