America's hour of shame: goodbye habeas corpus, hello torture

This is America’s hour of shame. It’s been our years of shame, starting with the drumbeat of lies leading to the invasion of Iraq, and then the mishandling of the occupation, and now, the worst: the suspension of habeas corpus and the institutionalization of torture. If you had told me 25 years ago, when I immigrated to America, that one day this country would be torturing its enemies, I would’ve thought it absolutely, totally, and completely impossible. Yet it has to come to pass. I will be writing a piece later this week to express my pain and outrage and sorrow about where this president has brought us, and the quisling Congress that has followed him and Cheney into the dark side. Meanwhile, here are some responses from the blogosphere and the mainstream media.

1. Rogue Presidency -- by tristero (from hullabaloo 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:
[Kerry] Let me be clear about somethingÔøΩsomething 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 theyÔøΩve 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.
tristero 9/28/2006 05:00:00 AM Comments (242) |Trackbacks (3)


This Ain't Yer Grandpa's Democracy

by tristero

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. [See update.]

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.

[Updated slightly after original post.]

[UPDATE: Some in comments and elsewhere have disputed my use of the F word here. Among the arguments: fascist states don't have elections. Well, in fact they do. But they're rigged. Computerized voting machines anyone. Another is that free speech is curtailed in a fascist state. Well, in fact it is. What matters freedom of speech in an era of megachurches if you don't have access to a significant microphone?

I deliberately chose one the most "extreme" words available because it sets off alarm bells. I am aware that this eruption of American fascism is quite different than classic examples. I am also aware that the extent of fascistic repression is small compared to other countries. American fascism doesn't resemble European models, or Asian, or Middle Eastern totalitarian states. But that doesn't make it any less fascistic.

If the cult of a leader inspired by God and Manifest Destiny, deeply beholden to corporate interests, which condones torture, heaps contempt on habeas corpus, plays the race card whenever it can, passes laws based upon the whim of the leader, and severely restricts the free discourse of ideas on the truly mass media isn't fascism, then please tell me what is.

More active use of the repressive powers Bush has seized? More censorship? That's simply a quantitative argument. The "quality" of fascism is undeniably here.]


2. Uncomfortably Numb to Torture
As America's politicians, media and citizens get used to wartime abuses, Bush's horrific policies get a pass.
By JoAnn Wypijewski (from the LA Times)

A year ago this week, a military jury convicted Army Reserve Pfc. Lynndie R. England of maltreating detainees. The face of the Abu Ghraib scandal, England is forever fixed in photographs as the girl with the bowl cut and the pixie smile who pointed at Iraqi prisoners while they were forced to masturbate and who held a writhing, naked man by a leash. Before sentencing, the Army prosecutor thundered: "Who can think of a person who has disgraced this uniform more? Who has held the US military up for more dishonor?"

Indeed, it was that uniform - not the breach of immutable standards of decency held by this nation - that put England in the dock and eventually in prison. It was that uniform and nothing else, because if England and the others charged in the scandal had been civilian interrogators instead of military police, they would be among the privileged torturers whom President Bush and members of both parties in Congress are determined to keep on the job and to shield from future prosecution.

Abu Ghraib has become shorthand for the kind of abhorrent behavior that, in the latest discussion about interrogation techniques, nobody ventures to allow. In that sense, Abu Ghraib is the new American standard, a negative one, marking the line that must not be crossed. A positive standard - that is, humane treatment of unarmed prisoners - being inconceivable, debate turns on permissible degrees of inhumanity; "rough stuff," as New York Times columnist David Brooks and others justifying pain say lightly.

So here is the bitter joke: England, the public emblem of torture, was convicted for nothing so awful as what the president and his flank have chosen to protect. Her crime was to smile, to pose, to jeer at naked, powerless men, and to fail to stop their humiliations or to report them afterward. She did not shackle men in stress positions, strip them of their clothes, deny them sleep, force them to stand for hours or days, douse them with icy water, deprive them of heat or food or subject them to incessant noise or screaming.

Despite Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain's compromise, none of those brutalities is expressly outlawed in the legislation that Congress just passed and the president is about to sign.

Such brutalities were regular fare at Abu Ghraib because interrogation, by civilian and military personnel, was regular fare. But interrogation was largely sidestepped in the Abu Ghraib trials, in which prosecutors focused on what soldiers did for "fun," for "laughs," with common criminals "of no value" to US intelligence. The infamous pyramid and sexual mortifications were not part of interrogations, so these formed the centerpiece of criminal charges. The daily application of fear and cold and want and pain - what Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr., the putative ringleader of the scandal at Abu Ghraib, called his job of "terrorizing prisoners" - was an accompaniment to questioning, so it went unpunished.

"We just humiliated them," England said; it could have been worse. For many detainees, it was. Two days before England was photographed laughing at prisoners, Manadel Jamadi died in a shower stall at Abu Ghraib. Army investigators found that he entered the stall under his own power with civilian interrogators said to be from the CIA. Later, soldiers smiled in pictures with his corpse. The interrogators had vanished, and no one was charged.

Congress would never justify murder by interrogators, but it hasn't insisted that anyone be held accountable for Jamadi's death either. There's a similar indifference to accountability in the one case in the Abu Ghraib scandal unavoidably linked to interrogation.

The Army never took a sworn statement from the prisoner who was forced to stand atop a box, draped in a hood and cape and told he would get a shock if he moved. Then the Army conveniently lost him, and though the MPs who improvised his ghoulish torment went to prison, the civilian interrogator who the MPs said instructed them to keep the prisoner awake was never charged. Take away the bogus wires and the iconic costume and this is the kind of treatment the president says is absolutely necessary for our safety.

The bold opposition wags a finger but leaves it to the president to set the rules. Where is the outrage? Like England and the others who went from good to bad, or bad to worse, through acquaintance with cruelty, finally accommodating themselves to it or even administering it, the citizenry, the media and the politicians have become insensible to horror.

Years of conditioning to abuse and war have had a numbing effect. So the president's advocacy of an "alternate set of procedures" for detainees gets a pass. The Democrats' official response, a pass. The McCain compromise, a pass masquerading as courageous dissent. Public reaction to legislating indefinite detention, the admissibility of hearsay, prosecutions based on torture, a pass.

As at Abu Ghraib, up is down, day is night.

(JoAnn Wypijewski covered the Abu Ghraib trials at Ft. Hood, Texas, for Harper's magazine.)

3. A Personal Declaration of Independence
I refuse to accept as my government actions by the current administration and its obsequious servants, the Republican Congress and the Republican Senate.
By William A. Cook (from Information Clearing House)

“If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic … It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” (President George W. Bush, Sept. 15, 2006 report by AP’s Terence Hunt)

09/29/06 " Palestine Chronicle " –
Citizens of the United States of America bear an awesome responsibility to maintain control of their government’s behavior since that government derives its powers from the consent granted it by the citizens. When the government ceases to act in accord with the dictates of the respective consciences of its citizens as determined by its foundational documents – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights -- , when it violates the established principles that give this nation legitimacy before the nations of the world through mutually accepted agreements, charters, and conventions, when it abrogates the inalienable rights granted the citizens by the Creator, when it declares unequivocally that the citizens cannot dissent with an action or actions taken by the government, then it is the right and the duty of the citizen to “alter or abolish” that government.

For the past five years, the present government of the United States, including the Executive branch, the Congress and the Senate, has committed a “long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object (that) evinces a design to reduce them (the citizens) under absolute despotism.” As a citizen of these United States for 70 years, I refuse to be ruled by a tyrant who imposes despotic, autocratic control on the citizens of these United States through a series of clandestine actions that usurp the rights of the people.

I refuse to accept as my government actions by the current administration and its obsequious servants, the Republican Congress and the Republican Senate, that include

* spying on its citizens without their knowledge or consent, an action contrary to existing law;

* elimination of personal privacy through the Patriot Act, an action that presumes culpability, not innocence until proven guilty;

* preemptive invasion of other nations determined by the unilateral judgment of an all powerful executive that eviscerates the power of the peoples’ representatives;

* acts of extrajudicial execution and the abandonment of rule by law thereby making the President, in effect, judge, jury and executioner;
* acts of torture and the unilateral infliction of “acceptable” torture techniques thus casting America before the world as an amoral nation beholden to no international agreement and placing at risk the soldiers who defend it;

* imposition of illegal actions of war instituted through an orchestrated control of lies communicated to the citizenry thereby negating their democratic right to know that they might vote in accord with their conscience;

* levying an incredible tax burden on the citizens to pay for the consequences of these lies that will cost them and their children dearly for decades to come while corporations reap a windfall of profit from closed bids and corruption;

* infliction of a forced military occupation on a nation against the desires of its people and enabling that occupation to use illegal weapons of war contrary to the Geneva Conventions thus implicating its citizens in acts against humanity;

* development of diverse nuclear weaponry in direct violation of the UN Charter even as it decries other nations for attempting to acquire their own nuclear weaponry;

* acceptance, indeed, complete complicity and support of the barbaric and genocidal actions of the state of Israel against the people of Palestine, and most recently, and most deplorably, the abandonment of all pretense to the behavior of a civilized nation through its almost unanimous acceptance of a resolution written by the American Israeli Political Action Committee to endorse the Israeli state’s wanton destruction of the state of Lebanon.

These are not the actions of a democratic state; these are the actions of an autocratic state, an amoral state, an arrogant state that rules by force and acts more ruthlessly than the “extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective,” negating by its actions the unthinkable comparison the President decried.

For six years I have tracked the deception of this government as it surreptitiously acted to acquire more and more power by instilling in the American people the fear necessary to propel the autocrat to absolute power. Fear suppresses individual inquiry even as it enables control of the people, ostensibly to provide protection for them. Fear creates victims, especially in the minds of those who have not been violated. It is the unknown, what might be that metastasizes into the mental slave, the compliant citizen who marches to the drum of those who would control a society. It is the instrument of tyrants and dictators.

This government hobbles its citizens by using fear to manipulate their belief in end time prophecy, by implanting fear of imminent threat from “Islamofacist” fanatics, and by immersing the people in a false sense of “victim hood” that links them with the state of Israel as the only “friend” in the mid-east suffering from the same terrorist scourge. It is time to dispel this fear that enslaves. It is time to declare that this government no longer serves the people, that, indeed, it surpasses in its behavior “the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” It is not the “compassion and decency of the American people” that is in question; it is the absence of “compassion and decency” in this administration that is at fault.

It is time to withdraw recognition of it as the government of these United States.
How can a citizen withdraw recognition, one might ask? I would answer simply that no person with a conscience could recognize the validity of this government that commits the actions listed above, each more heinous than the last, the worst being its near universal acceptance of the genocide perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinians, actions that are inclusive enough to incorporate almost all the others. If every person of conscience gave sign of their aversion to the behavior of this government by wearing a black armband or posting a black flag or ribbon on the door or window ledge or by flying our flag upside down, the numbers who distrust this government would be manifest for the nation and the world to see and we would not have to wait till election time to cast our conscience on the screen.

I tell you this, each day that passes casts more gloom over this nation as hundreds more die and thousands more are maimed, and all for a lie and all in our name. Appealing to our representatives accomplishes nothing; they are but lackeys to the administration and to the primary lobbing groups that determine for them America’s foreign policy, AIPAC and the lobbies for the military/industrial complex. We can no longer wait for the ballot box to determine our future; it may not be our conscience that is voted to office. Should we not act to declare this government unjust and hence unfit to be our government, then we will be no better than those who dictate and inflict these atrocities on the innocent. I will not have my conscience held hostage by an elite few who rule without a conscience. The honest citizen carries no weapons against his brothers and sisters; the honest citizen marches forward in tune with reason and common sense not fear and ignorance.

Think how many Lebanese died, how many were maimed, how many went homeless, how many die now after the cease fire because Israel left its calling card in the form of miniature mines for children to play with, how much destruction and wanton devastation this government inflicted in our name while our representatives waited for AIPAC to pen the resolution that gave license to such slaughter. If any justice came from this invasion it was this: the world was witness to the savagery and barbarism of Israel that ruthlessly devastated another people out of sheer anger turned to vengeance, a behavior that it has inflicted at will on the Palestinians behind locked gates and its Wall of Infamy.

Think now of the holocaust being inflicted on the people of Gaza, the reign of fire that comes with missiles launched into crowded civilian neighborhoods randomly killing mothers and children, a reign of terror that has lasted over three months as the Israelis lock the gates to prevent access to medical care, food, employment, and business, a reign of terror that starves the children, denies the people electricity and water, a reign of terror that is calculated, vicious, and inhumane. But it is done behind the Wall, out of sight of our conscience, locked out of public view by the Israeli IOF and its government that has closed access to Gaza by air, sea, or road. Americans cannot complain because our representatives have capitulated to an Israeli government gone mad, driven by racism as it surreptitiously rampages through schools, refugee camps, factories and homes killing, demolishing, executing at will a population that is cornered, starved, and near total death; yet America supports this mayhem justifying it as “self-defense.” How does an illegal occupying force operating on stolen land defend what they do not own and call it self-defense? What non-sense guides this crippled republic that our representatives would defend such dementia?

Where does one turn for guidance out of this morass? Will our Christian leaders proclaim the teachings of Jesus from the steeples of their churches? Will they condemn the government for its ruthlessness? Will they march in the streets to demand change? Will they echo Tolstoy’s astute observation, “to kill is incompatible with man’s uprightness…(for) A Christian, whose doctrine enjoins upon him humility, non-resistance to evil, love to all (even to the most malicious), cannot … join a class of men whose business it is to kill their fellow-men.” (Writings on Civil-Disobedience and Non-Violence). Oh, there are those who cry in the wilderness, congregations that have divested themselves of the atrocities inflicted by Israel and they are to be praised even as they are ignored by our representatives. There are the Christian Arabs in Bethlehem who weep each day as they see their flock decimated and their brothers and sisters murdered, maimed, and humiliated as that malicious Wall surrounds the birth place of their God and our representatives turn their backs. And there are voices for peace, millions of voices that decry the wanton brutality of this regime, Christian and Jew and Muslim, men and women who know they are drenched in the blood of the innocent because this despotic “President” has determined how they must think and how they must behave and our representatives kneel on bended knee before his throne.

But the horror of America today rests not just in the dementia of its leaders but in the distorted madness of its evangelical fanatics who have cloaked themselves in the armament of prophecy declaring themselves God’s voice on earth as they propel their sheep to wage endless war against God’s creatures. Men who follow not in the footsteps of the humble and peaceful Jesus but in the footsteps of prior fools and idiots that ran rampant in other days and times inflicting mayhem and death on the innocent. These fanatics do not know the teachings of Jesus; they read from a gospel of fear that has metamorphosed Jesus into a General who wields a bloody and fiery sword, stomping over the hills and valleys of the earth wreaking havoc and death, thus does the God of light and peace, of brotherly love, become the new Satan to whom these TV evangelists pay homage.

They are men of war who stand behind their pulpits in glistening cathedrals of gold and glass while they send the children of their congregations to slaughter. These men are criminals not Christians. They do not understand the bells of penitence for sin; the only bells they ring intone the opening of the Stock Market or the cash register.

Pastors like John Hagee, Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, Benny Hinn, and all the others who crowd the Cathedral of Television lead their respective laity into battle each day, marching at their head, holding aloft their missiles of fire and brimstone, tearing incendiary passages from the Old Testament and Book of Revelation that pour like acid from their mouths and flame forth against perceived disbelievers and infidels. Their exhortations on behalf of their malicious God pits dementia against the teachings of Jesus, pits vengeance against brotherhood, pits fear against love, and power against compassion.

Have we transformed a nation respectful of all, protective of the rights of all, assertive of the inherent rights that give personal authority to our conscience, into a nation that denies these values in order to inflict our will on all peoples of the mid-east? Has this nation granted to its President and Congress absolute authority to determine what we as a citizenry must obey if we are to be Americans? Have we returned to the days of McCarthy, days of fear and loathing, forcing on all the demented ideology of a few? Have we willingly accepted their lies that brought forth the invasion against the Iraqi people, the subterfuge that perpetuates the genocide of the Palestinians, the fear they use to compel loss of individual rights? Have we handed to this administration the one force that gives us power in this nation, our right to dissent? Liberty is not liberty if it is defined for you; freedom is but a word if it does not give you peace of mind; and conscience does not exist if you do not exercise it.

I would assert that as long as the compassion and decency of the American people are defined by this administration, we are a nation without compassion and without decency and as long as this administration directs the behavior of this nation, any comparison to Islamic extremists who “kill innocent women and children” pales in comparison with the hundreds and thousands this administration has slaughtered in our name in Palestine and Iraq and Lebanon. There is but one response and that is to deny it my consent.

(William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Depception: Bush's Mideast Policy He can be reached at: cookb@ULV.EDU.)


4. Why Torture Is Still An Option
The compromise terrorism detainee bill limits interrogation abuses-and lets Bush set the limits
By MICHAEL DUFFY (from Time Magazine)

A few days after terrorists toppled the World Trade Center in 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney said the U.S. would have to "work...the dark side" in order to destroy Osama bin Laden's network. Just what the dark side could mean became clearer last month when George Bush suddenly announced that 14 suspected al-Qaeda terrorists had been shipped from mysterious overseas locations to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was the first White House confirmation of a secret CIA-operated network of overseas prisons, places where unorthodox methods of interrogation were not unknown. "Were it not for this program," Bush said, referring to the secret prisons and the things done there, "al-Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland."

When Congress adopted legislation last week to establish military commissions to try terrorist suspects, it also gave approval to that program and then some. By allowing coerced testimony to be entered as evidence in trials, Congress potentially legitimized torture as a means of obtaining information. It left the President in charge of filling in the details of what the allowable methods should be. The clearest limit to what might be done was actually not so clear. The new methods could not constitute "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. But after all the huffing and puffing from Republican Senators John McCain, John Warner and Lindsey Graham, the Executive Branch kept control over what exactly could happen to an "enemy combatant." It was allowed to decide who an enemy combatant might be. The package of measures widened the definition to include any person determined to be one under criteria defined by the President or the Secretary of Defense.

More than that, the measures adopted by Congress last week stripped defendants of the ancient habeas corpus right to challenge their detention in court—a step that makes it possible that the Supreme Court will strike down some portion of the law and send everybody back to the drawing board. "The Supreme Court has made clear on three recent occasions that those whom the White House labels enemy combatants are entitled to challenge their detention before a federal judge," says Eric Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who is a legal consultant to Guantanamo detainees. "This new law was passed in outright defiance of those rulings."

What the legislation is likely to do even sooner is put the CIA's secret-prison program back online. That's right: back online. Although when he revealed its existence, the President left the impression he had suspended the program in response to a June Supreme Court ruling, that's not so. What neither he nor Congress nor the CIA has publicly acknowledged is that the agency halted the "special interrogations" in its secret prisons more than nine months ago. People briefed on the matter tell Time that the agency backed away from its program in December 2005 as Congress passed an amendment to the 2006 defense bill banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. According to other U.S. officials, then CIA Director Porter Goss feared that the amendment, sponsored by McCain, might undercut the legal authority for CIA interrogations. So Goss put those procedures on hold while seeking a legal opinion from the Justice Department.

For the next nine months, says a person briefed on activity in the program, some at the agency developed a bias for killing its targets instead of bringing them in for questioning, though sources add that ground conditions make capture impossible anyway. Goss's suspension order left officers in the agency's directorate of operations, says the source, repeatedly asking the question, What are we going to do with these guys if we capture them? So far in 2006, as government sources and public reports indicate, few if any terrorist suspects have been captured by the CIA. But at least four—including bombmaker Abu Khabab al-Masri, on the FBI's most-wanted list—have been killed, in most cases by remotely fired missiles from Predator drones.

The rules adopted last week may mean a return to the practice of capture and question. But question how? Just what interrogation methods are off the table now? Depends on whom you talk to. McCain, who along with Graham and Warner had fought the Administration on some of the most coercive methods, insisted to reporters last week that the harshest techniques—such as waterboarding, stress positions, extreme sleep deprivation and hypothermia—could now be illegal. "For all the gloating from the Administration," says Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch, "they are not getting what they want on torture." And what methods are O.K.? No one inside or outside the CIA will say. Which may mean we're going to be fighting on "the dark side" for some time to come.

(Reported by Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi and Adam Zagorin/ Washington)


5. This Time, Congress Has No Excuse -- by Andrew Cohen (from the Washington Post)

Of all the stupid, lazy, short-sighted, hasty, ill-conceived, partisan-inspired, damage-inflicting, dangerous and offensive things this Congress has done (or not done) in its past few recent miserable terms, the looming passage of the terror detainee bill takes the cake. At least when Congress voted to authorize the Iraq War legislators can point to the fact that they were deceived by Administration officials. But what's Congress' excuse now for agreeing to sign off on a law that would give the executive branch even more unfettered power over the rest of us than it already has?

It just keeps getting worse. This morning, esteemed Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman published this fine essay in the Los Angeles Times. His lead? "Buried in the complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

"This dangerous compromise," Professor Ackerman continued, "not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops 'during an armed conflict,' it also allows him to seize anybody who has 'purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.' This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison."

Scary enough for you? But wait, there is more. The legislation also appears to allow illegally-obtained evidence- from overseas or right here at home - to be used against enemy combatants (which gives you an idea of where this Congress really stands on the National Security Agency's domestic spying program). And wait, there is this: the Administration's horrible track record when it comes to identifying "enemy combatants" and then detaining them here in the States. Two of the most famous ones, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, both ended up having the highest courts in our land back up their legal claims, which is why the government had to release Hamdi outright and then turn Padilla over to the regular civilian courts (where he is a defendant in a weak case against him).

Do you believe the Administration has over the past five years earned the colossal expanse of trust the Congress is about to give it in the name of fighting terrorism? Do you believe that Administration officials will be able to accurately and adequately identify so-called "enemy combatants" here at home so as to separate out the truly bad guys from the guys who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Did you want your legislative branch to abdicate so completely its responsibility to ensure that there are adequate checks and balances upon executive power even in a time of terror? You might have answered "no" to all three questions. But your answer doesn't matter. And neither does mine. To Congress, the answer is "yes, sir." Our Congress is about to make yet another needless mistake in the war on terror and this time the folks making it won't be able to say that the White House tricked them into it.


6. On Torture -- by Ed Kinane

It's frightening that, at this time and in this nation, torture must be discussed as if it were a legitimate issue. What's next -- the pros and cons of child molestation?

Even hawkish old warriors like Sen. John McCain and retired General Colin Powell say torture is counterproductive.

Numerous are the reasons -- both expedient and moral -- for eliminating torture:

~ Torture degrades and dehumanizes the torturer. That may be his problem, but that torturer comes home and becomes a husband, a father, a neighbor, a politician....

~ Torture undermines the moral stature of those who condone it. Torture loses "hearts and minds" and allies -- huge strategic mistakes.

~ Torture embitters the tortured and those who care about them. Like invasion and bombing, torture recruits "terrorists."

~ If enemy soldiers face torture upon being captured, they are less likely to surrender. Their determined resistance causes more casualties on both sides.

~ Torture is utterly inconsistent with New Testament Christianity. Jesus, who was himself tortured by invaders occupying his country, urged, "Love your enemy."

The case against torture is irrefutable. What more need be said? Why is the torture issue still alive?

The issue keeps coming up because torture keeps being exposed at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or wherever. The issue keeps coming up because the Bush administration keeps pushing torture as a "legitimate" response to "terrorism" -- a terrorism it's doing its utmost to generate. Bush Inc.'s war on Iraq is just terrorism with a bigger budget and bigger bombs.

The Bush administration didn't pioneer torture. Invaders, almost by definition, use torture. In the 20th and 21st centuries invaders favor air wars. Bombing cities -- Baghdad and Fallujah for example, is mega-torture.

The U.S. Army used torture in Viet Nam. Those techniques were secretly taught at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Panama and then at Ft. Benning, Georgia years before Bush became Commander-in-Chief. The difference now is that Bush brazenly seeks to legalize and institutionalize torture.

The case against torture being unanswerable, why does the "Christian" George W. Bush jeopardize his soul? Why, despite broad condemnation and despite the strategic cost, does he openly promote torture?

I'm not yet ready to accept the recently suggested hypothesis that Bush is the devil. The likelier answer is akin, but more mundane. I suspect -- but would welcome being proved wrong -- that the Bush administration is seeking to establish precedent.

If U.S. people and the U.S. Congress can be conned or scared into tolerating the torture of "enemies," this will help legitimize torture generally. On this slippery slope, we will be de-sensitized to torture wherever it occurs and regardless of the technicalities of jurisdiction.

Why would our Neo-con leaders want that? Tolerating torture abroad paves the way for torture at home. Not only will anyone designated a foreign enemy be liable to torture, but also those designated as domestic enemies, as domestic "security threats." If you don't support the you-are-either-with-us-or-against-us Bush administration, you just might end up on its enemy list.

Sound farfetched? Consider: Bush Inc., by promoting torture, puts our own soldiers at greater risk. If these war criminals dismiss the lives and rights of our own soldiers, why would they be any gentler with non-soldier U.S. citizens?

Already we have seen how Bush Inc., through illegal domestic spying and the so-called Patriot acts, and through extraordinary rendition and the suspension of habeas corpus, is no great respecter of the Constitution.

Domestic torture -- or internal terrorism as it might be called -- is business as usual for certain U.S. allies and other authoritarian states seeking to squash dissent and intimidate opposition. The Neo-cons who have captured our government know they cannot succeed in conquering the world if they don't first finish conquering the U.S.

(In 1998/99 Kinane spent ten months in federal prison for writing "SOA = Torture" on the entrance sign of Ft. Benning, the home of the U.S. Army's notorious School of the Americas. Contact him at edkinane@verizon.net)


7. The Medieval Detainee Bill: An Uncivilized People -- by Jacqueline Marcus

What does it mean to be a civilized people?

There are laws that represent an Enlightened Age and, conversely, there are laws that represent a Dark Age. Today, our Congress has abolished, in Molly Ivins’ words, “a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta,” and replaced it with barbaric laws. With a single vote, they’ve done away with a humane, civil right: the right to know what charges detainees’ have been accused of and the detainees’ right to challenge those accusations in a court of law. The traditional saying is every person has a right to a trial, a right to confront his/her accuser and to challenge the accusations. It is a profound safeguard to protect the innocent.

These humane laws that characterize a civilized nation have been usurped by a medieval oligarch: According to the new archaic law, George W. Bush determines the final fate of detainees, many of whom were innocent Afghani farmers, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. That fate is cruel and unusual. No presumption of innocence. The punishment is either life in prison or death.

Once detainees are brought under U.S. jurisdiction, our constitutional rights should apply like a beacon to the world, demonstrating that we are a civilized people. And if they don’t, will U.S. citizens also be subject to the same fate? We cannot simply excuse this barbaric legislation on the bias that it is “them and not us.” Habeas corpus is a self-evident right, an apriori right recognized, universally, by rational thinkers from Plato to Rousseau, from Locke to Jefferson, from Lincoln to Martin Luther King.

Bush’s and his supporters’ message to the world is: The hell with rational and just laws. Saddam had it right: Rule with an Iron Hand.

As a Democrat, I felt obligated to call the twelve Democratic Senators who approved of the Bush administration’s archaic detainee bill. The medieval law bars “suspects from challenging their detention or treatment through traditional habeas corpus petitions. They allow prosecutors, under certain conditions, to use evidence collected through hearsay or coercion to seek criminal convictions.” (Washington Post)

Eleven staff members were cordial and several admitted that I was not the only caller. There were a few who seemed to be agreeing by voice acknowledgement, but were duty-bound to their Senators. All staff members politely listened to my objections except for one: when I called Senator Salazar’s (D-CO) office, I was met with an insolent reply: that if I was not a constituent, Salazar was not interested in hearing my criticisms. Before I had a chance to voice my complaint, the staff member cut me off. He told me to call my own Senators (Boxer and Feinstein). I calmly responded, “They would never have voted for such a disgraceful bill.” He rudely snapped, “Good. Go congratulate them.” Then, slam! He hung up on me. As soon as he heard the words, “detainee bill” – he refused to listen.

Republicans, the Party that traditionally supported individual and state rights, (hence the true meaning of conservative), relinquished their traditional principles for corporate sponsorship. Some Democrats are equally corrupt, approving a rogue bill for short-term political and corporate gain. Despite their reasons, it’s unconscionable. Congress has a moral and ethical duty to protect and uphold our Constitution. They are not supposed to give their allegiance to a single man or administration, especially when that man believes that he’s the Ruler of the World.

Bush uses the terms, “security and defense,” as an excuse to abolish our fundamental freedoms, but security and defense means protecting the public’s welfare and health. This administration has stubbornly eliminated as many safeguard health and environmental protection laws as possible. If they cared so much about protecting us, why are they systematically shredding health/environmental laws?

“This is going to be a long war,” said Senator Warner. That’s right, a long war that lines the pockets of the weapon contractors, Halliburton and the oil corporations with no end in sight. They could care less about defending Americans. Doesn’t Katrina speak volumes to that evidence? Clearly, history reveals that we’re living in the Dark Ages.

(Jacqueline Marcus’ ( jackiemarcus@justice.com ) editorials and letters have appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, Slate, New Times, (San Luis Obispo, CA Cover story: “The Politics of Restraint”). Her poems have appeared in national university journals, The Kenyon Review, The Ohio Review, The Antioch Review and many more periodicals. Her book of poems, Close to the Shore, was published by Michigan State University Press. She teaches philosophy at Cuesta College and is the editor of ForPoetry.com)


8. Detainee law may not provide total immunity for CIA interrogators -- by Greg Gordon and Marisa Taylor (from McClatchy Newspapers)

WASHINGTON - Congress has eased the worries of CIA interrogators and senior administration officials by granting them immunity from U.S. criminal prosecutions for all but "grave" abuses of terrorism detainees.

But legislation passed Friday may not leave them entirely in the clear.

International legal experts said the measure is meaningless overseas, where international courts theoretically could still prosecute alleged violations of anti-torture treaties.

The same experts concede such prosecutions are highly unlikely - but not because there's no evidence of wrongdoing. Instead, they predict American economic, military and political power will deter any country from allowing the cases to proceed.

"The obstacles to these prosecutions are not legal, they're political," said William Schabas, director of the Irish Center for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland in Galway. "There's certainly an arguable case that international crimes have been committed by American officials, and probably with the blessing of civilian political leaders going right to the top."

President Bush asserts that al-Qaida terrorists are a different kind of enemy and that the Geneva Conventions ensuring the humane treatment of prisoners were too vague to define what interrogation methods could be used to extract information that might prevent another Sept. 11. He said in announcing the transfer of 14 top terror suspects from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay that the United States does not torture, but that "alternative" techniques gleaned information that disrupted attacks and saved lives.

Human rights groups here and abroad, however, are in an uproar, assailing tactics such as giving a detainee a drowning sensation or shackling him to the floor naked for hours in a 50-degree room.

On the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said some of the techniques appear to have broken the law, and that through amnesty, "those who sent out the memos, those who gave the new directions will be off the hook," setting a precedent that "will make it harder to prosecute war criminals who abuse Americans."

The firestorm seems sure to rage on, because the new legislation appears to allow Bush to authorize continued use of some coercive interrogation tactics, possibly including sleep deprivation or making a detainee stand for hours.

The law itself also is expected to face strong legal challenges in the United States, mainly because it bars captives from appealing their detentions in court.

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents hundreds of detainees, said his group is preparing to file new war crimes charges in November in Germany against more than a dozen senior U.S. officials, probably including attorneys who shaped the policy. Two years ago, the group filed similar charges against Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and 10 others - charges that were dismissed after Rumsfeld hedged on whether he would attend a conference in Germany.

Legal experts say charges also could be filed in a recently created International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, which has jurisdiction over war crimes. European authorities are under pressure to respond to allegations that they breached human rights laws by cooperating with illegal CIA kidnappings and detentions of their own citizens. Italy has issued arrest warrants for 22 CIA agents.

Avril McDonald, an international law expert based in The Hague, said it's possible that U.S. officials could be charged with conspiracy in the ICC or in countries such as Belgium, whose legal systems allow private parties to bring war crimes charges.

At least 11 officials were involved in shaping the U.S. policy for interrogating captives overseas, including three Cabinet members - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was White House counsel at the time, Rumsfeld and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who officials say was consulted while he was chief of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. Another of those involved is 9th Circuit federal appeals court judge Jay Bybee, who as an assistant attorney general signed off on it.

Even if there were no prosecutions, experts said, the fallout from revelations over the U.S. government's secret policy could tarnish America's moral standing in the world.

Adam Roberts, a professor of international relations at Oxford University and co-editor of the book "Documents on the Laws of War," noted that the United States has been at the forefront in urging prosecutions of war criminals in genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda "no matter how high the positions" they held.

Roberts called the provision of immunity for all but grave abuses "extremely controversial both within the USA and internationally," adding that it sets a bad example for dictatorships to follow. He also said U.S. personnel could be arrested and prosecuted if they travel abroad and are recognized as alleged violators.

Congress was pressed into action after the Supreme Court ruled June 29 that Bush overstepped his authority in setting up a special military court system for terror detainees. The high court also suggested that the Geneva Conventions could apply.

The legislation now headed to Bush's desk not only creates a new military court system but also grants immunity to everyone involved in creating or carrying out the interrogation policies, so long as they did not commit "grave" Geneva violations. Sponsors of the bill said it would prohibit the most controversial technique - simulated drowning, known as "water boarding" - a method that sources say was used on self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and No. 3 man Abu Zubaydah.

The policy permitting such tactics emerged as administration lawyers grappled with the reach of the president's war powers in responding to the Sept. 11 attacks. In January 2002, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to violent, stateless actors such as al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

When Secretary State Colin Powell objected, then-White House Counsel Gonzales urged Bush to stand firm. If the Geneva prohibition on "outrages upon personal dignity" applied, Gonzales wrote in a memo, U.S. officials could face prosecution under the 1996 U.S. War Crimes Act that enforced the treaty.

If Geneva were ruled inapplicable, he said, that "would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."

With the CIA pressing for precise guidance on how far it could go in interrogating senior al-Qaida captives, Office of Legal Counsel chief Bybee issued a controversial Aug. 1, 2002, memo defining torture as actions triggering severe pain akin to organ failure "or even death."

John Yoo, the lawyer who drafted the memo, said in an interview on Wednesday that he and other administration lawyers faced "the toughest kinds of questions" in the months after Sept. 11 and "tried to do their best to protect the government from future attacks from a very dangerous enemy."

Powell wasn't the only dissenter. FBI Director Robert Mueller directed bureau counter-terrorism agents to stay out of the room during coercive interrogations of detainees in Guantanamo Bay, said a U.S. government official who insisted upon anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

While criminal prosecutions have been brought over abuse of Prisoners of War in Iraq and the death of a detainee in Afghanistan, a person familiar with the program said the interrogations of senior al-Qaida figures at secret sites were "very tightly controlled," with a physician and psychologist present.

Experts in international law said that the tactics would violate the Geneva Conventions, which override any nation's assertion of amnesty for war crimes.

"Legally, this isn't worth the paper it's written on," said McDonald, of the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague.

Even so, Martin Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor, called it "virtually inconceivable" that interrogators who abided by Justice Department guidelines would face U.S. prosecution even without the amnesty provision.

The department's advice "was completely wrong in many respects, but nevertheless, it was probably reasonable for them to rely on it," Lederman said. Senior administration officials could argue they made reasonable legal interpretations, he said.

Yoo, now a University of California law professor who has written a book defending the expansion of the president's war powers, argued that Bush could abrogate any international treaty. He said he is not worried about legal liability.

(McClatchy correspondent Tish Wells contributed to this report.)


9. Now, We're On the Record as a Torturing Nation
Mommy, What's Waterboarding?
By DAVID SWANSON

Remember the great harm done to the moral core of our nation when, according to the excited news reports following Kenneth Starr's great work in life, children were asking their parents what oral sex was? Neither do I. But children can now ask their parents what torture is, how waterboarding works, and when exactly torture is a good thing. "Mommy, we're going to play enemy combatant. Can I have some pliers to pull out Geoffrey's fingernails?"

Can I just say, to the Representatives and Senators who just voted to overturn (or allow George Bush to "interpret") the Geneva Conventions and half the Bill of Rights and I say this as mildly as I know how WAKE THE HELL UPYOU COMPLICIT FASCIST MORONS; BUSH HAS CAMPS PLANNED FOR SOME OF YOU, AND DANTE HAS A CIRCLE RESERVED FOR THE REST. Oh, and one more thing: oral sex feels GOOD. Torture HURTS LIKE HELL. Got it? The world needs more sex, less sadism. What exactly are you unclear on?

Remember when Bush, like O.J. Simpson on the trail of the real killer, was energetically searching the White House (not to mention consulting a private lawyer) to determine who had leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to the media? Neither do I. But if it had happened, wouldn't it have made sense for Bush to simply subject Cheney, Rove, Libby, Armitage and a few others to a little torture until they spilled the beans?

Of course not. The slightest threat of discomfort, and these characters would have each confessed to the leak, the Kennedy assassination, and firing the secret missile into the Pentagon from the ghost jet. Just look at what fear of a vague threat of future prosecution has brought them to. Bush and gang, terrified of prosecution for violating the War Powers Act of 1996, have rammed through Congress, just before an election, a piece of legislation that removes Habeas Corpus and retroactively legalizes war crimes a piece of legislation that will quite likely be, in part or whole, ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Whether the Supreme Court lets this illegal law stand or not, international courts need not. Legalizing torture and murder did not protect Pinochet or Hitler. And legalizing impeachable offenses does not protect a President from impeachment. On the contrary, it adds yet another impeachable offense to the list. And don't think for a minute that this President isn't scared of impeachment as well. There's no other explanation for the Republican National Committee announcing, in conflict with every bit of evidence, that impeachment is a good issue for Republicans in the coming election. The Bush gang attacks wherever it's most scared. The Pelosi gang falls for the bluff every time.

Because the list of impeachable offenses grows on a daily basis now, it may be helpful to list the top ten grounds for removing these thugs from office. The reasons can be found just after the main text of the U.S. Constitution. They're labeled "The First Amendment," "The Second Amendment,"....

Of course, I'm kidding. Bush and Cheney have destroyed much more than 10 amendments. Here are my top ten reasons to impeach:

1.-Launching an aggressive war, using fraud to sell the war to Congress and the public, and misusing government funds to move troops to Iraq and begin bombing raids prior even to Congress's dubious authorization to use force.

2.-Targeting civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, and using illegal weapons, including white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new type of napalm.

3.-Arbitrarily detaining Americans, legal residents, and non-Americans, without due process, without charge, and without access to counsel.

4.-Authorizing the torture of thousands of captives, resulting in some cases in death. Having prisoners hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross and shipped to other nations and secret U.S. bases to be tortured.

5.-Illegal warrantless spying, and lying to the public about it for years.

6.-Failing to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, to provide troops in Iraq with body armor, to attempt to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or to work to decrease global warming.

7.-Using signing statements to refuse to obey hundreds of laws passed by Congress.

8.-Stealing the 2000 and 2004 elections.

9.-Systematically using propaganda and disinformation, selectively and misleadingly leaking classified information, and keeping secret information meant to be public.

10.-Urging Congress to pass bills that will retroactively and unconstitutionally legalize a number of the crimes listed above.

(David Swanson can be reached at: david@davidswanson.org)


10. A Constitutional Shredding
Rounding Up U.S. Citizens
By MARJORIE COHN

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment of detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."

Bush & Co. has portrayed the bill as a tough way to deal with aliens to protect us against terrorism. Frightened they might lose their majority in Congress in the November elections, the Republicans rammed the bill through Congress with little substantive debate.

Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on Bush's list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies could be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.

The bill also strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. Congress has the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus only in times of rebellion or invasion. The habeas-stripping provision in the new bill is unconstitutional and the Supreme Court will likely say so when the issue comes before it.

Although more insidious, this law follows in the footsteps of other unnecessarily repressive legislation. In times of war and national crisis, the government has targeted immigrants and dissidents.

In 1798, the Federalist-led Congress, capitalizing on the fear of war, passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle dissent against the Federalist Party's political agenda. The Naturalization Act extended the time necessary for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because most immigrants sympathized with the Republicans.

The Alien Enemies Act provided for the arrest, detention and deportation of male citizens of any foreign nation at war with the United States. Many of the 25,000 French citizens living in the U.S. could have been expelled had France and America gone to war, but this law was never used. The Alien Friends Act authorized the deportation of any non-citizen suspected of endangering the security of the U.S. government; the law lasted only two years and no one was deported under it.

The Sedition Act provided criminal penalties for any person who wrote, printed, published, or spoke anything "false, scandalous and malicious" with the intent to hold the government in "contempt or disrepute." The Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government in time of war. The Republicans objected that the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of the Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against Republicans, the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and newspaper editors who criticized President John Adams.

Subsequent examples of laws passed and actions taken as a result of fear-mongering during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following World War I, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act).

During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in "red-baiting."

One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a timid Congress. The Patriot Act created a crime of domestic terrorism aimed at political activists who protest government policies, and set forth an ideological test for entry into the United States.

In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United States. Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would "lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables.

In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States , Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." Seventy-three years later, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans "they need to watch what they say, watch what they do."

We can expect Bush to continue to exploit 9/11 to strip us of more of our liberties. Our constitutional right to dissent is in serious jeopardy. Benjamin Franklin's prescient warning should give us pause: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

(Marjorie Cohn , a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law , will be published in 2007 by PoliPointPress.)


11. Pirates of the Mediterranean -- by ROBERT HARRIS

Kintbury, England

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”

Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.

But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”

Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.

Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey’s opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.

It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.

It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy — imperfect though it was — rose again.

The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate does not have the same result.

(Robert Harris is the author, most recently, of “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.”)