From my friend Henry, an excellent essay on the way things are right now....
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Detainee Justice
Why I'm going to have a hard time voting Democrat: The bipartisan support of the Detainee Bill clearly shows that neither party in our two-party system is prepared to act on behalf of protecting the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.
There is so much wrong with the Detainee Bill, just passed by Congress, that a week would not suffice to write it all down. Just a few main points: removing the right of habeas corpus from our legal code - allowing certain persons in the government the authority to deny certain citizens a right to trial by a jury of their peers. This is obviously dangerous and a BAD thing.
Allowing the government to torture people legally is also one of those "slippery-slope" things real conservatives used to be against. And if that wasn't criminal enough, how about exempting anyone from prosecution, retroactive to 1997, for committing crimes under the Geneva Conventions? In every case I can call to mind, whenever a government votes some people the specific immunity from prosecution for specific offenses and specific time periods, it is an open and obvious admission that those crimes had been committed. Where is the sense in making laws meant to protect people from government when the government just votes itself blanket immunity from prosecution for these crimes?
Quite apart from these other outrages, there is a provision in this bill that empowers the President and the Secretary of Defense (??) to declare anyone they dislike, at home or abroad, citizen or non-citizen, an "enemy combatant" and to legally deprive them of any legal rights. Add to this the Presidents' new right to define what torture is and you have a glaring and terrifying invitation to the very worst kinds of abuses a government can commit against its people.
Quite frankly, the only real use I have seen for the Democratic Party is to oppose this kind of crap when proposed by the Republican Party. But now they are acting, once again, in collusion. We have no opposition party in either the House of Representative or the Senate. The Republicans have extended their ownership of national corporate media to for a virtual monopoly on the press, so all the elected officials, whether Democrat or Republican, are towing the same line. And it isn't our line their pulling or our agenda they're supporting. They're supporting the interests of the 10% who own 90% of this country and want to extend their control of everything into every aspect of our lives. Being able to declare anyone you dislike and enemy combatant is a perfect way to ensure that you can crush any actual opposition. This kind of law has always been used in this way. That is why this kind of law gets passed.
Good people neither support nor tolerate this kind of governmental trespass on basic human rights, human dignity, and the prerequisites of liberty that have defined the American way of life for more than a century. Supporting this kind of legislation is unforgivable. Supporting people who think torturing people is a good idea is clear evidence of moral decay.
We're being sold down the river in the name of our own safety in the same way as the German people were defrauded by their government into supporting totalitarianism because democracy was too dangerous and too expensive.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and dozens of others in the current administration have clearly been guilty of crimes against humanity and have actively supported the overthrow of our own democratic government. Their aim in all of this has been to replace our representative government with a totalitarian regime that owes its allegiance to the highest bidder. Isn't two fake national elections sufficient warning of their ultimate goal? Every time I hear their words, I perceive only the latest incantation of deceit and know that all their promises of peace and plenty are just the same sad litany of every venal tyrant who ever stole the birthright of their nation's people with lofty sounding words.
