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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (7009)	12/16/2005 12:31:08 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 540820

The President and the security agencies do not have unfettered power to act as they see fit in a security-threat situation. They swear to uphold the Constitution. Where does it say in that document that wartime permits the suspension of anything except habeas corpus? Give them free reign to decide when the Constitution is optional and you undermine the entire document and the democracy it supports. It is one of the most treasonous, anti-democratic steps I can think of. But it's so easy to justify when people are scared, you can often get a temporary majority behind it. And the damage is done. You can rebuild buildings and live with damage. You can't resurrect a mortally wounded democracy as easily. I think the quote is one of the most courageous political comments I have ever come across. And it came from a man who knew the consequences of total war. I know your partisanship won't let you accept that idea so let's leave it at that.

To: michael97123 who wrote (7009)	12/16/2005 9:00:14 PM
From: thames_sider	Respond to of 540820

If you believe we are at war (WOT) what bush did was certainly appropriate. Um, during no other war did the POTUS avow that the US needed extra-jurisdictional torture chambers, or the right to secretly move people from one to another. Nor indeed was it necessary to abandon the Geneva conventions when fighting the Nazis, in fact that was one thing separating the good guys from the bad ones. And of course standing up against torture, and preventing the random imprisonment and torture due to race or place, was one of the reasons we fought the last real war. Do you think the WWII veterans would be pleased to find the US snatching 'enemy combatants' (definition variable but not subject to challenge) and torturing them, or shipping them off to elsewhere for secret torture and indefinite jail? Exactly which part of the word "good" do you think this covers? Is this what your grandfather and mine died for?

To: michael97123 who wrote (7009)	12/16/2005 9:15:07 PM
From: thames_sider	Respond to of 540820

A better comparison would be the concentration camps for Japanese Americans during WW2 set up by FDR. No, because then we kept records of interned aliens, gave them legal protection, and didn't torture them on a hunch, still less vanish them in the manner of Chilean (or, er, German) fascist dictatorships. Now these little traces of civilisation are far too liberal for modern times, let's just render them. <render> to melt down (e.g. a corpse) for its fat. How very fitting. Lincoln would be so proud. "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin --- Boy is this an overquoted Ben Franklin remark. Of course we should value our liberty but there are times that the President must act. You really, truly do miss the entire point of the Franklin quote, don't you. Just think, you could be so safe from terrorism etc. if you were to be sealed in a welded steel cube. How about if everything anyone ever said were noted by a special secret group; with powers of arrest to take any enemies, and informants passing on any information they thought showed someone who through like an enemy of the state - hey, let's call them Stasi, or Gestapo, or KGB... get the message? Or maybe call them the NSA... any difference?