I find it highly significant that the majority party–not the minority–stormed out of a committee that THEY control rather than debate the renwal of the Patriot Act.
Well, actually, that’s not why James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, abruptly adjourned the meeting–it’s because Republicans don’t want to talk about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Which means that’s exactly what Democrats should, and must, be talking about–America’s gulags, not only in Guantanamo Bay but in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world.
I sense that this is the Republicans’ Achille’s Heel–how can they defend what goes on there…what REALLY goes on there?
I know from the reaction amongst the American public when the Abu Ghraib torture photographs came to light that the Americanp public do NOT like the fact that prisoners are being held without charge for months and years on end, that they are being abused and tortured–and even if they did (especially if they did) approve, it falls to the opposition party to take upon the burden of opposing torture and extrajudicial imprisonment.
Why? Because it’s inhumane.
Because it’s immoral.
Because it’s un-American.
As Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York said: “We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it.”
More below.
By Jim Abrams
June 10, 2005 | Washington — The Republican chairman walked off with the gavel, leaving Democrats shouting into turned-off microphones at a raucous hearing Friday on the Patriot Act.
The House Judiciary Committee hearing, with the two sides accusing each other of being irresponsible and undemocratic, came as President Bush was urging Congress to renew those sections of the post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism law set to expire in September.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the panel, abruptly gaveled the meeting to an end and walked out, followed by other Republicans. Sensenbrenner declared that much of the testimony, which veered into debate over the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, was irrelevant.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., protested, raising his voice as his microphone went off, came back on, and went off again.
“We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it,” he said.
Democrats asked for the hearing, the 11th the committee has held on the act since April, saying past hearings had been too slanted toward witnesses who supported the law. The four witnesses were from groups, including Amnesty International USA and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, that have questioned the constitutionality of some aspects of the act, which allows law enforcement greater authority to investigate suspected terrorists.
Nadler said Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, was “rather rude, cutting everybody off in mid-sentence with an attitude of total hostility.”
Tempers flared when Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., accused Amnesty International of endangering the lives of Americans in uniform by referring to the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a “gulag.” Sensenbrenner didn’t allow the Amnesty representative, Chip Pitts, to respond until Nadler raised a “point of decency.”
Sensenbrenner’s spokesman, Jeff Lungren, said the hearing had lasted two hours and “the chairman was very accommodating, giving members extra time.”
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, speaking immediately after Sensenbrenner left, voiced dismay over the proceedings. “I’m troubled about what kind of lesson this gives” to the rest of the world, he told the Democrats remaining in the room.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, in a statement, said the hearing was an example of Republican abuse of power and she would ask House Speaker Dennis Hastert to order an apology from Sensenbrenner.
Source: http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2005/06/10/patriot/index.html
about how these things work, procedures, rules, etc. “point of decency” — what is that? Could someone help me out on that?
All I know is that in 2001, unlike most of our “representatives” in Congress, I READ the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and was shouting about it from the rooftops and no one seemed to care….didn’t blog back then…
I took some small comfort in the fact that there were sunset provisions on a few things, but really (and I’ll have to go into my office — a complete mess, mind you– and find my notes on it), there are some VERY scary things that do NOT sunset — we should be talking about ALL of them. Here we are in 2005, somehow, I knew I wouldn’t feel any better.
Thanks for this diary!
You know, my office is a pit of disorder too, the dumping grounds of the whole house. Do you suppose my dread of stepping foot in there might be related somehow to my slooooooow progress on the dissertation?
Wanna be my office-clean-up accountability buddy? We could do it Flylady style, 15 minutes at a time.
You betcha! Not today though, k??
Can we start tomorrow? (spoken like the true procrasinator that I am!!)
My Bostonian daughter and I have a pact. We call each other on the phone with our headsets on and start cleaning as we talk. Makes it a lot more fun. My middle daughter likes to listen to books on tapes as she cleans.
“point of decency” — what is that? Could someone help me out on that?
I’ve never heard of it. I was in Student Govt, but I don’t remember ever seeing that in Robert’s Rules. I probably still have a copy somewhere and I could dig for it, but it doesn’t ring a bell. “Point of order.” “Point of information.” Those I could explain, but… nah.
But, IIRC, if you mention someone by name you are under some imperative to yield them time for a response.
Thanks for the info., Cicero!
It seem like a sort of common sense kind of rule, but I take nothing for granted these days!! 😉
It is called a “point of personal privilege”- a member is always in order seeking to either rebut defamatory statements by another member or to raise a claim that they have been wronged by another member.
is the reference for this. This marked the beginning of the end of the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunt.
Are they participating on this issue? Are they shocked? do they care? I have no idea, but this seems like a perfect issue for the democrats and the real conservatives to get together on.
Funny you should ask — I have been wondering this for 4 years! After 9/11 (you know EVERYthing changed and all), I began to see some very valid points in the kinds of arguments that libertarians were making…I boggled at it for a while (I used to write them off all the time), but it occured to me that I didn’t have to agree with everything they argued for to agree with them on the fundemental issue of getting governenment OUT of certain areas of our lives….what are some good (or even not so good) libertarian blogs/sites?
how I can and cannot spell government! lol
When WILL I ever remember there’s a spellcheck here?!?
It would be really great if we could get together on this issue.
in mid-sentence?
Wow. I guess the pretense of normality in our centers of power is getting harder and harder to maintain.
The only thing that scares me is that in faltering democracies, what usually follows such exposure of the naked abuse of power is an open declaration of martial law.
For me — the passage of the “Act with the completely Orwellian name” (I can’t bring myself to type the acronym again — did so once today and it hurt) was the forerunner of things to come….I have just been waiting for the “official declaration”…
sigh
to compare our current crisis with Nazi Germany, but I can’t stop tripping over parallels. Someone on another thread on that other board, said something to the effect of “I don’t think Bush is Hitler, but I’m not sure we’re not acting like good little Germans.” When I look at our indifference to this torture thing, I cannot help but feel we are every bit is culpable as the German’s who had “no idea” what was going on at Auschwitz and Dachau. How will we ever atone for this?
it may not be POLITCALLY correct, but, it is essential that we look at the past and try to LEARN — especially when so many of us continue to “trip over the paralells” (great way to put it, Recordkeeper!!) — do we have to call people Nazis, or Hitler or argue over whether various analogies are exact enough not to offend people? No. Let’s not. Let’s learn, let’s try to do better, not repeat mistakes, not turn “blind eyes” and hearts and minds to things we would rather not see…
We must LOOK, we must SEE, we must be willing to LEARN.
To appropriate a most imappropriate meme:
“it’s that vision thang”, ya know?
Stanley Milgram, in the wake of revelations about Nazi Germany, did studies on human submission to authority and found that most people would be complicit in torture, if we were directed by an authority figure. I watched a documentary on this, when I was in college, and I was horrified. Subjects were directed to administer electrical shocks to people they were told were the subjects.
None of this left me very encouraged about human nature. I fear that the majority of human beings are sheep, and that as long as our fearless leaders and the press keep saying, “Move along folks. Nothing to see here,” the vast majority will. I think there is pretty strong empirical evidence at this point, that this is so. I hate to sound fatalistic, but I have outrage fatigue. I have no idea how you rock the American public out of its complacency. Maybe when credit card interest rates hit 50% and they reintroduce debtors prisons, people will say, “Hey what the hell happened to my country?”
Yep. I saw learned about it when I was in high school — made me look at my peers and their various cliques in a whole new way!
INHO, the only way is one-on-one interaction, small group interaction, back to humanizing “others” of all kinds…talk to your neighbors, ask people’s names who you see on a regular basis (store clerks, dry cleaners, etc.), make inroads to human connections, then there is no “us and them” except the ones trying to dehumanize us all…
I have fatigue too — of many different kinds.
But, I have one move left (did you see that, on the commencement address?)
in fourth grade. I have always remembered and felt very guilty.
I don’t find a hair’s breadth of difference between us and the Germans of the 1930 and 40s. It is a rare person who will tell authority no when it is wrong.
the patriot act when it goes against everything America once stood for?
to the republican thugs running the country, 1984 is more than just a novel. It is an instruction manuel.
I watched some of that hearing, and flipped the channel because it had degenerated into a partisan slugfest. Lost and confused in the shuffle and bullshit rhetoric (on both sides) was any discussion of amendment/repeal of specific provisions of the Act. As the members noted, this was the 12th hearing on the Patriot Act.
“Reader, suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.” [Mark Twain]