[GPSCC-chat] Fw: There Goes the Republic - Robert Scheer on defense authorization bill

[Caroline Yacoub]

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: shane que hee <squehee at ucla.edu>
Sent: Thu, December 15, 2011 8:57:06 PM
Subject: There Goes the Republic - Robert Scheer on defense authorization bill


Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:28:15 -0800
>Subject: There Goes the Republic - Robert Scheer on defense authorization bill
>From: Thomas Scott Tucker <scott at tstucker.com>
>
>
>There Goes the Republic
>
>By Robert Scheer <http://www.truthdig.com/robert_scheer> 
>
>EXCERPT, use link for full text:    
>http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/there_goes_the_republic_20111214/ 
>
>Once again the gods of war have united our Congress like nothing else. Unable to 
>agree on the minimal spending necessary to save our economy, schools, medical 
>system or infrastructure, the cowards who mislead us have retreated to the 
>irrationalities of what George Washington in his farewell address condemned as 
>“pretended patriotism.” 
>
>
>The defense authorization bill that Congress passed and President Obama had 
>threatened to veto will soon become law, a fact that should be met with public 
>outrage. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, responding to 
>Obama’s craven collapse on the bill’s most controversial provision, said, “By 
>signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as 
>the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law.” On 
>Wednesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney claimed “the most recent 
>changes give the president additional discretion in determining how the law will 
>be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law, which are at the 
>heart of our country’s strength.” 
>
>
>What rubbish, coming from a president who taught constitutional law. The point 
>is not to hock our civil liberty to the discretion of the president, but rather 
>to guarantee our freedoms even if a Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich should attain 
>the highest office.
>
>Sadly, this flagrant subversion of the constitutionally guaranteed right to due 
>process of law was opposed in the Senate by only seven senators, including 
>libertarian Republican Rand Paul and progressive Independent Bernie Sanders.
>
>That onerous provision of the defense budget bill, much discussed on the 
>Internet but far less so in the mass media, assumes a permanent war against 
>terrorism that extends the battlefield to our homeland. It reeks of a 
>militarized state that threatens the foundations of our republican form of 
>government.
>
>This is not only a disaster in the making for civil liberty but a blow to 
>effective anti-terrorist police work. Recall that it was the FBI that was most 
>effective in interrogating al-Qaida suspects before the military let loose the 
>torturers. Under the newly approved legislation, that bypassing of civilian 
>experts will be codified as a routine option for a president. 
>
>
>As The New York Times editorialized, the bill “would take the most experienced 
>and successful anti-terrorism agencies­the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors­out of 
>the business of interrogating, charging and trying most terrorism cases, and 
>turn the job over to the military.” Not only has FBI Director Robert Mueller III 
>opposed this shift in the law, but so has Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who 
>previously ran the CIA. 
>
>
>What’s alarming is not just that one pernicious aspect of the defense spending 
>bill, but the ease with which an otherwise deadlocked Congress that can’t manage 
>minimal funding for job creation and unemployment relief can find the money to 
>fund at Cold War levels a massive sophisticated arsenal to defeat an enemy that 
>no longer exists.
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