In addition to destroying Habeas Corpus among other things, this bill also gives the military the power to... (3) "Prohibit(s) a combatant under trial from invoking the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights."... Unbelievable..
We have lived as if in a
trance.
And now—our rights and
our freedoms in peril—we slowly awaken to learn that we have been afraid of the
wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight have
we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full
day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our
ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic
fear-mongering:
A government more
dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here
before—and we have been here before, led here by men better and wiser and
nobler than George W. Bush.
We have been here when
President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary
to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper
editors.
American newspaper
editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.
We have been here when
President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save
American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans,
especially those he disparaged as “Hyphenated Americans,” most of whom were
guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.
American public
speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.
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And we have been here
when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was
necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison
and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told
Congress: “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen—he is still
a Japanese.”
American citizens, in
American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the
choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.
Each of these actions
was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of
reasons.
And each was a betrayal
of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were
swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people
Wilson silenced survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got
900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his
jail cell.
And Roosevelt’s
internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but
it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States
to the citizens of the United States whose lives it ruined.
he most vital, the most
urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
In times of fright, we
have been only human.
We have let Roosevelt’s
“fear of fear itself” overtake us.
We
have listened to the little voice inside that has said, “the wolf is at the
door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.”
We have accepted that
the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a
little bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once
accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets was to let the government become
just a little bit like the Soviets.
Or substitute the
Japanese.
Or the Germans.
Or the Socialists.
Or the Anarchists.
Or the Immigrants.
Or the British.
Or the Aliens.
The most vital, the most
urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And, always, always
wrong.
“With the distance of
history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of
Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that
threat?”
Wise words.
And ironic ones, Mr.
Bush.
Your own, of course,
yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.
You spoke so much more
than you know, Sir.
Sadly—of course—the
distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans
needed to take seriously was you.
We have a long and
painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that
“those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
But even within this
history we have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that
wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.
You, sir, have now
befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given
us chaos and called it order.
You, sir, have now
imposed subjugation and called it freedom.
For the most vital, the
most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And — again, Mr. Bush —
all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank
check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to
compare anything this country has ever done to anything the terrorists have
ever done.
We have handed a blank
check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that “the
United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our
values” and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu
Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out,
around him.
We have handed a blank
check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare
not merely any non-American citizens “unlawful enemy combatants” and ship them
somewhere—anywhere -- but may now, if he so decides, declare you an
“unlawful enemy combatant” and ship you somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this
hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president
or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at Manzanar
when Franklin Roosevelt was president.
And if you somehow think
habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody
else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they
call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy
combatant”—exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court
hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to
help you?
This President now has
his blank check.
He lied to get it.
He lied as he received
it.
Is there any reason to
even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to
use it against?
“These military
commissions will provide a fair trial,” you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush, “in
which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney and can
hear all the evidence against them.”
"Presumed
innocent," Mr. Bush?
The very piece of paper
you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the
point just before they sustain “serious mental and physical trauma” in the hope
of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The
Geneva Conventions in their own defense.
"Access to an
attorney," Mr. Bush?
Swift
injustice
Oct. 13: “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann talks to Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, the
Navy lawyer who successfully challenged military tribunals for GITMO detainees,
about his departure from the military in the wake of being passed over for a
promotion
Lieutenant Commander
Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was
only granted access to his detainee defendant on the promise that the detainee
would plead guilty.
"Hearing all the
evidence," Mr. Bush?
The Military Commissions
Act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made
available to the defense.
Your words are lies,
Sir.
They are lies that
imperil us all.
“One of the terrorists
believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks,” you told us yesterday, “said he
hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America.”
That terrorist, sir,
could only hope.
Not his actions, nor the
actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up
to what you have wrought.
Habeas corpus? Gone.
The Geneva Conventions? Optional.
The moral force we
shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as
an eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have
done, Mr. Bush, they would be “the beginning of the end of America.”
And did it even occur to
you once, sir — somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome,
intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 -- that with only a
little further shift in this world we now know—just a touch more repudiation of
all of that for which our patriots died --- did it ever occur to you once that
in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some
irresponsible future president and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be
entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of “unlawful
enemy combatant” for -- and convene a Military Commission to try -- not John
Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the
most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, Sir, all
of them—as always—wrong.
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2006 MSNBC Interactive