Letters to the Editor
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Screw Impeachment
The court has made the illegality of the administration's actions clear. If they don't release the prisoners against whom they lack enough evidence to even bring charges, Bush needs to be arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced. End of story.
Are we to accept that the laws which protect a sitting President from being prosecuted still protect him after his actions have been judged felonious and he continues to commit them? Bullshit. If Congress is stocked with co-conspirators and cowards, some DC judge needs to step up and issue a warrant for the President's arrest because a felony is being commited by a citizen within his jurisdiction. Bush is not above the law. This needs to be made clear to him.
So, we have a President who thinks we simply are better than everybody else, and we no longer have to be better than everybody else. We have an AG who thinks the Constitution is quaint and is not ashamed to say so in public and on the record. We have at least one SC Justice who seems to think that our rights are granted by the President rather than endowed by our Creator. And we have a Congressional majority more concerned with how all this is going to help them in the next election than how it is harming the citizens they are supposed to be serving.
I'm half expecting to see a picture of Osama Bin Laden standing in front of a huge banner that says "Mission Accomplished".
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Holy Warrior
Despite the often deserved criticism of recent political campaigns, they occasionally produce defining moments in the national debate. One such moment occurred in the last presidential election when Mr. Bush criticized his opponent’s stance on fighting terrorism. Mr. Bush claimed that Mr. Kerry viewed the fight against terror as a 'police action' and did not understand the true nature of the threat. Mr. Bush argued that fighting terror would require a whole new approach. His 'War on Terror' assumes an enemy that wants to obliterate us simply because of who we are; because of our ideals of freedom and inherent goodness. This is supposed to be the battle of our generation against global 'Islamofascists' whose ideology is so hateful and methods so loathsome that only total victory is an option.
Judeo-Christianity vs. Islam has been a sub-theme of the War on Terror from the start, causing it to increasingly resemble a crusade or 'holy war'. Defeat in a holy war doesn’t just mean the loss of property, liberty, or even death; losing may mean eternal damnation. Anything other than victory is unthinkable. Against these stakes, issues like the weakening of the Constitution and the loss of personal liberties that preoccupy liberals and moderates pale by comparison. Revoking the writ of habeus corpus is a small price to pay when the gates of Hell are yawning before you.
From Mr. Bush's perspective, those of us who don't grasp the necessity of the measures he has taken to protect us are at best misguided and at worst shortsighted fools. The illegal wiretapping, torture, secrets prisons, and of course, the Iraq War, are all vital elements of Mr. Bush's struggle. I never bought the idea that all of the extralegal activities were part of a long-range plan to expand the powers of the presidency. This might be important to people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, but I doubt that Mr. Bush gives a damn about what happens to the Presidency after he leaves it. No, Mr. Bush is fighting his own 'Jihad', and the idea that anything short of either impeachment or a complete cut-off of funds will stop him is wishful thinking.
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But for a camera
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061707A.shtml
How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.
this is a very brief extract from the article listed above:
The Army also protected General Miller. Since 2002, F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo had been telling their superiors that their military counterparts were abusing detainees. The F.B.I. complaints were ignored until after Abu Ghraib. When an investigation was opened, in December, 2004, General Craddock, Rumsfeld's former military aide, was in charge of the Army's Southern Command, with jurisdiction over Guantánamo - he had been promoted a few months after Taguba's visit to Rumsfeld's office. Craddock appointed Air Force Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, a straight-talking fighter pilot, to investigate the charges, which included alleged abuses during Miller's tenure.
"I followed the bread-crumb trail," Schmidt, who retired last year, told me. "I found some things that didn't seem right. For lack of a camera, you could have seen in Guantánamo what was seen at Abu Ghraib."
End of Extract
it amazes me that Bush & co have no concept that pissing that many people off is going to cause some kind of rebound. And I don't mean just in the detainees, but in the public, in those who occupy positions in public life and particularly in the judiciary system, the professionals who care about the kind of country that they are helping to keep civilized.
You don't even have to be an elementary buddhist to understand that placing hostages to fortune here there and everywhere and then behaving like as if you really really really haven't will some day come back and bit you on the ass.
This is about dismantling the Al-Qaeda apparatus that was encouraged and set up by both the CIA and the ISI. They're trying to contain the frankenstein monster they unleashed, they're also using torture to ascertain which in the Al-Qaeda movement are CIA assets and are still dependable and loyal and which have turned, it's the ones that have turned and the new recruits since 9/11 that they're scared about, for the relationship between the very top Al-Qaeda brass and Western intelligence is murky indeed, and they thought they could just contain the whole thing with a pair of pliers and some loudspeakers. They are idiots, and highly malevolent idiots at that.
It's nearly 6 years since 9/11, why isn't the American public suspicious that there has been no trial in Manhattan for KSM and the others?
It's clear that any country that valued the rule of law would try KSM in open court in downtown Manhattan and prove to the world the evidence against him i.e show itself to be fair and open. A dictatorship or fascist state on the other hand would torture him and keep him in hiding all the time endlessly repeating incoherent threats about dirty bombs and hypocritically talk about nuking Iran.