Gratuitous Common Sense

Well, wouldn’t know it… the day after I posted about the powers being abused by the Military Commissions Act, a bit of irony has developed in Iran.

I can’t make this stuff up.

Apparently a U.S. based professor, who holds dual citizenship in Iran and the U.S., is being “detained” by Iran for “crimes against national security”. According to the article on CNN (emphasis mine)…

[Judiciary spokesman] Jamshidi did not give details but a judiciary source later told Reuters Esfandiari was suspected of “crimes against national security,” a broad legal term covering acts deemed to endanger the stability of the Islamic state.

Hmmm, that sounds familiar. But given that we’re basically doing the same thing, if not worse, you might expect the Bush administration to be intimately familiar with and understanding of Iran’s actions…

The U.S. State Department has condemned the arrest of Esfandiari, who has dual U.S. and Iranian citizenship, and said she was among a number of U.S.-Iranians being detained by Tehran.

…maybe not. It makes you wonder if the precedent set by his own actions has robbed Bush of any authority or credibility in this matter with Iran. Oops.

Then again, maybe Bush isn’t the one with the problem. His actions have merely undermined any future attempt by the state department or any other U.S. citizen to appeal to a more balanced form of justice. The irony continues in the similarity between Esfandiari and the story Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri in yesterday’s post…

Esfandiari flew to Tehran in December to visit her mother. As she drove to the airport to catch a flight back she was robbed of her belongings, including her passports, it said.

She applied for replacement Iranian travel documents and was interviewed by the Intelligence Ministry. There then followed weeks of interrogations focusing on her work for the center, it said.

The center’s president, former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton, sent a letter in February to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad explaining the work of the organization and seeking his help in securing Esfandiari’s return to the United States.

Gee, a foreign national being detained indefinitely, while an investigation is ongoing, and interrogated by a country out of fear for national security even though they were engaging in non-threatening business inside and/or outside the detaining country. What in the world could we possibly condemn about this?

This is standard operating procedure now, thanks to the Military Commissions Act.

Ahhh, the irony. We’re so lucky to have to have the Bush regime at the helm, and so is Esfandiari.

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A list regarding The Military Commissions Act of 2006:

• John Rockefeller (D-WV)
• Tim Johnson (D-SD)
• Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
• Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)
• Ben Nelson (D-NE)
• Debbie Ann Stabenow (D-MI)
• Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
• Bill Nelson (D-FL)
• Thomas Carper (D-DE)
• Joseph Lieberman (I-CT)
• Ken Salazar (D-CO)
• Mark Pryor (D-AR)

This is the list of democratic Senators that voted FOR the enactment of this bill in 2006, and the list of Senators (who are now part of the majority) upon whose shoulders the responsibility now falls to restore Habeas Corpus.

As Glenn Greenwald so perfectly puts it on Salon.com…

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is, without question, the single worst law enacted during the Bush presidency, and is one of the most destructive laws passed in the last several decades. It is not merely a bad law. It vests in the President the power to detain people indefinitely with no meaningful opportunity to contest the government’s accusations. That is the very power the Founders sought first and foremost to prohibit.

More significantly, whether a country permits its political leaders to imprison people arbitrarily and with no process is one of the few defining attributes dividing free and civilized countries from lawless tyrannies. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it in his 1789 letter to Thomas Paine: “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” To vest the President with the power to imprison people indefinitely with no charges is fundamentally to transform the type of country we are.

The administration sought to turn the debate over this bill into a partisan issue while claiming that the prisoners, including innocent ones, at Guantanamo Bay do not deserve a hearing. The administration also claimed that the burden of proof fell on the defendant to prove their innocence. Anyone who thought otherwise was declared a friend of the terrorists. As you can see from the votes above, this effort was fairly successful.

Currently, there are as many as half a dozen bills on the floor of the House and Senate that would restore the fundamental rights of Habeas Corpus and rescind the powers of a King that were granted to W. Bush last year. One of them is a DoD budget authorization bill, but the Chairman of the House Armed services Committee, Ike Skelton, has so far refused to add the Habeas Corpus restoration provision to that bill. Certainly, Ike is worried that such a provision would cause the thinker-in-chief to veto a larger bill. But one would hope that the republicans in congress would have enough of a backbone to recognize that it is time to stand on their principles, without voting out of fear of being painted as a terrorist lover, and have a little faith that the American people will be able to recognize it when they override the I-want-all-the-power veto from the “commander guy”.

Nowhere in the world is this kind of power more hypocritical to our foundation as a country than in the United States, or at least we would like to think so. As Greenwald cited in his article…

As but one of the countless heinous examples of what this law authorizes, review the plight of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar who, in 2001, was living with his wife and five children in the U.S. legally — as a computer science graduate student at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois — when he was detained and then charged with making false statements when he was questioned as part of the 9/11 investigation.

Al-Marri vehemently denied the accusations, and his criminal trial was scheduled for July, 2003. But the trial never happened, because President Bush, one month before it was to begin, declared him an “enemy combatant,” leading to the dismissal of the charges in court and his transfer to a military prison, where he has remained ever since — indefinitely — with no opportunity to contest the charges or to prove his innocence.

…or opportunity to ask the government to prove his guilt. This is the kind of behavior that the Military Commissions Act makes perfectly legal, without any forum for questioning it. I don’t know about everyone else, but this doesn’t even make me feel any safer, much less have any tangible positive effect of that nature.

In fact, like most everything else this administration has done in the name of terror, I think it has made us less safe. Holding prisoners without access to courts does nothing more than feed a terrorist’s propaganda machine. Much like Iraq, it increases their ability to recruit and provides easy access to a wider audience of impressionable individuals that they will easily sway in their direction. It also increases the risk to our military by setting a precedent that other governments could use to justify the detainment of American troops, civilians, or foreign nationals in their country without charges or appeal for an indefinite amount of time. Doing such a thing would be perfectly legal and okay, according to the principles and reasoning of the current administration.

The president signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 on October 17th. As of this post, it has been 7 months too long that we have allowed one man the kind of power that our founders were seeking to escape. It’s long past time to require that our government live up to the principles that have made this a great nation and restore Habeas Corpus.

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…a little. But that’s more than I can say for most of the current republican candidates for president.

In the wake of the first republican presidential debate, there are a number of self-proclaimed “true” conservatives decrying the mainstream media’s outright shunning of Ron Paul. Some of them even going so far as to declare that there’s an organized conspiracy by the media against Ron Paul to 1) assure that Hillary Clinton wins the White House or 2) assure that democrat-in-sheep’s-clothing John McCain wins the White House or 3) assure that [take your pick from the a la carte menu offered by the damned liberal media machine].

As someone who didn’t even watch the debate, I hadn’t even heard of Ron Paul until I came across a few people whining about the lack of coverage. Personally, I don’t buy their assumptions about why it’s being done. I’m much more apt to attribute the failure to general incompetence as a news organization. But given some of the polling statistics released after the debate, it’s hard to argue that there isn’t a failure on their part.

According to a rating window on the MSNBC.com website at 8:10 ET on May 4th, Ron Paul was carrying the highest positive rating (with 72,419 votes in at the time)…

32% - Paul
30% - Romney
26% - Giuliani
21% - McCain
14% - Huckabee
9% - Brownback
9% - Tancredo
8% - Hunter
8% - Thompson
6% - Gilmore

Not only that, he also had the lowest negative rating…

29% - Paul
35% - Romney
37% - Huckabee
40% - Giuliani
42% - McCain
43% - Gilmore
43% - Hunter
45% - Thompson
45% - Tancredo
46% - Brownback

Furthermore, on another MSNBC poll Ron Paul is as far from the rest of the pack as one can get.

Here is the top three for each of the other pertinent questions…

Read the rest of this entry »

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The difference between being crazy and being devout:

1. You say, “This orange juice has been transformed from the blood of Zeus.” Nobody else agrees. Congrats! You’re crazy.
2. You say, “This wine is transubstantiated into the blood of Christ.” Millions agree. Congrats! You are devout.

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I thought it best to round up some Anti-War quotes that center on the President’s decision to commit our troops to a long ill-defined conflict on foreign soil. As we all know, the Neocons like to consistently paint these people as Anti-American.

I have decided to gather some quotes that are indicative of the sentiments of the anti-war people and politicians. Then I will thoroughly and conclusively demonstrate why they are not Anti-American.

1. “You can support the troops but not the president.”
2. “Well, I just think it’s a bad idea. What’s going to happen is they’re going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years.”
3. “[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy.”
4. “American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy.”
5. “I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning… I didn’t think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.”
6. “I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today.”
7. “If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.”
8. “Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”

As I mentioned above, I am going to show you why these people are not Anti-American. Read the rest of this entry »

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Just in case you were wondering how far the bible belt actually stretched in America, I have provided an illustration.

A Bible Belt is an area [in] which Christian Evangelical Protestantism is a pervasive or dominant part of the culture. In particular, in the United States, it is the region where the Southern Baptist Convention denomination is strongest. It includes the southern states of the Midwest and the entirety of the South. Bible belts can also be found in other countries, including Canada and some parts of Europe. The name is derived from the (perceived) overriding importance of the Christian Bible among Evangelical Christian thought and practice.

In the U.S., the stronghold of the Bible Belt is typically seen as the South, due to the colonial foundations of Protestantism in the culture of the region. The major forms were of Tidewater Anglicanism after the Church of England and Appalachia Presbyterianism after the Church of Scotland.

If you were really wanting to be accurate, you might shade Utah and parts of Idaho and Wyoming too, but Colorado is in the way. My goal is to, one day, live outside the shaded area. I had the pleasure for a brief period of time, but it was too damn cold. Oh what a glorious time that was.

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“If there is a God, it is reasonably certain that he made the world, but it is by no means certain that he is the author of the Bible. Why then should we not place greater confidence in Nature than in a book? And even if this God made not only the world but the book besides, it does not follow that the book is the best part of creation, and the only part that we will be eternally punished for denying. It seems to me that it is quite as important to know something of the solar system, something of the physical history of this globe, as it is to know the adventures of Jonah or the diet of Ezekiel.

For my part, I would infinitely prefer to know all the results of scientific investigation, than to be inspired as Moses was. Supposing the Bible to be true; why is it any worse or more wicked for Freethinkers to deny it, than for priests to deny the doctrine of evolution, or the dynamic theory of heat? Why should we be damned for laughing at Samson and his foxes, while others, holding the Nebular Hypothesis in utter contempt, go straight to heaven? It seems to me that a belief in the great truths of science are fully as essential to salvation, as the creed of any church. We are taught that a man may be perfectly acceptable to God even if he denies the rotundity of the earth, the Copernican system, the three laws of Kepler, the indestructibility of matter and the attraction of gravitation. And we are also taught that a man may be right upon all these questions, and yet, for failing to believe in the “scheme of salvation,” be eternally lost.”

- Robert Green Ingersoll

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Anything that has Christians all up in a tizzy in this country is bound to catch my eye. According to CNSNews.com, on May 4th PBS is going to begin airing a three part series on Atheism called A Brief History of Disbelief. Here’s the (very brief) preview…

Produced and narrated by Jonathan Miller, “this series is about the disappearance of something: religious faith.” It originally aired on the BBC in 2005, and an IPF page has been set up for the US airing.

Of course, the CNS News article includes all the standard fallacy-laden Christian attacks. One would think that if they truly believed that they had the absolute truth correct, then they wouldn’t be so insecure about opposing views. For example, I wonder what kind of fervor would be heard from the scientists if PBS aired a documentary that claimed Earth doesn’t exist. This absolute truth thing seems to be lost on these Christians. Hmmm, fodder for another post…

Check your local listings for times.

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