The Reality-Based Community

Anyone opposes this effort to tear up the U.S. Constitution need only cite two words: Timothy McVeigh. Despite blowing up a federal office building and killing and maiming hundreds of people, including children, McVeigh was tried and sentenced within the full letter and intent of the Constitution. Mr. McVeigh, by all standards and definitions, was a terrorist and a massively dangerous terrorist. Yet the American justice system was not terrorized during his prosecution, trial and sentencing. It remained intact.

There's a typo in the title of this post (an f before "Department").

I'm afraid the D's are getting sandbagged.
Just as Spector raised eveyones hopes when he said that he supported the Constitition and was opposed to warrentless wiretaps then wrote a law that legitamizes them so will these three bush bots roll over and play dead by tweaking a word or two but leaving everything that their furher wants intact.
They are rethuglicans.
They are liars.
They cannot be trusted PERIOD.

It might be worth people re-reading _Darkness at Noon_ around now. If you're not silly enough to believe that the "belly slap" really is just a good old slap on the belly then the torture techniques Bush wants to use are now just those used to break people by the NKVD. (Of course it's also worth noting that you'd go to prison if you used these on your wife or kids.)

Thank you Senators: the Bush administration's attempts to bypass the laws of this country must be opposed. As the president keeps talking about freedom and democracy, he sure acts in opposition to them...
Keep up the good work.

I agree with Pometacom about Timothy McVeigh, but I think there is an even better precedent: the Nuremburg Trials. The Nazis were orders of magnitude more destructive than OBL/Al Qaeda on any measure, including American deaths. Employing against the surviving leaders a modern, fair, humane legal process that we can look back on with pride was the right thing to do from any perspective, and strengthened, not weakened, the United State of America. The same principles should guide us now. We could start by impeaching George Bush.

It's sad that the Democrats have learned, the hard way, that there's nothing to be gained by standing up for fundamental American ideals. Indeed, it seems like they weaken the case for these ideals merely by arguing for them, because that triggers a furious reflexive counterattack. Maybe Ann Coulter thinks torture is good, but as long as there are no Democrats loudly proclaiming that it's bad, she'll find other things to talk about.

«Meanwhile, the Senate Democrats are sitting back and letting McCain, Graham, and Warner do the work, denying the President what he and Karl Rove obviously wanted out of this: a chance to depict the Democrats as soft on terror.»

Shameful. OK that the Democrats want to win, but as Graham, McCain and Warner teach, sometimes the issues are worth more than an election.

«It's sad that the Democrats have learned, the hard way, that there's nothing to be gained by standing up for fundamental American ideals.»

What if American voters no longer believes in fundamental American ideals?

«Indeed, it seems like they weaken the case for these ideals merely by arguing for them, because that triggers a furious reflexive counterattack.»

Tragedy is, these counterattacks are usually done only because they are vote winners.

Sad thoughts of the day...

"but as Graham, McCain and Warner teach, sometimes the issues are worth more than an election"

Right, McCain, that principled decent fellow who has never hesitated to criticize GWB. Graham, Warner, I know nothing about, but principled is not the word that comes to mind when I hear McCain. He has a personal stake in this; that does not make him principled, anymore than the senator with Huntington's is "principled" in his support of a massive increase in the NIH genetic diseases budget. I'm glad he's doing the right thing here, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.

In some ways Timothy McVeigh is a more accurate and effective analog than the Nuremburg Trials. The N-trials were not about loosely organized terrorist acts, but the tightly centralized actions of a highly developed nation. McVeigh and al Qaeda are precisely about blowing up buildings for the sole purpose of killing innocents and creating fear and terror.

Second, people today remember the case of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing. In contrast, not many people alive today remember the setting and substance of the N-trials first hand.

Third, the trial of McVeigh in a US courtroom directly raises the question of why al Qaeda suspects implicated in 9/11 should be treated any differently than McVeigh in terms of their trials and sentencing. Both participated and conspired to blow up US buildings for the explicitly purpose of creating fear and terror. Once this parallel is established, the torture tactics are clearly illegal under US law since such treatment is not allowed for US criminal suspects under any conditions.

funny ringtones