Magna Carta Redux

--Like, Simon C. Page

There are no morals in politics;
there is only expedience.
A scoundrel may be of use to us
just because he is a scoundrel
--Vladimir Lenin

When law becomes despotic,
morals are relaxed, and vice versa
--Honore de Balzac

When there is a lack of honor in government,
the morals of the whole people are poisoned
--Herbert Hoover

The convoluted wording of legalisms
grew up around the necessity to hide
from ourselves the violence
we intend toward each other.
Between depriving a man of one hour
from his life and depriving him of his life
there exists only a difference of degree.
You have done violence to him,
consumed his energy
--Frank Herbert
___________________

Last month Georgia inmate Troy Davis was executed, proclaiming his innocence until the end (Troy Davis, from gurney, proclaims innocence before execution). The Atlanta-Journal Constitution (link provided) gave the most complete summary, and was first in the search rankings.

Second was Policemag.com's "Georgia Cop Killer Executed"; same story, only different.

The "We Are All Troy Davis" meme has capital punishment in the spotlight again, but no one seems to notice the odd juxtaposition of that concern against our Presidentially-mandated death sentences against U.S. citizens suspected or accused of being terrorists, such as that which recently killed Anwar al-Maliki. The death-listed people are not given a trial but are condemned by intelligence analysts acting on a presumption of guilt. This is not the American way.

Odd that a Peace Prize-winning president and supposed legal scholar does not recognize the contradiction in dropping missiles to blithely rub out people a la The Sopranos. Even the Constitution's predecessor, the Magna Carta (1215), recognized the necessity of applying the law of the land so as to avoid monarchical tyranny. Here we are, a mere 800 years later, and everything old is new again.

When did liberals become death-dealing tyrants? Obama is looking more like BushCheney's dream boy every day. If he were truly of the progressive lineage, he would remember that FDR opposed assassination and refused to sanction any personal U.S. attempts on Hitler's life during WW II. If we refused to rub out Hitler, how can we justify murdering a piss ant like al-Awlaki? Surely the gods are laughing at our pathetic and futile actions.

We are killing our own values when we kill men like al-Awlaki outright. Even if he were evil incarnate (presuming there were such a legal entity), the U.S. has no right to execute him sans legal decision. If we do, how does the U.S. differ from Henry VIII, Hitler, Stalin, Qadaffi, Saddam or Osama bin Laden?

When the good guys become killers, we are lost puppies without a tit.

By Any Means Necessary

Pavel Constantin, Romania

Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority
to animals; they are without sin,
and you, with your greatness,
defile the earth by your appearance on it,
and leave the traces of your foulness after you
- alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
--Fyodor Dostoevsky
________________

It is illustrative of our national mindset that even the New York Times thinks it acceptable that Congress would not balk at killing terrorists (actually, Ranger doesn't balk at killing terrorists either, but that infrequently happens):

"The plan was never put into effect, apparently because it was unworkable. But it’s hard to imagine Congress balking at killing terrorists (Illegal, and Pointless.)"

When we talk assassination, we are scrapping the basic tenet of western jurisprudence: Innocent until proven guilty. This principle governed the Nuremberg trials and should remain the standard. The problem with assassins is, they are judge, jury and executioner rolled into one.

Think of all of those collected in the seine net with the Worst of the Worst in Guantanamo who were never proven to have any terrorist affiliation. Do we simply say "oops" and apologize when innocents are killed? Do we want out national dignity sullied by having assassins on our tax-funded payrolls?

Does anyone want a torturer or assassin living next to them? Do we even want these people in our society?

The editorial says, "President Bush and his top aides panicked after the Sept. 11 attacks." This panic-stricken group think is a weakness of democratic governments. Panic cannot be the basis of any policy, whether financial, legislative, military or intelligence-related. When a president panics over an events like those which occurred on 9-11, it is clear this person is not leadership material.

The warrantless wiretapping was not an isolated case of breaking the law:

Once the Bush team got into the habit. . . , it became their operating procedure that any means are justified: ordering the nation’s intelligence agents to torture prisoners; sending innocents to be tortured in foreign countries; creating secret prisons where detainees were held illegally without charge."

The U.S. leadership has developed a callous approach to the question of the value of a human life. The people so in favor of assassination and all the dark side stuff are also those that had their fingers on the nuclear weapons.

Disregard for individual life is alarming, but sitting on thousands of nuclear weapons that are armed and launch ready is terrifying. The U.S. is stuck on verbally attacking North Korea and Iran, when we ourselves pose a great danger to the world.

Forty years ago we put a man on the moon, and today U.S. troops fight in the lunar landscape of Afghanistan.

It really was but a small step for man.

Worsted

I happen to be a death-dealing,
blood-crazed warrior who wakes up
every day just hoping for the chance to dismember
my enemies and defile their civilizations.
Peace sucks a hairy asshole, Freddy.
War is the mother-fucking answer
--Generation Kill (2008)

That's the way, uh-huh uh-huh,
I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh.
--That's They Way I like It,
K.C. and the Sunshine Band
________________

The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) has been rolling down the highway to hell for 8 solid years, yet many detainees have still not had their day in court in the land of the free.

President Obama holds with the Bush administration in allowing these illegal indefinite detentions. Congress passed the Military Commission Acts (2006), which was just another game of political football; three years later there has still been no significant court action on these cases.

Why does the U.S. even pretend to care about the rule of law? We claimed jailing the Worst of the Worst was imperative, yet trials for the detained are not exactly blossoming. As a nation, why do we accept such disregard for the rule of law?

The people held at Gitmo, Bagram, et. al., are not the worst. They are small fry guerrilla fighters, or at best, low-level military operatives.

The Worst of the Worst are men like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Yoo, Addington and their ilk. Men who would consider worldwide assassination programs to be valid expressions of democratic action. The people held in U.S. detention are small-fry compared to these world-class criminals.

That they hide behind the veil of national secrecy and wrap themselves in the flag does not erase their blatant criminality.

Ranger guesses the CIA didn't carry out the assassination program because it was transferred and hidden from congressional oversight by hiding it in the military's black operations budget. In addition, military Black Ops could easily sidestep oversight since there are layers of denial between the shooters and the Congress critters. This is how guys like Boykin and McChrystal get more stars than the Big Dipper.

Soldiers kill people in open combat or even in secret operations, but they are not killers. While they kill, assassins kill in a manner that is not military, and they are murderous. Soldiers are not murderers unless they kill as Private Green of the 101st Airborne Division. Having Top Secret military assassins short-circuits the lines between soldierly and criminal conduct.

Cloaking the program under a secret budget is the way everybody likes it since it gives everyone plausible denial. There is evidence that General Petraeus and McKean back-channeled normal reporting procedures and violated the chain of command to short-circuit the normal operational procedures during the entire Iraq War. Why?

Why would Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Army Chief of Staff allow this to happen? Since the Army Chief of Staff was hand-picked by Bush, the answer is easy to surmise and probably smutty.

The entire PWOT © has been a denigration of American values, one which continues in both Afghanistan and Iraq. If one can swallow these wars as moral it is easy to accept the unacceptable, which is the physical cost to a nation (that would be ours) that is losing a half million jobs a month while surging in Afghanistan. Nobody likes a busybody, especially a hypocritical one whose own house is not in order.

Were this a psychiatric ward, the people leading the PWOT would be put in lock-up. In a hospital, they would be nut cases.

In Washington D.C. they are called leaders.