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THIS IS THE MOST POWERFUL STATEMENT I HAVE EVER SEEN COME OUT OF THE
MAINSTREAM MEDIA! YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS! PASS IT ON!!! -------- Original Message --------
THIS IS ON LIVE TONIGHT.
OR WATCH IT ONLINE (URL BELOW).
'Beginning of the end of America'
"...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..."
"...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?..."
MSNBC.com
'Beginning of the end of America'
Olbermann addresses the Military
Commissions Act in a special comment
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Countdown
SEE THE VIDEO:
Updated: 3:00 p.m. ET Oct 19, 2006
We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived as people in fear.
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.
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.
The 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?
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.
© 2006 MSNBC Interactive
© 2006 MSNBC.com
David
Rubinson
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POB
411197
San
Francisco CA 94141-1197
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Quote of the day:
"In
order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be
afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have
a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us." Thich Nhat Hanh -
Vietnamese monk, activist and writer.
------------
Ill-tempered,
Iconoclastic, Impatient and Ideologically-
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Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. OM
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