Do We Sufficiently Feel The Loss?

[Jcrowley]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tluogv9EGTQ&mode=related&search=

[roguevalley]

1. no. i think people are standing between two gun barrels labeled

'war' and 'global warming' and they are of the mind that if they don't make a sound, it won't go off.

[Jcrowley]

2. Bush Wins Legal Victory Over Guantanamo Detainees

President Bush's victory is a defeat for American honor

February 23, 2007
By TOM TEEPEN Cox Newspapers

President Bush has won a signal legal victory. He should be ashamed of it. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington has upheld the administration's contention that prisoners the administration is holding at Guantanamo — some 400, reportedly — cannot challenge their detentions in federal courts.

That leaves their fate up to Bush's personal whim or to military tribunals set up by the administration and recent Republican Congresses so as to offer little hope to detainees picked up, often willly-nilly, as long as five years ago as suspected "enemy combatants."

The prisoners can be doomed by coerced testimony — testimony produced by torture, to be plain about it — and by hearsay, permissions granted last year in the Military Commissions Act, which in those and other ways deeply degraded the U.S. military's once proud system of justice.

The appellate ruling will be further appealed to the Supreme Court, but even if the justices take it up — big if — relief is unlikely. The high court has twice in recent years ruled that the Guantanamo prisoners may indeed challenge their status in federal courts, but only in the absence of a contrary congressional directive of the sort last year's legislation set out.

<snip>

So here's the way matters stand in Bush-world:
A president may declare a war just by his rhetoric — Bush could as easily have called his "war on terrorism" a "drive against terrorism." He can then order the detention of "enemy combatants," designated as such by whatever criteria he declares, and finally imprison them indefinitely without recourse to any court. The "war" and the president's extraordinary powers will run for as long as the president says — and remember, Bush said we might not even recognize when this one ends.

<snip>

http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070223/OPINION03/702230311/1039/OPINION03

http://greenberg-art.com/.Toons/.Toons,%20social/qqxsgLibertyCries.gif

[shadowknows69]

3. That is an excellent way of putting it rogue.

Probably the simplest and best explanation of this FUBAR situation the world is in I've ever read. The human race is truly at a crossroads in our existence IMO and just as bad as taking the wrong path is standing still and taking none.

[shadowknows69]

4. kicking this one

n/t

[Jcrowley]

5. Thanks

shadowknows.

Did you see the video at link?

The Host of Seraphim

[shadowknows69]

6. Yes, powerful stuff

This is where we have fallen from our role as potential leader of the free world. being "prosperous" country should never have meant ignoring the plight of those less prosperous. Money is only evil if the men who own it all have no souls and use it to hurt and control and amass more wealth than they could ever possibly use in ten lifetimes.

[Jcrowley]

7. And what about

the sooo many that are just ordinary folk and are really indifferent to the suffering of others much of this caused by their consumptive habits.

I guess I'm wondering about those who stroll along through the malls in light of all that surrounds us, screams at us, and can go on as if all is well with really nary a thought as to any of these things we discuss daily.

I take for granted the pernicious nature of the uber-greedy powerful capitalists but what worries me more is the low hum of indifference from others.