Glibbertysmidgeon

The US stood almost alone yesterday as the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to set up a new Human Rights Council to replace the discredited body based in Geneva.

Ambassadors from around the world broke out in sustained applause when the UN vote was announced: 170-4, with three abstentions.

The Austrailian

Human rights are as American as apple pie- why would the U.S. resist the creation of a U.N. council that is dedicated to protecting them?

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the assembled diplomats had missed a historic opportunity to help those most in need.

“We must not let the victims of human-rights abuses throughout the world think that UN member states were willing to settle for `good enough,’” Bolton said. “We must not let history remember us as the architects of a council that was a `compromise.’”

Chicago Tribune

Nice words, those, but I don’t find them credible.
Coming from an administration with a human rights pedigree like this one:

Torturing prisoners in Abu Gharib
Torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay
and now, tampering with witnesses in a terrorism trial

I have to suspect that Bolton’s objection is really about looking for a way to keep this council from getting too interested in the skeletons in America’s closet.

The Right Wing Spin Machine has been making a lot of noise about how important wiretapping is for our national security, and how the President would never wiretap innocent Americans- only those dastardly terrorists. That’s why we should all be ashamed of ourselves for questioning him, and be good Americans by looking the other way while he breaks the law.

This argument doesn’t hold water.

According to current law, the government can legally wiretap U.S. Citizens inside U.S. borders- as long as there is a warrant. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court was established specifically to have oversight of such warrants. This law goes on to say that if they need to rush, they can get the warrant AFTER the tap. Up to three days after the fact.

So why does the President need to disregard this law? Why is it important for our national security that he not get the necessary warrant?
There is only one reason I can think of that anyone would need to wiretap U.S. Citizens without a warrant.

And that’s if he doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s doing.

The last time a president was caught illegally spying on U.S. Citizens it had nothing to do with national security. President Nixon was caught spying on the Democratic National Committee’s Campaign headquarters.

June 17, 1972: Five men, one of whom says he used to work for the CIA, are arrested at 2:30 a.m. trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel and office complex.

June 19, 1972: A GOP security aide is among the Watergate burglars, The Washington Post reports. Former attorney general John Mitchell, head of the Nixon reelection campaign, denies any link to the operation.

August 1, 1972: A $25,000 cashier’s check, apparently earmarked for the Nixon campaign, wound up in the bank account of a Watergate burglar, The Washington Post reports.

September 29, 1972: John Mitchell, while serving as attorney general, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats, The Post reports.

October 10, 1972: FBI agents establish that the Watergate break-in stems from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of the Nixon reelection effort, The Post reports.

November 11, 1972: Nixon is reelected in one of the largest landslides in American political history, taking more than 60 percent of the vote and crushing the Democratic nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota.

Watergate.info

Nixon, also, defended his illegal actions by claiming he was acting in the interests of national security:

I had been acting, as did my predecessors—President Truman, President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, and President Johnson—in a reasonable belief that in certain circumstances the Constitution permitted and sometimes even required such measures to protect the national security in the public interest.

Nixon’s Second Watergate Speech

The Bush Administration uses the National Defense defense to excuse a variety of ills:

• Invading a country that did not attack us
• Running up record breaking budget deficits
• Torturing prisoners
• Illegally spying on U.S. citizens without warrants

The Bush Administration did learn a thing or two from Nixon’s mistakes. Many of the activities that got Nixon impeached are now entirely legal, thanks to The Patriot Act.

Day by day, this Administrations policies are doing much more damage to our American Dream of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness than any terrorist possibly could.

I was reading about five small towns in Vermont who voted to approve resolutions to impeach President Bush because of his illegal wiretapping. About halfway down the page I saw this:

OUTSIDE POLITICAL MAINSTREAM
The idea of impeaching Bush resides firmly outside the political mainstream. Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold’s call this week to censure Bush — a step short of an impeachment — found scant support on Capitol Hill, even among fellow Democrats.

Yahoo News

I had to wonder why the author felt the need to stick that in.
He could just as easily have mentioned that former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman has called for the President’s impeachment. Holzman served on the committee who voted to impeach president Nixon. The article could have mentioned that the Center for Constitutional Rights has written Articles of Impeachment for President Bush, or quoted Barron’s call for impeachment,

“AS THE YEAR WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE, we picked up our New York Times and learned that the Bush administration has been fighting terrorism by intercepting communications in America without warrants. It was worrisome on its face, but in justifying their actions, officials have made a bad situation much worse: Administration lawyers and the president himself have tortured the Constitution and extracted a suspension of the separation of powers . . .
Certainly, there was an emergency need after the Sept. 11 attacks to sweep up as much information as possible about the chances of another terrorist attack. But a 72-hour emergency or a 15-day emergency doesn’t last four years . . .

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.

Some ancillary responsibility, however, must be attached to those members of the House and Senate who were informed, inadequately, about the wiretapping and did nothing to regulate it. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, told Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 that he was “unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities.” But the senator was so respectful of the administration’s injunction of secrecy that he wrote it out in longhand rather than give it to someone to type. Only last week, after the cat was out of the bag, did he do what he should have done in 2003 — make his misgivings public and demand more information.

Published reports quote sources saying that 14 members of Congress were notified of the wiretapping. If some had misgivings, apparently they were scared of being called names, as the president did last week when he said: “It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.”

Wrong. If we don’t discuss the program and the lack of authority for it, we are meeting the enemy — in the mirror.

Barron’s

Maybe it’s true that most Americans don’t care if their President breaks the law, but I do. And I’m tired of being told I’m outside the mainstream.

What does it mean to be in the mainstream anyway? Why is being part of the mainstream better than being outside of it?

In Old Salem, it was once mainstream to burn ‘witches’. Only a radical would say, “We shouldn’t burn any witches”. I would have been outside the mainstream in Old Salem, because I don’t belive in witches, and I’m strongly opposed to burning people.

There was a time when the mainstream of America believed that slavery was right and good, and that the underground railroad was a radical organization. Again, I would have been outside the mainstream.

These news outlets act as if being one of the sheep is something admirable, and that thinking for yourself- being outside the ‘mainstream’- is somehow wrong.

Of course there are many instances when the mainstream is right- people shouldn’t kill one another or steal from one another, etc. However, as a concerned member of a Democracy, I consider it my responsiblity and my civic duty to examine and question the conventional wisdom of my society. It is my duty to raise alarm if I see any sign of witch burning, slavery, torture, or a president who purposely disobeys the law of the land.

I guess I wasn’t meant for the mainstream.

Published on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 by the Chicago Tribune
What to Do When the Emperor Has No Clothes
by Garrison Keillor

These are troubling times for all of us who love this country, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon. A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat. And then you read the paper and realize the country is led by a man who isn’t paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, “Try much harder.”

Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man’s life? The Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo, who then was at the Justice Department, and shadowy figures taking orders from Vice President Dick “Gunner” Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that President Bush has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.

One such prisoner, Mohamed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”

Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?

Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it. How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to Sept. 11, 2001, than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem. And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you’re doing a heck of a job. No need to tweak a thing. And your blue button-down shirt–it’s you.

But torture is something else. Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall. Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out. It is coming out now.

Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of billions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork-barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team. Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders–pick any big city–is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple, ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country’s defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.

Garrison Keillor is an author and the radio host of “A Prairie Home Companion.”

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the transcript of Michael Brown (of failed FEMA fame) warning the President that hurricane Katrina might create a “catastrophe within a catastrophe” the day before the storm hit the Gulf Coast. This is the briefing where Michael Brown and a series of hurricane experts warned the president, among other things, that the levees could breach.

Five days later, while New Orleans was underwater, and the nation was still discovering how many of our countrymen had been left to die, Bush lied to the press:

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we’re having to deal with it and will,” he said.

BBC

Slate.com asks if we should be worried that Bush did not ask a single question during the entire briefing.

Let me just say, I’m not worried. I’m angry.
If my mechanic tells me my car needs a tune-up, I’m going to have some questions for him. That’s because I care about my car, and about my budget, and I want to make an intelligent decision that protects them both.

But our President doesn’t care enough about the lives of ordinary Americans to ask a single question. All he had time to do was mouth empty, ‘cover my backside’ platitudes to the “folks at the state level” that “we are fully prepared” before disappearing back to his vacation.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that even this was a lie.