There are prior and current members of the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who openly argue that if the country is at war, the president should be able to ignore domestic and international law outlawing torture, prohibiting illegal detention, providing due process and jurisdictional restraints on military commissions and limiting domestic spying under alleged commander in chief powers. Such claims are unacceptable. Under Article II, Section 3 of our Constitution, the president has an express and unavoidable duty to faithfully execute the "Laws" and has no power to violate them. As Richard Nixon learned, presidential authorizations to violate the law are, in the words of the House Judiciary Committee, "subversive of constitutional government."
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"...There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing." : Daniel Webster, June 1, 1837
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U.S. Initiates Legal Processes Against Christian Group that Marched to Guantánamo
Seven individuals from Witness Against Torture, a group protesting the denial of rights to prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were served papers by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) last week. The group of twenty-four U.S. Christians marched over 60 miles to the Naval Base in an attempt to practice the Christian act of prisoner visitation. The group camped and fasted for four days at the gate of the militarized zone while awaiting access to the base.
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Soldier pays for armor
Army demanded $700 from city man who was wounded
By Eric Eyre
Staff writer
The last time 1st Lt. William "Eddie" Rebrook IV saw his body armor, he was lying on a stretcher in Iraq, his arm shattered and covered in blood.
A field medic tied a tourniquet around Rebrook’s right arm to stanch the bleeding from shrapnel wounds. Soldiers yanked off his blood-soaked body armor. He never saw it again.
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"If once [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions." : Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787
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The Neocons' Long War
by Robert Dreyfuss, TomPaine.com
Never in history has any nation decided to spend so much for so long to battle so few.
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Number Of Iraqi civilians Slaughtered In America's War 100,000 +
Number of U.S. Military Personnel Slaughtered (Officially acknowledged) In Bush's War 2258
The War in Iraq Costs $239,222,614,656 See the cost in your community
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THE REPUBLICAN-LOBBYIST-MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
"While Abramoff, DeLay and Randy 'Duke' Cunningham dominate the headlines," the Alexander Strategy Group (ASG) "deserves to be heavily scrutinized for its role in each of those scandals and others not yet on the mainstream radar," reports Jeremy Scahill. "Recently, ASG was on the cutting edge of one of the fastest-growing industries ... private security," working for Blackwater USA and an image-boosting industry coalition, the International Peace Operations Association. ASG's clients also included Republican fundraiser and "Bush Pioneer" Brent Wilkes, whose companies have collected "some $90 million in military contracts" over the past decade. Previous to hiring ASG, Wilkes retained Patrick McSwain, Duke Cunningham's former chief of staff, as a lobbyist. McSwain went on to found another "high-powered GOP lobbying firm," Northpoint Strategies, whose clients included the Carlyle Group and Titan Corporation ("of Abu Ghraib fame"). Scahill concludes that such connections speak "volumes to how far and wide these investigations should extend." SOURCE: The Nation, February 2, 2006 For more information or to comment on this story, visit: HERE
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"Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." : Frederick Douglass
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MIS-STATEMENTS OF THE UNION
Middle East expert and author Stephen Zunes dissected some of George W. Bush's "simplistic formulations" made during the State of the Union (SOTU) address. Bush stated, "there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success, and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure. Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy." Zunes countered, "Recognizing that the [Iraq] war is probably unwinnable is not defeatism. It is realism. Aiming for an unachievable military 'success' is not responsible. It is a folly of tragic proportions. And insisting the Bush administration be held accountable for the lies, the negligence, and the tragic blunders which have resulted from this ongoing tragedy is a patriotic duty." SOURCE: Foreign Policy in Focus, February 1, 2006 For more information or to comment on this story, visit: HERE
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Eroding U.S. industrial base comes with price
VCS commentator Dianne M. Grassi asks how the founders of our country would have dealt with a declining industrial base, requiring dependence on foreign countries for a whole range of defense related materials and parts.
"Endless conflicts of interest abound when it comes to foreign dependence in order for the U.S. to maintain its infrastructure, electrical grid, military weaponry and supplies, air travel and homeland security, to name a few. When smaller U.S. specialty industries vital to the industrial base become extinct on our shores, they now appear huge in a world where alliances are tenuous at best. A global economy at the expense of U.S. sovereignty, security and standard of living is something that the Colonists would not have stood for. They would have found another way. Maybe America still has time to do the same."
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A Real Way to Honor America's Troops
For America's veterans, 2005 was like the movie "Groundhog Day." Day after day in Congress we have had to fight for the health care and benefits that our veterans have earned, but after every minor victory we seemingly have to fight the battle again the next day against the forces of resistance.
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Beware The Ides Of March
Soothsayer's warning before Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44BC.
By Mathew Maavak
If Julius - regarded as one of the greatest Caesars - couldn’t take note, the leader of the current superpower should. This March, his actions may spark off a conflict from which the world might never recover.
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CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict)
is a Washington-based nonprofit organization founded by Marla Ruzicka, who was killed on April 16, 2005 by a suicide bomb in Baghdad while advocating for the families of Iraqi civilians killed and injured in the conflict. CIVIC believes that civilian casualties should be counted and their families assisted by the governments responsible, and is working to identify victims and help their families.
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