'Beginning of the end of America'
Keith Olbermann | October 18, 2006
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?disc=149495;article=105550;title=APFN
And nowour rights and our freedoms in perilwe slowly awake 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 beforeand we have been here before led hereby 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 citizenhe 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 Roosevelts 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 Roosevelts 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.
Sadlyof coursethe 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. Its against our laws
and its 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 somewhereanywhere -- 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 combatantexactly 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.
s 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 knowjust 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 themas alwayswrong.
© 2006 MSNBC Interactive
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