Republicans continue to push tyranny

Achtung!

Wiped out in two general elections, Republicans still haven’t learned that Americans don’t want your stinking tyranny!

Yet there they go again. 18 Republicans in Congress, including 3 from California, are pushing to pass a new bill that would extend Soviet tyrannies they passed when they were the majority in Congress.

It’s H.R. 1467, the “Safe and Secure America Act of 2009.” A better name: The SS Amerika Akt, or Amerika Akt.

It extends parts that soon would expire from the 2003 USA PATRIOT ACT, which Congress passed in a panic after the 9/11 attack, and which would be better termed the USSR TRAITORS’ Act. It repealed our sacred liberties and turned American into a tyranny.

Three of the co-sponsors are from Kalifornia:  Reps. Dan Lungren, Duncan Hunter, and Elton Gallegly.

Hunter ran a risible campaign for president last year.

Lungren is notorious as an enemy of American liberties. In the early 1980s he authored the Lungren Law, which allows the government to seize your property for any reason — even if you’re innocent — without a trial. A senile Ronald Reagan signed it. It’s a total violation of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” He’s still at it, getting Congress to pass a new seizure law. Herr Lungren belongs in the Reichstag in 1939, not the U.S. Congress in 2009.

So long as Republicans keep proposing, and imposing, the Amerika Act and similar tyrannies, they should lose every election — and deserve to.

World War II U.S. interrogators didn’t use torture

Anyone except a Neo”conservative” ideologue would consider World War II to be more serious than Bush’s badly run “war” on terrorism, or his war in Iraq. Hitler was rather a lot nastier than Saddam, or even Osama bin Laden.

Yet new reports on U.S. interrogators in World War II, hitherto kept secret, show that, although they sometimes bent the rules, the interrogators didn’t torture Nazi prisoners. The Yanks were civilized men, unlike Bush and the Neocons:

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler‘s deputy, Rudolf Hess.

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration’s methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army’s Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

“I feel like the military is using us to say, ‘We did spooky stuff then, so it’s okay to do it now,’ ” said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University.

When Peter Weiss, 82, went up to receive his award, he commandeered the microphone and gave his piece.

“I am deeply honored to be here, but I want to make it clear that my presence here is not in support of the current war,” said Weiss, chairman of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy and a human rights and trademark lawyer in New York City.

That’s how it’s supposed to be done. Even in the midst of the worst war in world history, which killed more than 60 million people, and even while interrogating some Nazis who were complicit in the Holocaust, these interrogators maintained their humanity.

And that’s how Americans distinguished themselves from the Nazis and from our “ally,” Stalin’s Soviet Union.

America’s “sacred honor,” as our Declaration of Independence calls it, has been besmirched by the foul Bush regime and its Neocon ideologues. Nothing is more important than restoring that honor. The only way to do so is to elect as president Ron Paul.

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What Bush should have done after 9/11

It’s been six years since the 9/11 attack. This time, the remembrances are more muted than in previous years, probably because the disastrous Iraq War now is front-and-center in our minds.

After 9/11, Bush had unprecedented power, authority, and popularity. The world was with him and America. At home, his approval rating was 90%. He squandered it all.

But what if Bush had acted prudently? What if he had respected the U.S. Constitution, instead of shredding it?

His first disaster was using 9/11 as an assault on our liberties. He first got Congress to pass the misnamed “USA Patriot Act,” which among other things authorized searches without warrants, in violation of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

That set the tone for the Bush administration ever since: gross violations of our rights in the name of “security.” Soon there came the Military Commissions Act, under which the president can secretly imprison anybody, including you, deemed a terrorist. That’s a violation of Habeas Corpus, a right that goes back a thousand years in British law, which American inherited.

Then came the Iraq War, which Bush began without a Declaration of War from Congress, as mandated by the U.S. Constitution. You know what a disaster that’s been. The war was begun under Vice President Dick Cheney’s “Unitary Executive” theory, which is the same thing as what’s called the “fuehrer prinzip,” or Leader Principle, in which one man — or one woman, if we get Hillary — is responsible for the security of the People. Another word for it is dictatorship.

It could have been different.

As to our liberties, they are sacrosanct. Bush should not have abridged them — no matter what. But he didn’t need get rid of our liberties to hunt down terrorists. The 9/11 terrorists succeeded because the government was incompetent. Numerous reports show that the FBI and CIA were incompetent. Coleen Rowley’s Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller has some of the details.

No new police-state edicts and decrees taking away our liberties were needed to prevent another 9/11, just higher competence in government.

To get bin Laden — the 9/11 perpetrator who is still at large — Bush should have concentrated on getting bin Laden. Instead, Bush got sidetracked into his Iraq quagmire. He let bin Laden escape capture.

If he had avoided his Iraq invasion, Bush would have retained the respect of the the world, including Arabs and Muslims, instead of throwing it away. He could have used that respect to advance the hunt for the terrorists.

Instead, he invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11, as the government now admits. He threw away important diplomatic leverage that could have advanced American policies in the Middle East, especially with Iran and the Israel-Palestinian situation.

In addition to getting almost 4,000 Americans and up to 600,000 Iraqis (mostly civilians) killed, the war has basically broken the U.S. Army. It can’t be used anywhere else if it’s needed. Moreover, the U.S. military’s inability to win in Iraq has shown the world that the military is not as powerful as was thought. That will embolden other anti-American forces throughout the world.

The sum of all this is a major disaster for America, Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All Bush needed to show was prudence: respect Americans’ God-given rights instead of violating them, and only go after America’s enemies, not those who are bad, like Saddam, but are not our enemies.

The last six years should have been different. That they were as bad as they turned out to be indicates serious flaws in America’s political system.

After 9/11, American needed a second George Washington. Instead, we got a second George Bush.

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