Bush’s Blank Check and the End of our Freedoms

Are we too busy being entertained by dancing with the stars and celebrity trash to not care about our own lives and standard of living? The general answer is yes. The general public does not care to get involved in anything political and wrongfully, blindly trust our own govt. to do “the right thing”. We to those that care, we can not count on others to take care of ourselves and we, with out a seemingly peep… I can’t say it better than the comments made by Keith Olbermann on his last show of Countdown on MSNBC:


A special comment tonight on the signing of the Military Commissions Act and the loss of habeas corpus.

We have lived as if in a trance.

We have lived as people in fear.

And now, our rights and our freedoms in peril, we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.

Therefore, tonight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before and we have been here before led here by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper editors.

American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.

We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as �Hyphenated Americans,� most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.

American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.

And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: �It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese.�

American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.

Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons. And each was a betrayal of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.

Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.

Many of the very people Wilson silenced survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.

And Roosevelt�s internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States to the citizens of the United States whose lives it ruined.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons. In times of fright, we have been only human. We have let Roosevelt�s �fear of fear itself� overtake us.

We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, �the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.�

We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists. Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.

Or substitute the Japanese.

Or the Germans.

Or the Socialists.

Or the Anarchists.

Or the Immigrants.

Or the British.

Or the Aliens.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And, always, always wrong.

�With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?�

Wise words.

And ironic ones, Mr. Bush, your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act. You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.

Sadly, of course, the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.

We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that �those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.�

But even within this history we have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.

You, sir, have now befouled that spring.

You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.

You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And again, Mr. Bush, all of them, wrong.

We have handed a blank check, drawn against our freedom, to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done to anything the terrorists have ever done.

We have handed a blank check, drawn against our freedom, to a man who has insisted again that �the United States does not torture. It�s against our laws and it�s against our values� and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank, check drawn against our freedom, to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens �unlawful enemy combatants� and ship them somewhere, anywhere, but may now, if he so decides, declare you an �unlawful enemy combatant� and ship you somewhere, anywhere.

And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.

And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an �unlawful enemy combatant,� exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you?

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?

�These military commissions will provide a fair trial,� you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush, �in which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney and can hear all the evidence against them.�

�Presumed innocent,� Mr. Bush?

The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain �serious mental and physical trauma� in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke the Geneva Conventions in their own defense.

�Access to an attorney,� Mr. Bush?

Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.

�Hearing all the evidence,� Mr. Bush?

The Military Commissions Act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.

Your words are lies, Sir.

They are lies that imperil us all.

�One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks,� you told us yesterday, �said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America.�

That terrorist, sir, could only hope.

Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists, real or imagined, could measure up to what you have wrought.

Habeas corpus? Gone.

The Geneva Conventions? Optional.

The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.

These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be �the beginning of the end of America.�

And did it even occur to you once, sir, somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations yesterday of the horrors of 9/11 — that with only a little further shift in this world we now know, just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died�did it ever occur to you once that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future president and a �competent tribunal� of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of �unlawful enemy combatant� for�and convene a Military Commission to try�not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And doubtless, Sir, all of them, as always, wrong.

‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ for Oct. 18 [MSNBC]

RIP Habeas corpus (1215 – 2006)

Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham were presented with an opportunity to uphold the fundamental human right known as habeas corpus, or flinch and write a law that would retroactively make sure that George W. Bush could not be prosecuted for violations of habeas corpus in our overseas concentration camps and prisons. It was a contest between protecting the President and protecting the Constitution.

We don’t need rights right, I mean what’s this whole thing about for Freedom anyway… For those of you that don’t know what this term means – Habeas corpus is the Latin for “you [should] have the body”, is the name of a legal instrument or writ by means of which detainees can seek release from unlawful imprisonment. A writ of habeas corpus is a court order addressed to a prison official (or other custodian) ordering that a detainee be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he or she should be released from custody. The writ of habeas corpus in common law countries is an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action (Wikipedia definition and history)

The modern institution of civil and human rights, and particularly the writ of habeas corpus, began in June of 1215 when King John was forced by a group of feudal lords to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede.

Two of the most critical parts of the Magna Carta were articles 38 and 39, which established the foundation for what is now known as “habeas corpus” laws. The concept of habeas corpus in the Magna Carta led directly to the Fourth through Eighth Amendments of our Constitution, and hundreds of other federal and state due process provisions.

Articles 38 and 39 of the Magna Carta said:

“38: In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.

39: No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”

For those that don’t know our own constitution, it’s a quick but important read:

The question these tragic Republican senators, ultimately, propose to decide is whether our nation will continue to stand for the values upon which it was founded. And they have chosen timidity and convenience – to trash habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act – instead of fulfilling their oaths of office to “defend the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Contact your Local Representative
– and –
Write your state Senator

Let them know now this action will have detrimental effects to not only our current generations but all generations of Americans to follow. No man should go above and beyond his country, and this is just the position Bush has put himself in, with the help of men like McCain, Warner, Graham , Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rove (among others).

(The original writer of some of this post is from the Baltimore Chronicle – please read the rest of Thom Hartmann’s prose)

Majority of American’s don’t believe W

A poll out today puts Bush’s approval rating at the lowest EVER – 33% of those questioned do not approve of the Presidents job -down from 36%. Additionally only 25% of American’s are satisfied with the direction our country is moving in and that 66% believe that Iraq is not making the US safer.

Latest Newsweek poll

You realize that if our government was run like a corporation, where the CEO = the president, and the board = the American people. This guy would have been fired long ago…