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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Keep your blog focused on this issue: no immunity or amnesty for Bush, Cheney and others in this most lawless of administrations ever. As for Mort Kondracke, isn't he now a hack on FAUX News? (or is he still on CNN?)
So killing twenty Jews by rocket is OK
Are you capable of opening your mouth and making an argument without blatantly lying?
Who says that killing Jews by rocket is OK? Who says that. Be specific.
You have steadfastly declared, by your statements and sneers, all deaths to be equally laughable. Human life must have been held truly cheap in the house where you were born.
I salute you.
"moral posturing" ?
Is that like--putting the "detainee" in an upside down position, with arms and legs shackled while I get to see how many hours it takes for him to complain that he would like to not mess on the floor?
That "moral posturing"--didn't know whether to take you literally. No Jews or Arabs deserve any treatment you deem permissible to further a dubious position of moral right, because we're at war with those people.
Aren't all crimes that get prosecuted are for criminal acts that happened in the past? This argument that we should move on and forget what happened in the past is inane. Imagine: "Oh, judge, I murdered that person yes, but it happened 5 years ago! Thats a long time! Can't we just forget about that and worry about the future, so that hopefully it won't happen again? The best way for me not to repeat my crime is to let me go free. Haven't I suffered enough, just by showing up in court?" This seems to be the equivalent argument alot of the Washington establishment have been spouting and its quite preposterous. It is making the entire legal system look like an Orwellian hypocritical farce.
Glenn, two points - why are you not pleased that Klein seems to have shifted his opinion to more closely match yours? Is this not the goal of an opinion writer, to win people over to your side? So what is the complaint?
Secondly, the first citation of Klein you listed was made in 2002, which is before Klein, as well as most people, knew what was going on in Abu Graib, so how should he be held to account for developing an opinion based on the available facts?
Aren't all crimes that get prosecuted are for criminal acts that happened in the past?
It does tend to be pretty difficult to prosecute future crimes. As you point out, all prosecutions involve looking to the past rather than the future. For that reason, it's hard to see why this puerile excuse only justifies immunity for political officials rather than all criminals.
The US already had its out in the 90s on this, regarding international law. Long before Bush/Cheney raped the Constitution, Clinton and Bill Richardson carved out American exemption from international law. Just follow the whole International Criminal Court stuff from that time, the establishment of "precedent" for American lawlessness -- the US opted out of the Court for fear of "politically-motivated charges" being levied against American operatives.
Actually, the carving out, in terms of actual signatures and ratifications, can be traced to the 1980's, and Douglas Feith lobbying the Reagan Administration, successfully, to send the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions to the Congress with a recommendation of no ratification. Yep, that'd be the same Douglas Feith.
And during Clinton, a lot of pushing for peeling away from international law came from a group that was, at the time, referred to as the 'New Sovereigntists', who disputed whether common or customary international law was in any way binding on the U.S. and opposed the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. That group was composed of some other, little known, lawyers: Jack Goldsmith, John Yoo, John Bolton,...hmmmm.
So, like you, I used to say this had old roots, but, unlike you, I put them in the 1980s with people like Feith.
But then came this interview with International Law scholar Mary Ellen O'Connell by Scott Horton:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/12/hbc-90003966
She most clearly pegs it, with facts to back it up, on the 1960's, and the foreign policy theories of a guy named Hans Morgenthau.
[Carl] Schmitt’s ideas did indeed come to be reflected in the foreign and legal policy of the Bush Administration. Leo Stauss’s dismissal of international law and his support for the strong-man leader came to the United States primarily through Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau’s influence in U.S. foreign policy from the 1960s forward has been extraordinary. By then, the very highest U.S. officials were no longer speaking the language of international law and institutions but of projecting American power. U.S. legal thinkers, of course, took note, and, by the 1960s were also focused on the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Movement. Those movements were primarily concerned with constitutional law, and constitutional law became the prestige topic in U.S. law schools—some top schools no longer even taught international law. The result was that by the 1990s, international law was increasingly being mischaracterized as weak, unimportant or even dangerous—nothing that should fetter the superior American state. And Bush officials were able to find in the Constitution support for a strong-man leader above the law in wartime.
I recommend her interview, if you want to really see how deep these roots go.
Are you capable of opening your mouth and making an argument without blatantly lying?
Objection - counsel is badgering the witness again.
1: (Scheißer242) If you oppose actions taken by good against evil, you are for evil perpetrated against good.
Thanks for the suggestion, although it is as liberal as a suggestion could be. I suspect you of treason.
Our grandfathers would have already lynched the guy.
(Well, at least if our grandfathers were white sheriffs and the rider was a young black man on foot. But you see the parallel.)
Anyway, you and I are not on speaking terms, since I wasn't even nominated for best contributor. Liberal censorship, you know.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
