From the Consent of the Governed

10 Comments

1. 

   S2 on February 27, 2006 at 12:32 pm

   But don’t forget, Jefferson and his pals only faced the threat of the mightiest nation on the earth at the time, not the awesome power of a religious fanatic with failing kidneys living in a cave halfway around the world.

2. 

   Ed J on February 27, 2006 at 1:05 pm

   in the seemingly endless litany of disturbing items lately. A bizarre aspect of this is that the “state secrets” Trager is protecting are not just US state secrets. This from the Toronto Star, by way of Common Dreams:

   “The need for much secrecy can hardly be doubted,” Trager wrote in an 88-page judgment. “One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar’s removal to Syria.”

   Canadian officials have always denied complicity in the decision to send Arar to Syria after he was held in U.S. custody for 13 days, but Arar said yesterday Justice Dennis O’Connor, who is examining the role Canadian officials played in the affair, should make special note of the judge’s comments.

   Maybe Judge O’Connor has more balls than Trager.

   • 

     BooMan on February 27, 2006 at 1:14 pm

     that is very interesting.

     What say some of our Canadian tribbers?

3. 

   Shalimar on February 27, 2006 at 1:23 pm

   Still waiting for the day one of my best dreams comes true: I’m a prison guard explaining to inmates Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the crew that as prisoners suspected of numerous war crimes they don’t have the right to counsel or charges or trial or really much of anything else other than imprisonment until such time as they stop being sociopaths.  

4. 

   soj on February 27, 2006 at 1:33 pm

   Nobody here is old enough to remember the British back when they had an honest-to-goodness Empire, or just how powerful their worldwide Navy really was.

   But most of us remember the Soviet Union and its assorted allies, with tens of thousands of nuclear missiles, millions of soldiers and wide array of conventional, chemical and biological weapons – always at the brink of a war that would truly be Armageddon if not in name than in deed.

   And they’re all gone.  Even the Chinese, who have never attacked the US, spend less than 1/10th of what America does on its military.  North Korea? Maybe two nuclear missiles at most, and that’s even assuming they could be fired from a ship offshore.  Iran has the POTENTIAL of making a nuclear bomb, maybe possibly.  Who is left? Zimbabwe with their starving hordes?  Myanmar with their astrological dependent junta?

   Libya is toothless.  Cuba has more doctors than guns.  Venezuela?  Syria, with its military budget in the millions not billions?

   We should be riding the wave of one of the most amazing peacetime situations in modern history.  Europe is at peace and all their armies are aligned together.  

   And yet what is the situation? We’re all hiding in cowardly fear that a ragtag band of “evildoers” is going to bring down the only remaining superpower using less cash than it takes to make a single movie in Hollywood.

   Unbelievable…

   Pax

   • 

     leftvet on February 27, 2006 at 2:00 pm

     the foreign evildoers are not the ones who are going to bring down this “superpower democracy”.  We’re going to do it all by our scaredy little selves.

   • 

     Knoxville Progressive on February 27, 2006 at 2:25 pm

     Soj, I wish I could give you a 10!

     That is the best summary I’ve read in a long time of the state in which we find ourselves – a tragedy that a publisher would have rejected as an outlandish farce if it had been laid on his desk a mere decade ago.

     And the wasted opportunities of the last generation (since the fall of the Iron Curtain and subsequent collapse of the USSR) will be ripping through history for a millenium – and through the biosphere for thousands of times longer than that.  (I was just thinking about this when I woke up today, in fact.  Nothing like waking up with a song in your heart, eh?)

     No one won the cold war.  This is a drama that has not played itself out completely yet.

5. 

   Arcturus on February 27, 2006 at 2:49 pm

   Let’s hope the appeals courts take a dim view of the ‘state secrets’ ploy. It’s a faint hope, but still . . . While I doubt renditions & torture will continue at the current levels, I don’t hold out high hopes for any significant policy changes with the dems in control here.

   Amy Goodman had both Maher Arar & Center for Constitutional Rights President, Michael Ratner,  on her show this morning:

   MICHAEL RATNER: You know, this was one of the most remarkable and infamous and worst decisions I’ve ever read by a federal judge. I mean, what it really is saying is it gives a green light to the U.S. to take people like Maher Arar and send them overseas for torture. You understand that he had to accept the allegation that the United States government, the Bush administration, intentionally sent Arar over to Syria to be tortured. And on that allegation, he said, “We cannot go into this case because of national security.”

   And even worse, in my view, even worse, he wrote an opinion that said it might be one thing to torture somebody for purposes of getting evidence for a criminal case; “that,” he said, “I agree is unconstitutional, but it’s not yet sure under the Constitution or it’s still an open question of whether if you torture someone for purposes of preventing terrorism, whether that is unconstitutional.” In other words, he is buying into the argument, buying into it that you might be able to torture people if your purpose is to prevent terrorism. This is coming from a federal judge.

   What’s happened here is the idea that torture is somehow a legitimate means in the so-called war on terror is now seeping into not just the administration and the executive, into the judiciary, into obviously the pundits and everything else. It is one of the most — I mean, I was incredibly flabbergasted when I read that. In other words, you can torture for one reason, but you can’t torture for another. What else do we have to say? This is Pinochet. This is Pinochet saying I can torture in the name of national security, and this is our client on the phone, Maher Arar, who had this happen to him, who was sent to a place by the United States to be tortured.

   SAy, Booman — do you accept emails?

   • 

     BooMan on February 27, 2006 at 2:55 pm

     bottom right corner of the page

6. 

   Arthur Gilroy on February 27, 2006 at 4:09 pm

   BooMan wrote:

   ..when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

   That is what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence. We are all militiamen now. This is the year that we find out whether we can elect a Congress that can throw off this government and provide new Guards for our security.

   YES BooMan!!!

   Only….pray tell me what “we” are going to do when we find out that no matter whether we elect a so-called new congress of people who are owned by the same forces..owned by the current owners’ next door neighbors at best (“Oh yes…he lives a couple of houses to the LEFT of us. Heh heh heh…”> or not we will be in the same predicament.

   Ruled without our informed consent by a corporate-owned government that is totally dedicated to the idea of economic imperialism…”More for us, less for them”…enforced by any means necessary.

   Enforced by business, diplomacy, covert ops, and overt ops in that order of preference.

   And that the people who have borne the brunt of this approach are now in open slave revolt.

   And have found a winning tactic.

   Bleed ’em dry, drop by drop.

   “We are all militiamen now?”

   Please.

   What are we going to do?

   Throw our laptops at the bad guys?

   We are NOT militiamen, we are whiners and complainers.

   Militiamen are ready to DIE for what they believe.

   And militiamen…if they are to be successful…recognize their real enemies.

   When I am taken to task here for pointing out that a stated reliance on organs of putrefaction like Newsweek, CNN and the NY Times to get things done is met with reprimands…then “we” do NOT know our enemy.

   And we are no militia, either.

   “We have met the enemy, and they are us.” Walt Kelly/Pogo.

   Not YET we haven’t…

   Not until we meet the demands of my sig.

   We do not yet even recognize where that “power” that needs to be broken really resides.

   Militia?

   Please…

   “The Weeping Militia?”

   Possibly…

   AG