Bush Must Use Deceit To Get His Way - As Always

Can the "terrorists" destroy the civilized world? I don't think so. They may want too, as Bush will tell us over and over, but they are not capable. Everybody agrees we need to be diligent and take the fight to them, there is no argument with this. We DO NOT need violate the Constitution to do this. We DO NOT need to surrender ALL government power to the executive branch, aka BUSH. Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban have taken refuge in Pakistan and Bush does not have a problem with this. They have been there since he let them slip away from Toro Boro to turn his attention to Iraq. Bush needs to stop his propaganda campaign to gain more power for himself and go get the terrorists he said he wanted "Dead or Alive" five years ago! From Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory Bush followers distort history to justify their radical changes In order to justify a complete overhaul of the legal framework and value system which the United States has embraced since at least the end of World War II, Bush followers have been insisting -- by necessity -- that the threat we face now is unprecedented and the enemy is more barbaric and dishonorable than any we previously confronted. Thus, they argue, all of those conventions of the past, such as the Geneva Conventions and FISA, were from a now-obsolete era of relative peace and tranquility, where the only enemies we fought abided by the noble rules of war. As both Andrew Sullivan and Charles Pierce noted, John Yoo actually claimed in his Op-Ed in the NYT yesterday that "the changes of the 1970’s occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil, but plenty of paranoia." That would come as a great surprise to Ronald Reagan, who warned on March 31, 1976 -- the time Yoo claims we "had no serious national security threats": But there is one problem which must be solved or everything else is meaningless. I am speaking of the problem of our national security. Our nation is in danger, and the danger grows greater with each passing day. Like an echo from the past, the voice of Winston Churchill’s grandson was heard recently in Britain’s House of Commons warning that the spread of totalitarianism threatens the world once again and the democracies are wandering without aim. And yet FISA was enacted a mere two years later, and President Reagan abided by it -- and never complained about it or contested its validity -- even as he confronted and defended the country against a threat which, in 1983, he characterized as follows: "The Soviet Union is acquiring what can only be considered an offensive military force. . . .They're spreading their military influence in ways that can directly challenge our vital interests and those of our allies." The notion that long-standing American principles embodied by the Geneva Conventions and FISA are a by-product of a peaceful past is just rank historical revisionism. And the fact that these fictions come from those who revere Ronald Reagan and his dramatic warnings of the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union leave little choice other than to conclude that this is deliberate deceit. We adhered to and embraced -- and, indeed, enacted -- the Geneva Conventions and FISA when we were constantly told that we faced great peril from a mortal, unprecedented enemy, not when we were in some bucolic time of peace with threats posed only by noble and upstanding enemies. ...................... Claims that the enemy we face poses a unprecedented, mortal threat -- and that they operate beyond all bounds of decency, humanity, and civilized norms -- is something that we have heard (often accurately) about all sorts of enemies over the last 100 years, and especially since the end of World War II -- exactly during the time we enacted, among other things, the laws of war, FISA and other safeguards. The nature of the enemy is not new, nor is the threat unprecedented. The only difference is that, for the first time, we have a President who claims that America is too weak and ineffective to defeat those enemies while adhering to our defining values and a superior set of civilized norms. George Bush is the first President, certainly since World War II, if not ever, to claim that we have to become the enemy and to descend to their barbarism in order to protect ourselves. What is new and unprecedented is not the enemy we face, but the fundamental and depraved changes to our national character which the President insists we much accept in order to win.