Picking and choosing when the laws can be followed without impeding one's progress toward's the mission's objective is bull shit. And simply re-writing them to retroactively make actions previously illegal "immune" isn't bullshit, it's chicken shit.

And the methods deemed permissible for these actions? The administration gets to pick. But they have to say what they pick and record the choices in the Federal Register, so we'll all know what's legal today. Since when does this administration demonstrate it's devotion to revealing it's methods? Do you seriously contend we'll see this happen?

Show me.

Which, of course, is total nonsense promoted by a lying president, PA Senator Rick Santorum, and Rush Limbaugh fans. The Constitution does not define war as only limited to nations. In fact Article 1 defines two types of military actions: Where does any of this say anything about war only limited to nations? It does not. So why do extremists lie about this? What is their agenda? But if they have declared war - and MaggieL says they need not be a nation to do that - then America is at war and those prisoners are soldiers. Soldiers that are covered under article three of the Geneva Convention. Remember that article three ratified by the US as stipulated by the Constitution AND that the US is obligated to abide by? That question is for extremists who conveniently change the rules whenever it suits them. MaggieL - others have accused you of also changing the rules when it suits you. So how you you explain torturing soldiers in direct violation of the Geneva Convention?

Article three does not permit secret prisions, torture, and other actions. Actions intentionally performed and advocated by radical extremist George Jr AND approved by MaggieL.

Non-Americans in The Cellar are again cautioned that S3930 is about kidnapping you, torturing you, hiding you from any judicial review or even from the International Red Cross.... and making it legal. S3930 that MaggieL so approves of is about screwing any non-Americans - violating the Universal Declaration for Human Rights - and making that crime legal.

This same MaggieL finally admitted those tortured prisoners always were protected by the Geneva Convention - but will deny it because "Nobody expects a Spanish Inquisition". Why do you think that phrase has been reposted so many years in The Cellar. Did one poster understand all this years ago? Whom?

Torture any foreigner whenever the president demands it. No judicial review (writ of Habeas Corpus), Red Cross, or Geneva Convention protections. Torture of foreign citizens is to become legal in American - and MaggieL approves.

Scarier still - so much silence from non-Americans about what MaggieL and George Jr think of non-citizen rights. You have the right under new American laws to be kidnapped in your own country and to be tortured in secret prisons - and MaggieL approves. Scary? They why so much silence here?

Do you know where the phrase comes from? Or is this the most unintentionally funny post from you in ages?

What part of "asymmetrical" don't you understand? Issuing such fatwas as these doesn't make someone a soldier, it only makes their violent intensions explicit.

Oh, and another thing: once again I'll thank you too refrain from telling me what I've "admitted", particularly when you do so to put your own words in my mouth to construct yet another of your famous straw men.

I know you bear a very heavy mantle in being the self-appointed resident arbiter of "reality" and ultimate dispenser of facts. But buck up; sophomoric debating fallacies are not becoming to your high office.

An historical analogy
 

Pirates of the Mediterranean

By ROBERT HARRIS

Kintbury, England

September 30, 2006

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the worlds only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Romes port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: The ruined men of all nations, in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.

Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of Civis Romanus sum I am a Roman citizen was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.

But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone, the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.

Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury 144 million sesterces to pay for his war on terror, which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.

Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompeys opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompeys genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as soft or even traitorous powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of serious physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompeys special command during the Senate debate was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.

It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.

It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid onOstia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Romes democracy imperfect though it was rose again.

The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate does not have the same result.

Robert Harris is the author, most recently, of Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.

I've been snickering each time it's posted.

Someone who's supporting Bush and his right to do whatever the fuck he wants, explain this and then explain to me how this isn't violating the Constitution.
This isn't about some hypothetical terrorist anymore. This is about the government getting the okay to come after YOU for whatever the fuck reason they want.

@headsplice: "trust us"

@Flint: I'll trust 'them' when I'm dead and burned.

As you wish...

My favorite part:

List of American Citizen enemy combatants, by GWB:

1. John Kerry
2. Edward Kennedy
3. Barbara Boxer
4. Dan Rather
5. Al Gore
6. Al Frankin
7. .......

7. tw
8. headsplice

and, I'm guessing, pretty much everyone who's given to unicef.

It's sad, but most Americans don't appreciate the freedoms and rights that come with citizenship in our country. They take them for granted and have no clue what it feels like to be without them. Therefore, they cannot comprehend the impact that a law such as the one under discussion here will have. They erroneously believe that it won't affect them since they are law-abiding people. It only pertains to 'those other people, the terrorists', they think.

I've lived without these freedoms. I've been held captive and assaulted with no legal recourse or escape. I've lived where it was illegal for me to drive, to own property, to hold most jobs or attend a religious meeting of any kind. I've been groped and beaten on the street simply because of what I was wearing. There was no one to appeal to, no one who cared. I had absolutely zero legal rights. As a result, I no longer take even the smallest freedom or right for granted. In that country, if you pissed off the wrong person, you could be picked up, detained and questioned. And never seen again.


http://www.yaledailynews.com/Article...rticleID=33532


So lets think about what this bill does.

Who decides if YOU (yes, you...even an American citizen) are an unlawful combatant? - The Military

Who hears the charges? The Military

Who decides if you are telling the truth? The Military

Who is supervising the people detaining you? The Military

Who do you appeal to? No one.

Who is protecting and defending your rights? No one.

Do you notice a severe lack of checks and balances to that system?

Oh wait, this doesn't apply to you or me because we're law abiding, upright citizens and we despise terrorism. No one like us would ever get caught in a web of accusations resulting in our detainage. :fingerx:

Anyone wonder why this bill happens to be retroactive to 1996 specifically? Coincidentally, that is when the War Crimes Act of 1996 was signed into law.http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/h...1----000-.html. Convenient that this would cover Bush and his Military commanded actions should they be deemed to be "crimes", isn't it? This bill not only provides legal shelter for the administration, but, perhaps equally as important, retroactive moral justification for their crimes.

Stormie