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Tuesday, January 17, 2006 |
Al Gore: "Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.
When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the power he wanted when they passed the AUMF [Authorization for the Use of Military Force], he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother.
The President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.
Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges.
This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then - until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture."
11:14:19 AM 
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TotEotA: "The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.
The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups."
Which again points to the fact that the 'war on terror' is just an excuse to gain total control over the citizens.
10:56:22 AM
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Newsmax: "American ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton has sent a sharply worded letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, threatening to cut U.S. funding to the U.N. if the world body continues to promote anti-Israel events."
10:48:53 AM
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ETUC: "The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) is calling for a major demonstration on the Services Directive on 14 February 2006 in Strasbourg."
The Bolkestein directive: "The Commission wants to liberalise the cross-border supply of services, creating a single market across the EU and eliminating the so-called barriers between Member States.
This law is aimed at areas of the economy with a high concentration of labour. Any attempt to revise the regulations will inevitably have a knock-on effect on employment conditions for millions of workers. That is why it is crucial that the trade union voice should be heard in reaching a workable proposal."
10:43:39 AM
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