Time for change's Journal - Why Bush Can’t Allow Habeas Corpus

Advertise on more than 70 progressive blogs!

Time for change's Journal

Why Bush Can’t Allow Habeas Corpus – And Why we Need to Leave Afghanistan

Posted by Time for change in September 11
Sat Nov 22nd 2008, 10:45 PM

The vast majority of George Bush’s “War on Terror” detainees are never charged with or tried for a crime. On the rare occasions when they are charged with a crime, the American people are afforded the opportunity to learn, if they care to, what Georg

The whole rationale for our war in Afghanistan probably would be exposed to the world as the farce that it is if the Bush administration allowed its “War on Terror” prisoners to use the writ of habeas corpus to challenge their detentions. That appears to be a major reason, if not the major reason, why the Bush administration has for several years fought tooth and nail to deny its prisoners the habeas corpus rights that are guaranteed under our Constitution. And it is also probably a major reason why whenever our courts have over-ruled the Bush administration in specific cases, Bush has released the respective prisoners rather than allow them a fair and open trial.

The whole rationale for our Afghanistan war is based on the presumed refusal of the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden, whom George Bush claimed to have perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on our country, to U.S. custody. But there are enough holes in that story to drive a truck through.

The ultimate rationale behind the indefinite imprisonment without charges of many or most of our “War on Terror” prisoners is rooted in the claim that they fought for the Taliban or al Qaeda against our country (when we invaded it). Since we accuse the Taliban of harboring bin Laden, whom we claim perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and since we also claim that the Taliban knew of bin Laden’s role in the 9/11 attacks and yet refused to hand him over to us, therefore the Taliban is guilty of terrorism, and so is anyone who fought for the Taliban when U.S. troops invaded their country.

Since that scenario provides the rationale for our imprisonment of the so-called “terrorists”, and would therefore provide the basis for any formal charges that were to be brought against them in a fair and open trial, and since the underlying scenario can be so easily disproven, obviously the defendants’ lawyers would attempt to expose that scenario for the fraud that it is if they were given the chance to do so in a fair and open trial. And then the whole house of cards that we call the “War on Terror” would come tumbling down. And then of course, quite a few high level officials would be vulnerable to war crimes charges.

That’s it in a nutshell. Let’s look at some of the evidence:

THE FRAUDULENT BASIS FOR THE U.S. INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN

Bin laden denied responsibility for the 9/11 attacks from the beginning

I’ll start out with bin Laden’s denials of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. That of course means little by itself – except for the fact that our news media have been such cheerleaders for war that most Americans probably believe that bin Laden admitted his responsibility for the attacks from the beginning. But he didn’t. To the contrary, six days following the attacks, CNN published the following statement by bin Laden, which he had made to al Jazeera:

The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it. I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons. I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations.

Lack of evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11

To support their claims of bin Laden’s guilt, the British and U.S. governments published a dossier of “evidence”. That dossier was lambasted by numerous critics, including Bronwen Maddox in the Times of London, as:

a puzzling and worrying piece of work with so many puzzling omissions that the document begins to undermine itself… more significant for what it leaves out than for what it leaves in, with few clues even to the form of evidence for September 11… It seems lame – to the point of advertising a deficiency – to say that a signature of an al Qaeda attack is the absence of a warning.

One of the points of evidence was the claim that bin Laden warned his closest associates to return to Afghanistan by September 10th. But since there were no known incidents of bin Laden associates actually returning to Afghanistan shortly before September 11th, the evidence for that claim is quite weak.

Another of the major points of evidence was that three of the hijackers were said to be “associates” of bin Laden. But the nature of the alleged association with bin Laden was not very well spelled out.

And there was the claim that no other organization than al Qaeda is known to have both the motivation and the capability of carrying out such an attack. That claim has been widely disputed. But even if no such organizations were known to have had the motivation and capability of carrying out such attacks, that hardly constitutes evidence of al Qaeda involvement in 9/11.

Bush administration and Taliban interaction prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan

But whether or not bin Laden was involved in the 9/11 attacks on our country is not the primary issue. The more relevant issue is what the Taliban – whom we declared war upon – had to do with it.

The Taliban never demonstrated the kind of intransigence on the issue that the Bush administration and the U.S. news media accused it of. To the contrary, The Taliban Information Minister, Qudrutullah Jamal, said from the beginning:

Anyone who is responsible for this act, Osama or not, we will not side with him. We told (the Pakistan delegation) to give us proof that he did it, because without that how can we give him up?'

But the Bush administration never provided that proof. It claimed to have secret information beyond the “dossier of evidence” described above, but it refused to share that secret information with the Taliban.

Then on October first, the Taliban went a step further. They agreed to extradite bin Laden to Pakistan – an American ally – to stand trial for charges of participation in 9/11. They agreed that if the court found sufficient evidence that bin Laden would then be extradited to the United States. And bin Laden even agreed to that. But President Musharraf turned the deal down, for the absurd reason that he could not guarantee bin Laden’s safety.

George Bush turned down all Taliban offers, saying “We know he’s guilty. Turn him over”. Bush later elaborated further on that, saying, “When I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations”.

U.S. obligations under international law

One of the major purposes of the United Nations is to prevent unnecessary wars. Therefore, it is not surprising that its charter says: “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered”. Clearly, George Bush’s actions with respect to his invasion of Afghanistan fall well outside of that mandate. Maher Osseiran explains the implications of that:

The Bush administration, with premeditation, ignored its international obligations in deference to war. If the Bush administration had supplied the evidence to the world and specifically the Taliban who were requesting such evidence in exchange for bin Laden, the war might not have taken place and bin Laden would very likely be in custody.

Not pursuing that route makes the Afghanistan war an illegal war under the UN Charter and The Geneva Convention; thereby, the majority of the Guantanamo detainees can no longer be classified as enemy combatants, but (rather) victims of war crimes.

That, of course, is what fair and open trials of Bush’s detainees are likely to show – which of course is why he can’t allow that to happen.

FBI finds no hard evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11

If all that isn’t enough (and it should be), several years later the FBI admitted that there is no substantial proof of bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11.

The FBI website lists Osama bin Laden as one of its 26 most wanted terrorists. However, it says nothing about his involvement in 9/11. The Muckracker Report, an investigative group, looked into this oddity in an attempt to find the reason for it:

The Muckraker Report contacted Rex Tomb, who serves as Chief of Investigative Publicity with the FBI. Tomb's response? “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11… He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”

BUSH ADMINISTRATION EFFORTS TO DENY HABEAS CORPUS RIGHTS TO ITS PRISONERS

The following examples show the great extent to which the Bush administration has repeatedly gone to deny its prisoners their rights under international law and our Constitution, and to manipulate the law for their own nefarious ends.

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld

Yasir Esam Hamdi was captured by the Northern Alliance in November 2001 and turned over to the U.S. military in Afghanistan (probably for a large bounty), then sent to Guantanamo Bay as an “enemy combatant” and a suspected terrorist. After the U.S. military discovered that Hamdi was a U.S. citizen (having been born in Louisiana), he was transferred to a U.S. Navy brig in Norfolk, Virginia, still classified as an “enemy combatant”, where he remained, in isolation, for the next two and a half years. His father claimed that he was a humanitarian relief worker, not a terrorist.

Several criminal defense attorneys, concerned about the trashing of our Constitution by the Bush administration, filed suit on Hamdi’s behalf. After working its way through lower courts, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case on June 28, 2004. Though the Bush administration tried to spin the decision as a victory for them, eight of the nine justices agreed that the Executive Branch does not have the right to indefinitely hold a U.S. citizen without basic due process protections. Constitutional lawyer Cass Sunstein summarizes the main finding in his book, “Radicals in Robes”, by noting that the court

said that an enemy combatant must be supplied with notice of the factual basis for his classification and a fair opportunity to rebut the government’s factual assertions before a neutral decision maker. The plurality did not deny the possibility that the constitutionality could be met by a military tribunal.

Explaining the decision, Justice O’Connor, writing for the majority, said that “… We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.”

What this meant was that now the Bush administration had to either provide Hamdi with access to a lawyer and some sort of hearing on his case or else release him. Faced with that choice, three months later it decided to release him back to Saudi Arabia.

Deliah Lithwick comments on the absurdity of the situation:

So the Bush administration's decision to release Hamdi is stunning, given that only months ago he was so dangerous that the government insisted in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and the world that he could reasonably be locked up for all time, without a trial or criminal charges….

He was slammed into solitary on some flimsy assertions contained in what's known as the two-page "Mobbs Declaration." … swearing that Hamdi was an enemy combatant, because, according to his captors from the Northern Alliance, he was "affiliated with a Taliban military unit." Any other American suspect, including serial killers and Timothy McVeigh, would have been given an opportunity to dispute that bare claim; to tell his side of the story – which, according to Hamdi's father, was that Hamdi was in Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons. But we never heard that story and we never will. Yaser Esam Hamdi was evidently too dangerous even to set foot in a courtroom.

Rumsfeld v. Padilla

On May 8, 2002, Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was taken into custody by the FDA and locked up as a “material witness”. On June 10, four days after Colleen Rowley testified to Congress about the failure of the FBI to respond to her pre-9-11 warnings of an impending attack, Attorney General John Ashcroft made an announcement to the nation about Padilla. Referring to him as “a known terrorist” who had been plotting to explode a radioactive bomb in the United States, Ashcroft announced that the FBI foiled the plot by capturing Padilla. The previous day, George Bush had classified Padilla as an “enemy combatant” and had him sent to a Navy brig in South Carolina, where he remained for three and a half years and was repeatedly tortured.

As with the Hamdi case, lawyers concerned about the abrogation of Padilla’s Constitutional rights took up his case. On September 9, 2005, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Padilla’s detention without charge was legal. The author of that ruling was J. Michael Luttig, who was considered to be a potential Bush Supreme Court nominee. Padilla’s lawyers then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but before the Supreme Court made a decision on whether or not to take the case the Bush administration made the case moot by rescinding Padilla’s “enemy combatant” status and agreeing to prosecute him in a civilian court. But the charges had nothing to do with the original allegations about plots to explode a “dirty bomb” on U.S. soil. Rather the new charges were “providing – and conspiring to provide – material support to terrorists, and conspiring to murder individuals who are overseas.”

Luttig, the 4th Circuit Court judge who had made the prior ruling, was incensed at this about face by the Bush administration. Charlie Savage, in his book, “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy”, describes Luttig’s reaction:

Luttig – one of the most conservative and executive power-friendly judges on the federal bench – accused the Bush-Cheney administration of manipulating the judicial process to make sure that the Supreme Court would have no opportunity to evaluate the precedent that Luttig himself had just written. The Padilla indictment, he said, raised serious questions about the credibility of the government’s statements on which the judge had relied when crafting that precedent, and “left the impression that Padilla may have been held for all these years, even if justifiably, by mistake”.

Hamden v. Rumsfeld

Salim Ahmed Hamdan was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and brought to Guantanamo as an “enemy combatant”. He was the personal driver of Osama bin Laden, but he claimed not to be a terrorist or even a member of al Qaeda.

In November 2004 a federal district court ruled, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that the Bush administration’s military commission trials violated the Geneva Conventions. But that decision was overturned on July 15, 2005, by the D.C. Circuit Court, in a 2-1 decision ruling that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to war time detainees suspected of terrorism.

John Roberts cast the deciding vote in that decision, just 5 days before he was nominated as Chief Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court by George Bush. Furthermore, it later emerged during Roberts’ Senate confirmation hearings that Roberts had: met with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez 6 days prior to hearing oral arguments in the Hamdan case; in the midst of deciding the case, met secretly with Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Andy Card, Harriet Miers and Gonzalez, and; met with Bush himself on July 15, the same day that the court handed down its decision.

In the end, the ridiculous D.C. Circuit Court decision was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court by a 5-3 decision. Roberts, though Chief Justice of the USSC by that time, had to recuse himself because the Court was ruling on his own previous decision. Two of the USSC justices who voted in the minority on the Hamdan decision (Scalia and Thomas) were two of the same scumbags who had voted in 2000 to hand Bush the Presidency by stopping the vote counting in Florida.

In the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld USSC decision, Justice Stevens, speaking for the majority, explained that the petitioner Hamdan was “entitled to the full protection of the Geneva Convention”, and that the “military commission convened to try him was established in violation of both the Universal Code of Military Justice and Common Article 3 of the Third Geneva Convention”. Justice Kennedy further elaborated on the Geneva Convention that the USSC determined the Bush administration to have violated:

The provision is part of a treaty the United States has ratified and thus accepted as binding law… moreover, violations of Common Article 3 are considered “war crimes,” punishable as federal offenses…

The Military Commissions Act and its overturn by the U.S. Supreme Court

Consequently, the Bush administration pushed through Congress the Military Commissions Act, in an attempt to ensure that detainee trials remained secret. However, on June 12, 2008, the USSC determined that this law too was not Constitutional, primarily because the Act was not sufficient to restore habeas corpus:

Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to separation of powers. . . .

The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system, they are reconciled within the framework of law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, part of that law.

CONCLUSIONS

The vast majority of George Bush’s “War on Terror” detainees are never charged with or tried for a crime. On the rare occasions when they are charged with a crime, the American people are afforded the opportunity to learn, if they care to, what George Bush’s “War on Terror” is really about, and to what extent he will go to manipulate our judicial system for his own political purposes: In the case of Hamdi we find, after holding him in isolation for two and a half years, that George Bush would rather set him free than give him a hearing to present his case, as demanded by our Supreme Court; In the case of Padilla we find, when faced with the possibility of an adverse ruling from our Supreme Court, that Bush would rather drop his “enemy combatant” status and try him on vague charges rather than on the spectacular charges (plot to explode a “dirty bomb” on U.S. soil) that he originally used to scare the American people with, and; In the case of Hamdan, Bush found it necessary for he and his administration to secretly and repeatedly meet with the justice who was trying the case while simultaneously dangling before him the possibility of being nominated as Chief Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court – assuming that he ruled correctly, of course.

All of this because an open and fair trial of any one of George Bush’s so-called “illegal enemy combatants” could expose his “War on Terror” for the fraud that it is.

What does all this say about our war in Afghanistan? In the first place, the war has been illegal from start to finish, and those who perpetrated it should be subject to criminal charges. But even if we had a decent reason for our original involvement, what are we accomplishing by our continuing presence there? This is what the editors of The Nation have to say about escalating our war in Afghanistan:

The United States and its NATO allies are losing the war in Afghanistan not because we have had too few military forces but because our military presence, along with the corruption of the Hamid Karzai government, has gradually turned the Afghan population against us, swelling the ranks of Taliban recruits. American airstrikes have repeatedly killed innocent civilians. Sending thousands of additional troops will not secure a democratic and stable Afghanistan, because the country is not only deeply divided but also fiercely resistant to outside forces. Indeed, more troops may only engender more anti-American resistance and cause groups in neighboring Pakistan to step up their support for the Taliban in order to stop what they see as a US effort to advance US and Indian interests in the region…

Second, securing Afghanistan is not necessary to US security and may actually undermine our goal of defeating Al Qaeda…. American safety thus depends not on eliminating faraway safe havens for Al Qaeda but on common-sense counterterrorist and national security measures – extensive intelligence cooperation, expert police work, effective border control and the occasional surgical use of special forces.

Discuss (195 comments) | Recommend (46 votes)

A summary of my DU posts

Time for change

The good majority of my DU posts consist of one of six general subjects: The need to remove from office the current cancer upon our nation; election fraud; the tragedy of the Bush administration; my ideas on the liberal values that we all hope will some day replace the values that our current government runs on; historical events that I believe cast light upon our current situation; and other political ideas.

The need to remove Bush and Cheney from office

In 2006, John Conyers wrote a 198 page report, documented with 1,401 references, titled “The Constitution in Crisis – The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Cover-ups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance”. The title of his report reflected the primary reasons why George Bush and Dick Cheney must be removed from office: They have made a mockery of our Constitution – the foundation for the rule of law in our nation – by consistently violating it. Our Constitution, if we can keep it in fact and not just in name, makes our nation much more than just a democracy. By providing protections for minorities and the powerless, our Constitution adds civility, humanity, and decency to what could otherwise be a barbaric nation – democratic or not.

Aside from the continuing damage that Bush and Cheney can do to our country in their remaining time in office, including their potential to involve us in ever expanding new wars, failing to remove from office the most lawless presidential administration in our history will set an awful precedent in our nation – a precedent for doing away with our Constitution. Providing in our Constitution a mechanism for impeachment and removal from office was of utmost priority to our Founding Fathers. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “When once a republic is corrupted there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles…”

Many arguments have been put forward against impeachment. This post answers those arguments. Some opponents of impeachment mistakenly advocate the view that the impeachment of public officials requires evidence of the commitment of an actual crime – and would not be justified by such things as gross violation of the public trust, corruption, negligence, or incompetence. Leaving aside the fact that such an interpretation would leave our nation subject to rule by people who would do great and possibly irreparable harm to it, the preponderance of evidence flatly contradicts that interpretation.

Others claim that we don’t have enough evidence to proceed with impeachment. I argue here that the current evidence for impeachment is so abundant, arguing that we need more sets the impeachment bar at an absurdly high level.

Others argue we don’t have the votes for impeachment – which implies that we must not bring individuals to trial until we have counted the votes, rather the using the trial to get the votes. Such an argument ignores the likelihood that votes will accumulate as Americans watch the impeachment trial and become intensely exposed for the first time to the many outrageous crimes of George Bush and Dick Cheney. And it also ignores the fact that Senators who refuse to vote for conviction will probably be putting their seats in jeopardy.

But perhaps the most urgent reason for moving to impeach Bush and Cheney as soon as possible is that their continuing refusal to be bound by the laws and the Constitution of our nation raises the spectacle that they may be planning a coup d’etat. Why else would they go to such lengths to destroy our Constitution and the rule of law in our nation? We must preempt them by moving as quickly as possible on this.

Election fraud

The DU apparently was born as a result of the 2000 November-December election fraud that began the long nightmare that is the George W. Bush administration.

I went to bed on Election Day 2000, shortly after Bush was announced as our new President, feeling as if the end of world civilization was near at hand. My wife woke me up a couple hours later to tell me the good news that the announcement of Bush’s Presidency had been temporarily cancelled. Thus began a period of 36 days that I followed more intensely than any other news event of my life – ending in the infamous and disastrous Supreme Court decision that marked the beginning of our long road to dictatorship.

My son (EOTE) joined DU in January 2001, a few days after it began, but I did not, for reasons that now escape me. I did, however, do a lot of writing about the 2000 election, including a desperate plea to my Maryland Senators, to please demand a real recount of the 2000 Florida vote. And I also contributed an article to DU on that subject, in my son’s name (I did not use my own name because I was a federal employee and I was afraid that I could get into trouble for writing such an article), in the spring of 2001.

The fraudulent 2004 Presidential election is what brought me into DU. I had worked as a volunteer in the Kerry/Edwards campaign, I had followed the presidential polls obsessively, and by Election Day 2004 I was about as confident as I could be that John Kerry would be our next President. Thus, the reported results of that election were both profoundly disappointing and difficult for me to believe, as they were for the great majority of DUers.

I immediately began an effort to acquire as many election statistics as I could, in a feverish and desperate attempt to prove that the election was a fraud, which I hoped would aid in its overturning. In late November I had my son post an analysis that I did of the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official election results (Note: My son supplied the title, which I feel is too strong, which you can see if you read the article). And finding that it was awkward to have my son post my articles, I joined DU a few days later.

Since then I have posted dozens of election fraud related threads, a small number of the most important of which I have included in my journal.

In particular, I have come to believe that the main mechanism by which the 2004 election was stolen was the massive and illegal targeted purging of Democratic voters in Ohio, especially in Cleveland. This thread contains a great amount of evidence to support that contention.

In addition, I believe that there is good evidence that says that large numbers of votes in Cuyahoga County were deleted by its central tabulator, as explained in this thread, which also discusses an early 2006 partial audit of Cuyahoga County. And, I think that the death of Raymond Lemme, who while investigating Clint Curtis’ sworn allegations of vote switching computer programs, was found dead in a Georgia hotel room, just a couple weeks after telling Curtis that he had traced the corruption “all the way to the top”, is extremely suspicious to say the least. Here is my explanation of the controversy over the discrepancy between the 2004 exit polls and the official 2004 vote count. And here is a summary of several reasons I have written about for believing that the 2004 election was stolen.

Finally, here are my ideas for preventing another stolen election in 2006 and 2008.

The tragedy of the Bush administration

The fake war on terrorism

I believe that a crucial requirement for a good understanding of the Bush administration’s actions since September 11, 2001, is the realization that its “War on Terrorism” is nothing but a colossal fake. Only with that realization do numerous Bush administration characteristics and actions make sense, including: Its disinterest in Osama bin Laden; its great urge to rush into a war with Iraq at any cost; its utter contempt for international law and the rest of the world; its succession of no-bid contracts for its wealthy friends; its lavish tax cuts for the wealthiest of our citizens and corporations during ‘time of war’; the Dubai port deals; and, its attempt to turn our democracy into a dictatorship.

With that in mind, I wrote in this post about the main reasons why I believe that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9-11 attacks. There are many reasons why I believe that now, but the initial and still most important reason is the utter failure of our military, the mightiest military that the world has ever known, despite repeated warnings and more than ample time on 9-11 itself, to protect its own capital city.

Abuse of the human rights of prisoners for no apparent purpose

To me, the most sickening and disgraceful aspect of the Bush administration’s “War on Terrorism” is its complete lack of concern for human rights, demonstrated among other ways by the indefinite confinement, without trial or even bringing of charges, of thousands of prisoners of war, and its frequent use of torture. I have discussed this issue in several OPs, starting with this one. Here I describe the issue as seen through the eyes of a U.S. Army Muslim Chaplain who had ministerial responsibilities for hundreds of our prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, who witnessed the severe and daily abuse of his charges over a period of several months, and who eventually was imprisoned himself when it was felt that he was making too many waves over what he had seen. Here is my summary of what the great journalist Seymour Hersh had to say on this subject, based on his numerous high level sources. Jimmy Carter felt so strongly about this issue that he broke the unwritten rule against ex-Presidents criticizing sitting Presidents, with one of the most scathing attacks on this policy that I have ever seen. And Senator Richard Durbin was the victim of continued public verbal abuse from the right for daring to make public how our government was treating its prisoners.

Lying us into war

It is evident to most informed people that one of the biggest motivations for Bush's "War on Terror" was to provide a justification for the invasion of Iraq. Seymour Hersh’s excellent account of how the Bush administration manipulated and twisted intelligence in order justify a preemptive war against Iraq is a must read for anyone who still supports this administration and thinks that the Iraq war was necessary. And as for Bush's excuse that we are now fighting that war for the benefit of the Iraqi people, Democrats should start talking about how the Iraqi people actually feel about us being in their country.

Just how bad are Bush and his cronies and how much danger do they pose to American democracy?

George w. Bush and his administration and fellow travellers in today's Republican Party are about as bad as they come. They are anti-science ignoramuses. They are chicken hawks. They have no consciences. They are torturers. They are cowards. They are evil. And I doubt that there are any moral boundaries beyond which they will not go to get their way.

I think that in the interest of preserving our democracy, we should be aware of the similarities between the Bush administration and Hitler’s Nazis (which I wrote about even before the revelations about Bush’s warantless wiretapping), and understand that if we aren’t vigilant, yes it CAN happen here too.

Moral values that separate us from today’s Republicans

It makes me so mad to hear people ridicule what they consider to be “liberal values” and compare them unfavorably to the wonderful moral values of George W. Bush and his Republicans friends. In the vast majority of cases these people don’t even have a vague idea about what liberal values really are. They have simply been conditioned by our corporate media over several years or decades to believe that liberals encourage irresponsibility, are ‘soft’ on national defense and ‘law and order’, and are wild spenders. These ridiculous myths about liberals have in turn encouraged the Democratic Party to disavow the liberal label and in some cases to veer way to the right. I submit that, rather than running away from the liberal label we should be proud of it, and we should challenge those that seek to disparage it. And to further make this point I posted a tribute to several historical and current political leaders who have been unafraid to speak out loudly for what they believe in, and I suggested an answer to those Republican morons who accuse liberals of hating America.

Let's take a look at some of the specific moral values that separate Democrats from Republicans:

Republicans like to pretend that they're more moral than us because they're more "religious"

Many of those who disparage liberals are fundamentalist Christians who repeatedly invoke the name of Jesus Christ, and who believe that the superiority of their moral values to those of liberals and Democrats is proven by their repeated references to Jesus. Don’t these people understand that Jesus was a liberal, whose moral values were much closer to those of the Democratic Party than to those of the Republican Party, with whom they align themselves and vote for? Isn't it an astounding paradox that the Republican Party has usurped for their own purposes one of the most liberal religious leaders in world history, while at the same time showing nothing but contempt for liberals and liberal principles?

The movement for privatization of government functions

One of the biggest threats to our democracy is the privatization movement. In the name of “freedom” and “self-reliance”, the leaders of this movement advocate the freedom of powerful corporations to destroy our environment and to run our elections, our schools, our social safety net programs, and our prison system, as well as every other program which has long been considered a legitimate function of government. The fact that government is elected by the people to serve public functions, whereas the purpose of private corporations is to make profits for their investors, is either totally lost on these people, or else they simply feel that the above mentioned programs should be run for profit rather than for service.

Al Gore alluded to this issue in his great film, "An Inconvenient Truth", where he discussed the unholy alliance between government, private industry, and the press, whereby a corrupt government, in exchange for legal bribes from the industries they are supposed to control, propagates false information and policies that are favorable to those industries instead of the public that they are elected to serve. I discuss my own personal experience with that unholy alliance, where the FDA withdrew an about to be published scientific article I had written, under pressure from a manufacturer who stood to be economically hurt by the information in that article.

The need for a free and independent press

Another great threat to our democracy is the ownership of our country’s news media by a very small group of wealthy individuals who have strong ties to the Republican Party, and whose motivation in providing “news” is to maintain satisfaction with the status quo, rather than to report what is important and true. Two prime examples of corporate media shills and pseudo-journalists who pretend to be real journalists are Chris Matthews and Tim Russert. Bill Moyers explains how this situation threatens to destroy our democracy, and how this came about through the dismantling of rules and regulations which were meant to prevent the monopolization of our news. And Robert Parry explains why he started his web site to help combat the misinformation we get from our corporate media.

Health care

Liberals, and most other decent people, believe that people should be entitled to decent health care. That is why, prior to the "pro-life" administration of George W. Bush, infant mortality rate in the United States had been steadily declining for several decades. But shortly into the Bush administration, due to the starving of women and infant health programs for federal funds, infant mortality rate began a steady rise. Nor do Republicans care much about veterans' health, as indicated by the rejecting of this much needed veteran's health bill in the U.S. Senate by virtually a strict party line vote.

An enquiring mind

One of the many tricks that our corporate media uses to squelch alternative viewpoints is to label anyone who substantially disagrees with their “correct” version of the news as “conspiracy theorists”. Well, I have news for them. The views of us “conspiracy theorists” are usually much more closely aligned with reality than is most of the trash that we hear from the corporate news media these days, such as the stories about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which were used to justify our illegal preemptive invasion of that country. We “conspiracy theorists” believe that it is not only the right of American citizens to challenge the corporate news media story lines, but it is our responsibility as well, as good citizens who care about our country.

The dignity of all human beings

Perhaps the most important value held by liberals is a belief in the dignity of all human beings – hence the 19th century movement by liberals to abolish slavery. Here is one of my favorite stories on that subject.

A summary

And here is a post where I talk about all the major values that separate Democrats from Republicans.

Historical events that help us understand our present

Though there is little doubt that George W. Bush is by far the worst president we’ve ever had, our past history is at least partly responsible for preparing the way for this tragedy. The history of our nation is full of examples of failures to live up to our ideals. In addition to our long history of slavery and our near extermination of the Native American population of our present day country, we began a long history of overseas imperialism beginning in the late 19th Century. The long standing history of extreme hostility to socialism by the elites of our country has been responsible for much of this imperialism, as well as domestic repression against labor unions and others who would speak out against the status quo. The usurpation by our Executive Branch of the war making powers given to Congress by our Founding Fathers did not originate with George W. Bush. And the attitudes fostered by our long history of slavery are still with us today, especially in the areas of our country where slavery thrived for so long.

Today, as the transgressions of George Bush and Dick Cheney threaten the existence of our nation as we know it, we would do well to recall how the German nation was led into tyranny more than six decades ago. The parallels between Hitler’s war on terror and George Bush’s war on terror are extraordinarily striking in my opinion. And the better able we are to recognize the danger, the more likely we are to take steps to prevent a similar fate.

Political ideas

Republicans have 3 great advantages in elections against Democrats, whereas the only advantage that the Democratic Party has is that its policies are meant to serve all Americans, rather than just the select few. In addition to electoral fraud and huge sums of money donated to the GOP by their corporate masters as legalized bribery, Democrats have to contend with a multitude of news media whores.

But those advantages are not sufficient for a Party that has nothing of value to offer to our country. So, when we suggest investigation of their corrupt deeds they call us conspiracy theorists. When we suggest policies such as making basic affordable health care available to all Americans they accuse us of class warfare. And when we criticize the rampant corruption at the highest levels of government they accuse us of "hating America". And when none of that works they try to scare us by telling us that if we don't give them unlimited power over us we risk being killed by terrorists.

If there was ever a presidential administration that needed to be impeached, this is it. Grass roots efforts are under way to accomplish this, and we can all help. Our Democratic leaders need to seriously consider and talk about this. And they must be united and avoid inter-party warfare.

Profile Information

Time for change

DU Donor

9037 posts

Member since Thu Dec 2nd 2004

Silver Spring, MD, US

Male

Visit Homepage

Visitor Tools

Use the tools below to keep track of updates to this Journal.

	Track this Journal
	Blogroll this Journal
	RSS/XML

Discussion Forums

Enter Discussion Forums

Big Forums

	Latest Breaking News
	Editorials & Other Articles
	Political Videos
	Research Forum
	General Discussion
	General Discussion: Presidential
	The DU Lounge

More Forums

	Topic Forums (35)
	State & Country Forums (56)
	DU Groups (131)

Today's Featured Forums

	September 11
	Iowa
	Ancient Wisdom and Pagan Spirituality Group
	Deaf/Hard of Hearing Group