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Thursday, August 3, 2006 |
TheOnion: "In a decisive 1-0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers.
The Presidential Empowerment Act, which the president hand-drafted on his own Oval Office stationery and promptly signed into law, provides Bush with full authority to permit himself to authorize increased jurisdiction over the three branches of the federal government, provided that the president considers it in his best interest to do so."
Satire? No reality! The Bush administration is a farce, but a very deplorable one.
WashingtonPost: "A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such 'commissions' to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not al Qaeda members or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal plan.
The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, also allows the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction. The two provisions would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries, officials and independent experts said."
TomPaine: "The power to label individuals as 'enemy combatants' - and detain them indefinitely - presents one of the most basic threats not only to elemental human liberties, but also to the democratic order. Why? Because a government that can simply banish its foes - and those it erroneously seizes - from public sight simply by labeling them as beyond the pale is not a government that labors under the rule of law."
George W. Bush: He who is not with me, is against me. Armageddon, here he comes!
11:08:20 AM 
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ChristianScienceMonitor: "As pundits and policymakers scramble to explain events in Lebanon, their conclusions are virtually unanimous: Hizbullah created this crisis. Israel is defending itself. The underlying problem is Arab extremism.
Sadly, this is pure analytical nonsense. Hizbullah's capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12 was a direct result of Israel's silent but unrelenting aggression against Lebanon, which in turn is part of a six-decades long Arab-Israeli conflict.
Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored 'blue line' on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah's military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel only in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah's leadership; this indeed has been the pattern.
In the process of its violations, Israel has terrorized the general population, destroyed private property, and killed numerous civilians. What peace did Hizbullah shatter?
For six decades the Palestinian refugees have been refused their right to return home because they are of the wrong race. 'Israel must remain a Jewish state,' is an almost sacral mantra across the Western political spectrum. It means, in practice, that Israel is accorded the right to be an ethnocracy at the expense of the refugees and their descendants, now close to 5 million.
A realistic understanding of the conflict, therefore, is one that recognizes that the crux is not in this or that incident or policy, but in Israel's foundational and persistent refusal to recognize the humanity of its Palestinian victims. Neither Hizbullah nor Hamas are driven by a desire to 'wipe out Jews', as is so often claimed, but by a fundamental sense of injustice that they will not allow to be forgotten.
If Israel, like its former political ally South Africa, has the capacity to come to terms with principles of democracy and human rights and accept egalitarian multiracial coexistence within a single state for Jews and Arabs, then the foundation for resentment and resistance will have been removed. If Israel cannot bring itself to do so, then it will continue to be the vortex of regional violence."
Only through Justice can there be peace.
Francis Boyle, Professor of Law: "The United Nations General Assembly must immediately establish an International Criminal Tribunal for Israel (ICTI) as a subsidiary organ under U.N. Charter Article 22. The ICTI would be organized along the lines of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was established by the Security Council."
The purpose of the ICTI would be to investigate and prosecute Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against the Peoples of Lebanon and Palestine."
10:47:01 AM
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