September, 2006 archive

That’s one thing the Decider didn’t tell us Wednesday in his forceful yet obfuscatory speech confirming the existence of the CIA prisons and announcing the transfer of 14 detainees to Guantanamo Bay, including boldface-name miscreants such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida.

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Since the president didn’t address this question, I’ll try. The only reason that makes any sense to me is that the Decider wanted to put his secret prisons beyond the reach of U.S. courts. I think the president and his lawyers knew from the beginning that detaining suspects indefinitely and wringing information out of them with methods that international agreements define as torture — “an alternative set of procedures” was the president’s delicate euphemism — wouldn’t amuse even the most law-and-order federal judge.

The full story of what has taken place at Guantanamo Bay and in the CIA’s overseas prisons will come out someday. But even with the little we know so far, I remain convinced that history will view these acts of arbitrary detention, extraordinary rendition and coercive interrogation with strong censure and deep shame. The president’s claim that “the United States does not torture” comes with an asterisk, since his definition of torture is as tortured as Bill Clinton’s definition of “is.”

(snip)

No, an American “detained” by al-Qaeda wouldn’t enjoy a guarantee of due process. But we’re not al-Qaeda. I thought that was the whole point.

U.S. District Court Judge Catherine Perry also scolded school officials for continuing the program after warnings that it violated the Constitution.

South Iron Elementary in Annapolis, a town of 300 in southeastern Missouri, has quietly allowed Gideons International to hand out Bibles to fifth-graders for years. After concerns were raised last year, the then-superintendent consulted with the district’s attorneys and insurance company and recommended that the handouts stop, but the school board voted to continue them.

Acting on behalf of two sets of parents from the district, the
American Civil Liberties Union sued in February in federal court in St. Louis.

“The defendants were repeatedly told that their actions violated the Constitution, but they chose not to heed those cautions,” Perry wrote in the preliminary injunction issued Wednesday.

Such as?

“There was massive complicity in this attack by U.S. government operatives.”

But here was Bush on March 13, 2002: “I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority….I truly am not that concerned about him….We shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his al Qaeda killers anymore.”

Following through on the Bush plan, which calls for military tribunals allowing evidence obtained through coercion, would cast the nation as a hypocrite in the eyes of the world, the scholars said.

“We can’t do things that violate our basic notions of law and fair play, no matter how despicable the person is,” said Mark J. Miller, a political science and international relations professor at the University of Delaware. “He or she deserves a process that is consistent with our standards.”

But I saw our president taking unseemly advantage of the terror threat. I saw him take short cuts in the law. I saw him repeatedly mischaracterize the facts. I saw him hang pre-existing projects on this new peg. I saw him try to make Americans– always before a proud, free people–live in fear, so as to aggrandize his own power and prevent criticism of his policies. Now members of his cabinet have been so emboldened by their megalomania that they are likening critics of the Iraq War to Hitler-lovers.

Bush did it again on Wednesday. He continues to peddle the Abu Zubayda myth:

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Today, in the same subtle terms in which Mr. Bush and his colleagues muddied the clear line separating Iraq and 9/11 — without ever actually saying so—the President quoted a purported Osama Bin Laden letter that spoke of launching, “a media campaign to create a wedge between the American people and their government.”

Make no mistake here—the intent of that is to get us to confuse the psychotic scheming of an international terrorist, with that familiar bogeyman of the right, the “media.”

The President and the Vice President and others have often attacked freedom of speech, and freedom of dissent, and freedom of the press.

Now, Mr. Bush has signaled that his unparalleled and unprincipled attack on reporting has a new and venomous side angle:

The attempt to link, by the simple expediency of one word—“media”—the honest, patriotic, and indeed vital questions and questioning from American reporters, with the evil of Al-Qaeda propaganda.

That linkage is more than just indefensible. It is un-American.

Mr. Bush and his colleagues have led us before to such waters.

We will not drink again.

And the President’s re-writing and sanitizing of history, so it fits the expediencies of domestic politics, is just as false, and just as scurrilous.

“In the 1920’s a failed Austrian painter published a book in which he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany and take revenge on Europe and eradicate the Jews,” President Bush said today, “the world ignored Hitler’s words, and paid a terrible price.”

Whatever the true nature of al Qaeda and other international terrorist threats, to ceaselessly compare them to the Nazi State of Germany serves only to embolden them.

More over, Mr. Bush, you are accomplishing in part what Osama Bin Laden and others seek—a fearful American populace, easily manipulated, and willing to throw away any measure of restraint, any loyalty to our own ideals and freedoms, for the comforting illusion of safety.

It thus becomes necessary to remind the President that his administration’s recent Nazi “kick” is an awful and cynical thing.

And it becomes necessary to reach back into our history, for yet another quote, from yet another time and to ask it of Mr. Bush:

The train had reached Chicago when Daniel Stepanovich’s daughter told officials that he had died in a sleeper car on Sunday evening, about the time the train was pulling into Glenwood Springs, Colo., said Chicago Police spokeswoman Jo Ann Taylor.

It would be altogether understandable for Congress and state legislatures to counter this constitutional excess with constitutional responses of their own. Yet it would be the wrong thing to do.

The Framers meant our Constitution to establish a structure of government and to provide individuals certain inalienable rights against the state. They certainly did not envision our Constitution as a place to restrict rights or enact public policies, as the Federal Marriage Amendment does.

Ordinary legislation — not constitutional amendments — should express the community’s view that marriage “shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.” To use the Constitution for prescriptions of policy is to shackle future generations that should have the same right as ours to enact policies of their own. To use the Constitution as a forum for even our most favored views strikes a blow of uncommon harshness upon disfavored groups, in this case gay citizens who would never see this country’s founding charter as their own.

The fish, smallmouth and largemouth bass, are naturally males but for some reason are developing immature eggs inside their sex organs. Their discovery at such widely spread sites, including one just upstream from the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, seems to show that the Potomac’s problem with “intersex” fish extends far beyond the West Virginia stream where they were first found in 2003.

The cause of the abnormalities is unknown, but scientists suspect a class of waterborne contaminants that can confuse animals’ growth and reproductive systems. These pollutants are poorly understood, however, leaving many observers with questions about what the problems in fish mean for the Potomac and the millions of people who take their tap water from it.