December 30, 2005 - You have to be exceedingly naïve to believe that America’s enemies had not imagined that their telephone, wire, and radio transmissions were being intercepted. Any reasonable person would have believed that the United States was reading Al Qaeda’s mail long before the New York Times broke the story of the Presidents illicit directive. So now the Justice Department is investigating the leak of the President’s direction to skip getting an FISA warrant before or within 72 hours after eavesdropping.

Back in the era when Richard M. Nixon occupied the White House and Richard B. Cheney was Don Rumsfield’s assistant at Nixon’s OEO those of us who were opposed to the war answered the telephone with, “Hello. Can you hear me, J. Edgar?” We assumed that the government was engaged in illegal wiretapping. We were right. We assumed that the government was engaged in illegal entries. We were right. Now, thirty years later, are we to believe that a sophisticated enemy planning guerilla attacks on United States interests here and abroad is less suspicious than we were three decades ago?....click here for entire article

December 29, 2005 - Jose Padilla, remember that name. It is about to be enshrined as the lawyer’s reference to a watershed in the development of American - Constitutional law. For generations to come law professors will be citing the Padilla case. Students will cite it in papers and examination essays. It will be pivotal as it decides the nature of the Presidency in the Twenty-First Century.

It was quite a trip that elevated a Chicago street punk into landmark case. After a move to Miami he converted to Islam and adopted a radical sect as his own. He allegedly became active with a group of young men raising money and recruits in support of terrorists abroad. He went to Afghanistan and when he returned he was arrested without a warrant by FBI agents in the arrival area of O’Hare Airport. Taken to New York he was held in the Metropolitan Detention Center there awaiting the filing of charges. An Attorney was appointed to represent him. Before any charges were filed and without securing any warrant from a court the President ordered that he be turned over to the Department of Defense declaring that Padilla was an enemy combatant....click here for entire article

December 27, 2005 - If we are engaged in a War on Terror as the President says then where is the battlefield; who is the enemy; and how will we know that we have won? The facile answers are that the battlefield is in Iraq and Afghanistan; that the enemies are Islamic Radical Terrorists and we will know that we have won when Afghanistan and Iraq are stable and secure democracies. The real answer is that the battlefield is in the recesses and interstices of our own minds; that the enemies are ourselves; and that we will know we have won when we no longer march to the cadence beaten out by the fear mongers. We are not engaged in a war on terror but we are engaged in at least two wars.

We are engaged in that forgotten war in Afghanistan. It is a continuation of the war that 19th Century slogan makers dubbed The Great Game. For almost two centuries first one European power and then another has sought to impose its own client government on the Afghani tribes. Imperial Britain and Imperial Russia contested the mountain passes and desolate plains of Afghanistan. At the end of the last century a decade of occupation sent the Soviet Union down the slide to history’s ash heap. Now, in the first decade of this century America has stepped to the wicket for its inning. Not since Alexander marched this way and gave his name to Kandahar has any foreign army successfully subjugated this tribal people. But it is not a war on terror. It is a war to deny Osama Bin Laden a sanctuary. Its mission cannot be accomplished without an imperial investment in a perpetual garrison stationed there. Only then will we last out our inning in the Great Game.....click here for entire article.

December 22, 2005 - "I thought it out. Imagine a war where you can call home after a bad day. Does that make it easier, more familiar?

"'Hey, Honey, how was your day?'

"'Oh, you know, same old stuff, killing, dying. That sort of sh*t. How about you?' The skeptics, the reporters, the pro and antiwar demonstrators, they're all wrong. The news says the war's over. That was fine by us. No one else belonged there anyway. This was our war, this was my war, and it's the only one I had. I may have had my doubts about it but it was something to hold on to. I looked forward to my phone call, knowing that my wife would tell me to calm down, that it was just a dream, that there was no other man - there never are, after all."

Crawford, John ; The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell ; An Accidental Soldiers Account of The War In Iraq; Riverhead Books, New York, 2005. pp 72-73.....click here for entire article

As a result of his service in the War Crimes trials following WWII no American jurist was more familiar with the abuses imposed upon the citizenry by arbitrary totalitarian government than was Mr. Justice Robert H. Jackson. Shortly after he resumed his seat on the U.S Supreme Court following his assignment as the U.S. Prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials he wrote the following:

"These [Fourth Amendment rights], I protest, are not mere second-class rights but belong in the catalog of indispensable freedoms. Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart. Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government." Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160, 180 (Jackson, J., dissenting). (quoted with approval in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U.S. 266, 1973)......click here for entire article

December 20, 2005 - “I, George W, Bush, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States so help me God.” The President has repeated those words twice; once when he was inaugurated President in January 2001 and again when he commenced his second term eleven months ago. Our public officials from the President own to the newest military recruit take that same solemn oath as they enter into public service. Each of them swear allegiance, not to an monarch, not to a tyrant, but to that which the President has called “just a goddamned piece of paper.” We say that we are ruled by law and not by men setting ourselves apart from those totalitarian societies ruled by the despotic whim of men wielding dictatorial power. We call it “democracy”.

We have long appreciated what a totalitarian society looks like. Secret police monitor what the citizen reads; what the citizen hears; and control what a citizen may say. Secret police abduct people from the streets and they disappear into a system of secret prisons where they remain, unprotected by any law or court until enough information is wrung from them or they succumb to the methods used to extract intelligence from them. None of that could happen in America. That revered scrap of paper which our public officers swear to preserve, protect, and defend prevents us from descending into that kind of political Hades in which a perverted patriotism forbids questioning the men who sit in the seats of power. In our Constitutional democracy dissenting voices are not stifled as disloyal but heard as part of the dialogue out of which wise decisions emerge.......click here for entire article

Yesterday the news leaked out that in a December 8th raid by forces of the American sovereign entity upon an Interior Ministry detention center operated by the Iraqi sovereign entity 600 detainees were found cramped into space for less than half that number. 13 of the detainees were immediately transferred to hospitals to treat their injuries. It was the second such raid by the American sovereign entity upon a detention center operated by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The first raid – or at least the first reported raid occurred last month on November 15th when a unit of the Third Infantry forced its way into an Interior Ministry bunker in Baghdad and found 169 mistreated and malnourished prisoners – some of whom, the Army said, had been subjected to what our army called torture.......click here for entire article

December 8, 2005 - Did the Miami Air Marshall over react? Should they have been more aware of the passenger’s mental condition? Was there a basis for them to believe that lethal force was necessary to protect themselves or others? It is for too early for anyone to make any definitive answer to the many questions raised by the killing of an apparently innocent leaving an airplane at Miami International Airport. At this point we must consider the air marshals innocent of wrong doing and that their shooting was, in the circumstance, justified.

But, even though the killing of this particular person may have been entirely blameless it does focus a spotlight on a defective and dysfunctional system of airport security. The confrontation itself demonstrates that the system of airport security is so unreliable that the air marshals cannot rely on its efficacy. The passenger was shot while he was leaving the plane. When he reached into the backpack he carried the air marshals had to consider whether he was reaching for a weapon or, worse a remote trigger to explode a bomb that he had left on the aircraft. That being so then they acted properly.......click here for entire article

December 5, 2005 - On November 17 th Rep. John Murtha (D. PA) introduced House Joint Resolution 73 which provided:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That:

SECTION 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.

SEC. 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines shall be deployed in the region.

SEC. 3. The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy. (emphasis supplied) http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.J.RES.73:

 The Resolution was referred to committee and Representative Murtha announced it in a news conference the following day. The Republican reaction was swift, uncoordinated, and like most Republican reactions shifting ground as the operatives gauged public reaction.......click here for entire article

December 4, 2005 - Who is Peter D, Feaver and why should we care? People more expert that I in the operation of Adobe’s Acrobat have discovered that he is the author of "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.", the document that the White House posted on its website claiming that it had been newly unclassified. His “National Strategy” was the framework upon which the President’s speech to the Naval Academy Cadets and the emerging campaign to sell the Iraqi war to the public has been built. That is why we should care, Peter D, Feaver is the new guy on the Administration block and he is the guy who is telling the President how we are going to win in Baghdad.

He must be a military expert, right? He must have built some kind of reputation as a genius of counter-insurgency operations. When he joined the NSC as a consultant in June of this year he must have brought new expertise to the table. He did. He presented the Administration with a study of the polls that he claimed showed that the people would support the war only if they believed that it could shown that we were winning. Peter D. Feaver is a political scientist from Duke University whose field of study is not counter-insurgency, terrorism, or even the economic reconstruction of a war-torn country. His field of study has been public opinion and specifically American Public Opinion. The new expertise he brought to the table was how to sell the war.......click here for entire article