September 28, 2006
I rarely read the Times anymore, especially their editorials, but from time to time, their hyperbole-filled missives are worth the read, if for no other reason than to try to understand just how out of touch the "liberal elite" is with mainstream Americans.
The Times editorial begins:
Here's what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans' fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser.
Hmmmm... the "mindless politics of a midterm election." I wonder, does this ever apply to Democratic-led Congresses, or only Republican-led ones? I think we know the answer.
But here's the gem:
...The Bush administration uses Republicans' fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists.
I'd like for the Times to go out of their way for once and try to apply a little logic and reason, and—God forbid, facts—to support their contention that the legislation will make American soldiers "less safe." The truth the Times and its liberal supporters refuse to confront is that our enemies in this war against Islamic terrorism do not now, nor have they ever, followed any civilized notion of how to conduct warfare against military or civilian targets, and when they have been able to capture American soldiers, they have tortured, mutilated and beheaded them.
Perhaps Bill Keller and company should search their own archives:
The American military said today that it had found the remains of what appears to be the two American soldiers captured by insurgents last week in an ambush south of the capital, and a senior Iraqi military official said the two men had been "brutally tortured."An American military official in Baghdad, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that both bodies showed evidence of "severe trauma" and that they could not be conclusively identified. Insurgents had planted "numerous" bombs along the road leading to the bodies, and around the bodies themselves, the official said, slowing the retrieval of the Americans by 12 hours.
[snip]
General Caldwell declined to speak in detail about the physical condition of those who had been found, but said that the cause of death could not be determined. He said the remains of the men would be sent to the United States for DNA testing to determine definitively their identities. That seemed to suggest that the two Americans had been wounded or mutilated beyond recognition.
"We couldn't identify them," the American military official in Baghdad said.
Neither Mr. Keller nor his liberal supporters in the blogosphere seem to have anything approaching a reasoned response as to how this legislation will make the native barbarity of our enemies any more depraved than it already is. Perhaps the Times thinks they'll use dull knifes for beheading instead of sharp ones. The simple fact remains that no law we pass will affect how terrorists treat captured soldiers. They will brutally torture and kill any soldier they capture after this legislation becomes law, just as they did before.
As for the "lasting damage" the Times shrieks will occur, I notice they didn't try to provide specific details. Fortunately for the Times, hyperbole doesn't rely on factual support, as history shows that past wartime Democratic Presidents have done far more damage to the Constitution than measures our present Administration would even consider.
During World War I, Woodrow Wilson pushed through the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, cruelly slapping aside the notion that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" embraced by today's defeatists. Heavy media censorship, the crushing of free speech about the war (at least for those that dissented) and even imprisoning former Presidential candidates was par for the course for Wilson's wartime Presidency.
Bush, in stark contrast, has not made any attempt to muzzle the press, even to the point of allowing classified document leaks to news agencies like the Times without shutting the paper down or putting so much as a single reporter in jail.
The hyperbole continues:
Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That's pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them.It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling striking down Mr. Bush's shadow penal system that he adopted his tone of urgency. It serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism.
It may come as a shock to the editors of the Times, but Democrats themselves have made themselves look soft on terrorism long before this legislation came around.
The party of "defeat and retreat" features leadership that wants to force the American military into a headlong withdrawal from Iraq, genocidally ignoring the fact that such an act would destabilize the fledgling democracy even worse, possibly leading today's sectarian violence to denigrate into full-scale genocide. John Murtha has yet to explain how withdrawing thousands of miles away to Okinawa will make the streets of Baghdad any safer. Ned Lamont has yet to explain how shifting our forces away from the central front of the war on Terror in Iraq and the terrorist forces assembled there will make America safer. The Fringe Left is far more interested in loosing Iraq to make the Bush Administration look bad than combating terrorism. Their only plan is withdrawal and defeat. Democrats look soft on terrorism because they are soft on terrorism as shown by their own actions, not the actions of any other group.
The screed goes on:
Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.
This may come as a shock to the Times, but the legislation passed by the House does not reinterpret the murky language of the Geneva Conventions, and in fact, does just the opposite: it clarifies and delineates a clear policy of what constitutes legal interrogation methods. The United States have never before attempted to clearly define how U.S. law should meet Geneva's standards, even though it should have done so when the standard was agreed to in 1929. What upsets the Times and many on the left is that this legislation strips them of their ability to label anything and every interrogation technique they don't like as torture.
The Times Hyperbole Drive (unrelated to the Hitchhiker's Improbability Drive, and far less coherent) then kicks into overdrive as they kick out an unsupported list of possible abuses:
Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.
The President patently does not have this power. The House bill's language states that a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another tribunal will determine if someone is to be classified as an enemy combatant, not the President. The Times goes beyond hyperbole and delivers a falsification.
The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there's no requirement that this list be published
As I stated previously, the legislation passed by the House does not reinterpret the murky language of the Geneva Conventions, and in fact, does just the opposite: it clarifies and delineates a clear policy of what constitutes legal interrogation methods. The Congress should have passed this legislation, or something like it, prior to World War II.
Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.
Congress has the power to say that foreign terrorists are not entitled to the rights of American citizenship, and they have done so, much to the chagrin of those who would coddle them.
Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.
Again, more hyperbole based upon an outright falsification. President Bush does not determine the status of a captured terrorist; a Combatant Status Review Tribunal made up of military judges makes that determination.
Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.
The Times does a masterful job of spinning the actual language of the legislation, which stipulates that coerced evidence could only be used if certain conditions were met. Among those conditions are that "totality of the circumstances renders the statement reliable," meaning that other information must support to coerced information. If a detainee confesses under interrogation to a bomb plot and no evidence can be found to support the admission, his confession cannot be used as evidence. Again, President Bush does not make any determinations whatsoever, the language of the bill explicitly delegates that power to the judge.
Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.
Of course, the Times is referring to American civil and criminal law, which follows a somewhat different set of rules than the military criminal justice system. With the conviction of terrorist-supporting lawyer Lynne Stewart, an ugly truth already known by many in the legal and intelligence communities was shown to the world; not only were terrorists using confidential lawyer-client letters to smuggle information to one another, they also discovered that some activist lawyers actively participated. The decision to allow some secret evidence and testimony to protect the lives of sources and intelligence operatives is a reasonable one. Apparently, the Times would rather a defendant learn the source of the information so that he could pass it along to others so that the sources could be eliminated. That the source is quite likely to be tortured before being murdered is not apparently a concern of the Times.
Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.
Of course the definition is unacceptably narrow for the Times. As I stated previously, the Congress, by finally defining terrorism, strips the ability of the Times to label anything and everything it wants as torture. The Times loses a rhetorical tool, and that seems to be their primary concern. The assertion made by the Times that "the bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture" is unconscionable, and a willful distortion of the bill's language and reality. There are literally millions of things the legislation didn't address—the price of tea in China, how long a detainee's hair may be, or if he's allowed to watch The View—but that does not translate into an acceptance or denial of a practice covered under other laws. The bill also refused to stipulate that the detainees cannot be assaulted by wookies or unicorns, so I'm certain the Times will address the oppression of terrorists by fictional beings in their next missive.
The Times finishes with a call to action for Democrats to filibuster the bill, which patently won't happen. Democrats may not like giving America the tools to fight terrorism, but unlike the Times, they are occasionally forced to interact with reality.
Posted by: Confederate Yankee at
11:20 AM
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