Bush declared a national emergency [ http://www.ccadp.org/executiveorder.htm ] on Sept. 14, 2001, and issued a military order [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011113-27.html ] on November 13th. These acts form the basis upon which Padilla was captured and kidnapped.

This was a faulty and disproportionate response to terrorist attacks. Beyond kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment, Bush perpetrated human rights violations, mistreatment of prisoners and torture on people who were outrageously found to be completely innocent!

These matters are abhorrent and are so violative of U.S. and long-established Common Law and int'l. treaties that our entire system of checks and balances with Congressional oversight and judicial review has collapsed around us. Fear of biological or neurotoxic attacks upon our lawmakers in D.C. led them to pass laws like the Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act and perform kabuki oversight, that is, oversight with no teeth; no subpoenas have been honored, and secrecy reigns over the substantive OLC documents and opinions that formed the basis for suspension of habeas corpus, violation of the third article of the Geneva Convention, and Iraq was visted by a genocide on false evidence.

In order to re-establish safety and security, as well as continue to apprehend suspected terrorists before they have performed heinous acts, it will be necessary to determine what civil violations have occurred, and this must be done by a respected judicial authority that has been spared the insulting barrage of lies and propaganda that has issued from patriots and tyrants.

The Hague International Criminal Court was designed to establish or re-establish justice where treaties and int'l. laws have been scrapped in favor of anarchy, barbarism, or wholesale murder and genocide of a specific group of people who have been singled out. (Such is the case in Iraq.) Our nation has been so subverted by the miserable leadership of Bush and Cheney that we are now incapable of restoring our own affairs.

Presidential Commissions have no legal power to command the kind of emergency legal changes that must be put in place; a commission is a premeditated white wash.

Our only hope for the future of the United States as it is currently comprised is the International Criminal Court. President Obama will not even be able to renounce his own authority in these matters, for certain policy changes can only be made through the force of laws and the enforcement of those laws through punishment meted out by courts.

Unfortunately for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, it's their fault.

Lawyers who enabled such patently false legal opinions that have so disfigured our legislative and judicial branches will have to be disbarred and in some cases, imprisoned; politicians who been instrumental in horrendous abuses will have to go to jail.

There is no going back. In Bushworld, it will have been worth his personal sacrifice to assure the safety of our nation and he will be adjudged by history to have performed heroically.

In my world, he and his handlers grafted a cancer on our body politic that must be excised with the scalpel of international justice and verdicts that our own system is incapable of meting out.

I haven't bothered with print subscriptions, either, for 2 years Traditional media is so lacking in depth as to make even a thirty-minute broadcast or a short article in the Times a total waste of my time.

Moreover, much of what I see on MSNBC or CNN is flawed, slanted or just plain bullshit. It gets pretty easy to spot spin when there's absolutely no substantive back story or scant details.

kudos, as always to Chomsky.

"We have engaged in a flagrant military aggression, ceaselessly attacking a small country primarily to demonstrate that we run the world. The rationale that we are simply enforcing international morality, even if it were true, would not excuse the military aggression and widespread killing that it entails. It also does not lessen the culpability of the authors of this aggression.

"As a primary source of international law, the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal in the 1945-1946 case of the major Nazi war criminals is plain and clear. Our leaders often invoke and praise that judgment, but obviously have not read it. The International Court declared:

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

-Walter J. Rockler, a Washington lawyer, was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. This essay originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune. It may be viewed at the following web address ->->->->-> http://www.counterpunch.org/rockler.html