Safeguarding ‘The Long War’

August 30, 2008

As Decider George and his miserable band of legal cutthroats get ready for a much-anticipated kick out the door, the blood lust must remain first and foremost.
As the rest of the US swirls around Jackboot John McCain’s VP pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the White House is attempting to blindside a provision through Congress to keep the so-called Global War on Terror terrifying the entire freakin’ planet.

In the New York Times this morning is a simple story of how a proposal for hearing legal appeals from detainees at Guantánamo Bay has some nasty verbiage deep in its bowels.
Decider George wants to keep his war going:

  • Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say.

    Mr. Bush “is trying to stir up again the politics of fear by reminding people of something they haven’t really forgotten: that we are engaged in serious armed conflict with Al Qaeda,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard and legal adviser to Mr. Obama. “But the question is, Where is that conflict to be waged, and by what means.”

    Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said he wanted to make sure the Bush administration — or a future president — did not use that declaration as “another far-fetched interpretation” to evade the law, the way he believes Mr. Bush and aides like Alberto R. Gonzales, the former attorney general, did in using the wiretapping program to avoid the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
    “I don’t want to face another situation where we had the Sept. 14 resolution and then Attorney General Gonzales claimed that that was authorization to violate FISA,” Mr. Specter said.
    For Bush critics like Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, the answer is simple: do not give the administration the wartime language it seeks.
    “I do not believe that we are in a state of war whatsoever,” Mr. Fein said. “We have an odious opponent that the criminal justice system is able to identify and indict and convict. They’re not a goliath. Don’t treat them that way.”

Ah, the old “politics of fear” bullshit that has been the theme of Decider George’s failed Wide World of War on Terror the past near-eight years.
The wording in the proposal in the Times piece is part-n-parcel from the Sept. 14, 2001, Congressional resolution, “Authorization for Use of Military Force,” which allowed Decider George to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks to prevent such things from happening in the future.
Most people viewed the invasion of Afghanistan in going after Osama and his boys was justified under that resolution, but what happened during the ensuing seven years has been a total page from some obscure George Orwell novel.

And the ludicrous Global War on Terror?
Worse than a total failure — the scheme just made the world a much more dangerous place.
And should the US be this involved?
SourceWatch cites a October 16, 2003, memo from Dumb-ass, cold-hearted Don Rumsfeld:

  • “Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.
    Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”

The memo turned the corner from war against a physical enemy to one against a mind-set.
A war against an idea.
Against something floating out in the ether.
Anyone and anybody and anywhere.

Even in the good, old US.
Also from the Times story:

  • The proposal is also the latest step that the administration, in its waning months, has taken to make permanent important aspects of its “long war” against terrorism.
    From a new wiretapping law approved by Congress to a rewriting of intelligence procedures and F.B.I. investigative techniques, the administration is moving to institutionalize by law, regulation or order a wide variety of antiterrorism tactics.
    “This seems like a final push by the administration before they go out the door,” said Suzanne Spaulding, a former lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency and an expert on national security law. The cumulative effect of the actions, Ms. Spaulding said, is to “put the onus on the next administration” — particularly a Barack Obama administration — to justify undoing what Mr. Bush has done.

Decider George and his ass-crack VP, Dufus Dick Cheney, are turds til the end.
And is Sarah Palin able to fill Dufus Dick’s big, security-tight, vault-like office?
The very answer fills one with terror.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.