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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Coz who wrote (4629)	11/23/2003 8:23:23 AM
From: rrufff	Respond to of 20773

That's a very good start at summarizing the issues and problems. The real problem with big government is always incompetence and lack of communication and that's what did us in. This needs to be fully investigated and exposed primarily so that it doesn't happen again. Unfortunately, the "Bush did 9/11" thread on SI is so filled with whacko theories that it actually hurts the call for truth. There is no way the government or Israel or France or Russia did 9/11. It's likely that there were warnings as there are thousands of warnings every day. The process of sifting out which warnings are real is a daunting one, hindered by bureaucracy and in fighting and just plain incompetence.

To: Coz who wrote (4629)	11/23/2003 11:07:51 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

This is pretty horrible: 19Nov03-'Enemy Combatant' Sham The Bush administration insists that it can hold American citizens in secret as long as it wants, without access to lawyers, simply by calling them "enemy combatants." A New York federal appeals court heard a challenge to that policy this week by the so-called dirty bomber, Jose Padilla. The administration's position makes a mockery of the Constitution and puts every American's liberty at risk. It is important that the court strike it down, and give Mr. Padilla the rights he has been denied. Mr. Padilla is an American citizen who was taken into custody in Chicago in May 2002. The government suspects him of being part of a "dirty bomb" plot by Al Qaeda, but it has not charged him. Instead, it has labeled him an enemy combatant and locked him up in a naval brig in South Carolina. He has been held there nearly 18 months, with no indication of when he will be tried or released. He has not been allowed to meet with a lawyer, despite a lower court ruling that he should be. Of all the post-Sept. 11 denials of civil liberties, the enemy combatant doctrine is among the worst. It gives the president untrammeled authority to lock up Americans merely by asserting that they are part of a terrorist plot. In its argument to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit this week, the government insisted that military-style rules like the enemy combatant doctrine now apply to American citizens, even on American soil, because Al Qaeda has "made the battlefield the United States." Governments are always tempted to detain perceived enemies without charges, hold them incommunicado and deny them counsel. But the framers of the Constitution knew that if the government was allowed to act on those impulses, the result would be tyranny. That is why they built into this nation's founding document the very rights the Bush administration is intent on taking away. Fortunately, it appears from this week's argument that the appeals court panel saw through the administration's spurious justifications. "As terrible as 9/11 was,"` Judge Rosemary Pooler observed, "it didn't repeal the Constitution." nytimes.com.

To: Coz who wrote (4629)	11/24/2003 5:15:21 AM
From: Coz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

Did anyone happen to watch 60 Minutes on CBS Sunday evening. cbsnews.com One of the segments featured four of the pilots who were shot down over Iraq during the first Gulf War and then held as prisoner of war, tortured, humiliated, beaten, threatened under pain of death. The courts awarded them (all of the POWs) nearly a billion dollar part compensation, part punitive. The will of the court was to make the price per soldier so great that any foreign power in the future would have to take this into consideration when decided how they were going to treat Americans captured. We all know that the Bush White house confiscated the impounded Iraqi funds that this compensation was to come from, but what I learn from the story was that the POWs present several alternative offers to the justice department so as not to hurt the war and reconstruction efforts. Yet, no offer is even under consideration. No one in the administration will talk about this issue other than to stay the money is no long impounded and is no longer available to them. The funds are now part of the Iraqi reconstruction projects. What I find particularly pitiful is that although the Bush people would not even give the POWs a hearing by saying that ALL FUND WERE NECESSARY for the Iraqi reconstruction efforts, yet at the same time The Bush people had skimmed of 8 million dollars of the 87 billion going to Iraq and gave that to the Miami police to harass and break up the non-violent protesters at the Free Trade Area of the Americas Summit held in Miami. democracynow.org The whole thrust of this protest was to try and keep American Jobs in America. It had nothing what-so-ever to do with Iraq. Yet the Bush people felt it was okay to skim off the eight million to set up police lines and also have infiltrators mingle with the crowd and try to start fights among those trying to peaceably protest. This is a very strange use of the Iraqi funds in my opinion seeing as how not one cent of that money will be available to American victims of Iraqi aggression from Gulf War I. I thought that the four soldiers interviewed were admirably professional. The interviewer at one point literally set them up to vent angrily at the Bush people and not a single one took that bait. They all spoke with greatest respect for their Commander in Chief and concluded that they could not believe that George Bush personally knew that this was happening as he would surely stop this and make sure Justice was done. It appears that the ex-POWs hope to take the near one billion dollar award and use the bulk of it to set up a foundation dedicated to helping present and future victims of torture at the hands of an enemy in war. Unless they are allowed to collect on their judgement. This will remain only a dream on their part. --Cozzz