In the land of the stupid the intelligent man is not king but some kind of freak. But I digress.
“This is the time to demonstrate to the world that the United States need not abandon its principles even as it seeks to ensure the safety of its citizens.”
– Janet Reno, former Attorney General and member of ACLU Guantánamo Defense “Dream Team”
Unless, of course, they were women and children in a compound at Waco. But we needn’t pick solely on Reno - we always have the sterling example of Madeleine Albright.
See the Democrats have been just as bloodthirsty as the GOP when conducting our foreign and domestic policies.
And if you doubt the Democrats are not as heavily invested in the military-industrial complex did you catch this story in CommonDreams:
Senator John Kerry, the Democrat from Massachusetts who staked his 2004 presidential bid in part on his opposition to the war, tops the list of investors. His holdings in firms with Pentagon contracts of at least five million dollars stood at between 28.9 million dollars and 38.2 million dollars as of Dec. 31, 2006. Kerry sits on the Senate foreign relations panel.
Members of Congress are required to report their personal finances every year but only need to state their assets in broad ranges.
Other top investors include Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican with holdings of 12.1 million - 49.1 million dollars; Rep. Robin Hayes, a North Carolina Republican (9.2 million - 37.1 million dollars); Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin (5.2 million - 7.6 million dollars); and Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat (2.7 million - 6.3 million dollars).
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Democrat and former governor of West Virginia who chairs the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, invested some 2.0 million dollars in Pentagon contractors, CRP says.
Other panel chiefs who invested in defence firms include Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent who presides over the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Rep. Howard Berman, the California Democrat who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
In all, 151 current members of Congress — more than one-fourth of the total — have invested between 78.7 million dollars and 195.5 million dollars in companies that received defence contracts of at least 5.0 million dollars, according to CRP.
These companies received more than 275.6 billion dollars from the government in 2006, or 755 million dollars per day, says budget watchdog group OMB Watch.
Yes they’re all pretty heavily invested in the Matrix. So what is to be done.
Well they’ll have their show trial for Mohammed. Whitney writes:
On the other hand, the ACLU, which has courageously decided to defend Mohammed, will try to demonstrate the basic unfairness of the proceedings (which provide defendants with fewer rights than civilian trials or courts-martial) and how the Bush administration has violated the law at every turn by denying Mohammed due process and by using harsh interrogation techniques, including torture, to extract a confession.
Bush is no friend of civil liberties or justice. Since he first took office in 2000, he’s waged a persistent and systematic no-holds-barred attack on the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions. Last week, a 30-page memo authored by senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo surfaced, showing that the Bush administration worked assiduously to create a legal framework for justifying the cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees in their custody.
“Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner’s eyes poked out? Or, for that matter, could he have ’scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance’ thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting?”
According to Yoo’s 81-page memo, which was declassified last week, the president had the legal authority to order any of these acts of barbarism because, as Yoo says, “Federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief.” The memo also repeats the Yoo’s assertion that an interrogation tactic cannot be considered torture unless it results in “death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions.”
Wow. Remind me not to piss off a man with that kind of power.
I think that’s the point. And most Americans could care less about giving due process to some towel head. Kill them all, God will know his own and all that. The whole world is watching and we could care less.
As far as the ACLU, I always remember my parish priest, Msgr. Schumacher, railing against the ACLU from the pulpit on many Sundays. And heads were nodding all over the congregation.
See this is the salient point of all this. If we really ARE the country we teach our children we are, we would be giving even Mohammed the benefit of the law. After all, if the case is such a slam dunk, what’s the harm? We demonstrate to the rest of the world that we ARE a nation of laws and not a budding torture state dictatorship.
We can’t say, well, we’ll give corporate criminals and their high priced attorney every benefit of the legal system but the people we don’t like because of their race, religion, economic status, etc., we’ll railroad through the courts.
Oh wait, we pretty much do that already.
Never mind.
But anyway, Whitney ends with the quote from A Man for All Seasons that I read while studying law (one class) at Cleveland State. Not that anyone in the society cares about such things, but it’s refreshing to read it anyway:
“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake!”
