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On The Passing Of The Torture Bill....
Well folks, they’ve gone and done it: torture is now legal in the United States of America, Land of the Free and Home of the brave, and formerly illegal wiretapping is a fact of life. The people everyone in the world look to for the moral high ground.
Until these “compassionate conservatives”, those “Good Christians” who are so righteous and holy their leader talks to God, and God not only talks back to him, He sends him “gut feelings” all the time to guide him, and actually SPEAKS THROUGH HIM, he says, until they came to power, destroyed the Middle Class to create the Working Poor, started an unjust, illegal, immoral, undeclared war, we were the quintessential example of ethical and humanitarian behavior. Now we are the same as all the other third world countries: all power and necessities in the hand of the rich, everyone else scraping the dirt to get enough to survive one more day, and if someone annoys the Holy and Dreaded Rulers, they get “disappeared”, tortured, and maybe they get returned, may be not. Maybe they turn up dead.
More
http://americaabroad.tpmcafe.com/blog/ian_macleod/2006/oct/01/they_passed_the_torture_bill_gave_bush_wiretapping_and_america_is_dead
Why Torture Is Still An Option
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
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541238,00.html
American show trials
In the play A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More and William Roper, the man who wishes to marry More's daughter, have an exchange about the evenhanded application of law.
More says that he would extend the protections of the law even to the devil. Appalled, Roper retorts that to get at the devil he would "cut down every law in England." More replies, "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? ... I'd give the devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake."
More's point of view had always been America's point of view. Our country gave alleged evildoers of every stripe the benefit of due process. It was a point of national pride and a shining example of how America lived up to its reputation for securing liberty. It also was the only way to ensure that the right people - the truly guilty people - were the ones being punished. By giving them due process we enshrined it for ourselves.
But in passing legislation on the interrogation and trials of suspected terrorists, Congress has switched allegiances. Our nation now stands with Roper.
To get at those we suspect of terrorism, the constitutionally grounded protections that have defined us as a nation for more than 200 years have been seriously diminished.
- Until now, no one could be held indefinitely upon the order of the president without having access to the courts to challenge the legality of that imprisonment. Now Congress has handed the president the power of monarchs. The legislation bars the courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions from "unlawful enemy combatants," who are essentially defined as anyone the president so designates.
- Until now, no evidence obtained by waterboarding or dousing a naked detainee with cold water and leaving him to contract hypothermia could be introduced in court. Now, evidence garnered through abusive or coercive means before Dec. 30, 2005 (the date Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act) is considered valid as long as a military judge agrees.
The legislation includes numerous other ways in which traditional due process protections have been weakened or abandoned. Under the new law, the use of hearsay evidence is permitted; the right to a speedy trial has been eliminated; and sharp limits have been imposed on judicial review.
More
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/10/01/Opinion/American_show_trials.shtml
More
http://americaabroad.tpmcafe.com/blog/ian_macleod/2006/oct/01/they_passed_the_torture_bill_gave_bush_wiretapping_and_america_is_dead
Why Torture Is Still An Option
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
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541238,00.html
American show trials
In the play A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More and William Roper, the man who wishes to marry More's daughter, have an exchange about the evenhanded application of law.
More says that he would extend the protections of the law even to the devil. Appalled, Roper retorts that to get at the devil he would "cut down every law in England." More replies, "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? ... I'd give the devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake."
More's point of view had always been America's point of view. Our country gave alleged evildoers of every stripe the benefit of due process. It was a point of national pride and a shining example of how America lived up to its reputation for securing liberty. It also was the only way to ensure that the right people - the truly guilty people - were the ones being punished. By giving them due process we enshrined it for ourselves.
But in passing legislation on the interrogation and trials of suspected terrorists, Congress has switched allegiances. Our nation now stands with Roper.
To get at those we suspect of terrorism, the constitutionally grounded protections that have defined us as a nation for more than 200 years have been seriously diminished.
- Until now, no one could be held indefinitely upon the order of the president without having access to the courts to challenge the legality of that imprisonment. Now Congress has handed the president the power of monarchs. The legislation bars the courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions from "unlawful enemy combatants," who are essentially defined as anyone the president so designates.
- Until now, no evidence obtained by waterboarding or dousing a naked detainee with cold water and leaving him to contract hypothermia could be introduced in court. Now, evidence garnered through abusive or coercive means before Dec. 30, 2005 (the date Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act) is considered valid as long as a military judge agrees.
The legislation includes numerous other ways in which traditional due process protections have been weakened or abandoned. Under the new law, the use of hearsay evidence is permitted; the right to a speedy trial has been eliminated; and sharp limits have been imposed on judicial review.
More
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/10/01/Opinion/American_show_trials.shtml
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