Oct 18

The American experiment ends with a whimper, not a bang

George Bush, taking his lines from the overpowering irony department:

One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America. He didn’t get his wish.

The real end of the republic, as everyone knows, will only start after we lose the entire Bill of Rights and fortunately that's still a long way off – with all of the military budget increases it's unlikely that the DoD will be asking you and I to provide spare bunk space any time soon; the 3rd Amendment will continue its 215-year run, albeit as the lone uninfringed amendment these days.

Just as a reminder of what sort of country we are now living in, courtesy of the ACLU:

The president can now - with the approval of Congress - indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions.

These concerns are commonly dismissed by Republicans as insignificant because they (at least in theory) only apply to non-citizens. The ease of proving one's citizenship while being tortured in a legal blackhole somehow never comes up in these discussions but anyone who's unsure how that might work out might find this story illuminating:

Two ordered not to discuss Guantanamo claims

As to whether this is an abstract concern, we already know that US treatment of innocents has already exceeded even the new weakened thresholds ("prolonged mental or permanent physical damage") - and the new law really requires President Bush to both determine that these incidents were actual violations and choose to prosecute them. Don't hold your breath - his White House Counsel and Attorney General came up with the Geneva-circumvention strategy in the first place:

This kind of treatment – not coincidentally identical acts – was considered a reprehensible war crime when it was practiced by the Germans, Japanese, North Koreans, North Vietnamese, Soviets, etc. Now it's our turn to lay claim to the coveted “Evil Empire” title - and the real tragedy is that most people couldn't even be bothered to pay attention.