Monday, October 23, 2006
How The Shrub Is Twisted, etc..
Sometimes we stumble over things by seeming accident. Ah, well—you know, there are coincidences, but then there are significant messages that come to us, and those important messages are not coincidence. Wake-up calls, God shots, visions, major insights...they’re things that need to be noticed.
Fifteen or so years ago, I read a lot of Alice Miller. I don’t know how many people know of her work. She was a pioneer in seeing how “poisonous pedagogy”—could utterly wreck a person’s adulthood. Teach a child to stuff back a lot of feelings, convince that kid she or he is stupid or evil, and stand back. Miller used as examples, the childhoods of many Nazi war criminals. She made her points. And the universality of her insights, I believe, is shown in the current irrational stupidity of America’s war in Iraq. It’s about tyrannical internalized rage that finds outlets where-ever it can.
I think it’s clear how these three sections tie together. In case it isn’t, here’s a short quote from Ms Miller: "The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason."
Decimating the Constitution with Military Tribunals
by Jacob G. Hornberger, September 27, 2006
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2006/09/suffering-and-death-in-world-of-empty.html
Given all the glorification being bestowed on three U.S. senators for displaying "principle" in standing against President Bush’s plan to amend the Geneva Convention to permit torture of detainees, followed by their quick compromise abandoning any semblance of principle, it is easy to lose sight of something much bigger: The military tribunals that the president and the Congress are set to approve will constitute the most radical, dangerous, and disgraceful transformation in the U.S. criminal-justice system since our nation’s inception.
...
The military tribunals that Congress is now set to enact at the behest of President Bush effectively toss those legal principles into the ashcan of the "war on terrorism." No habeas corpus, grand-jury indictments, due process of law, speedy and public trials, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, incompetent evidence, coerced testimony, and cruel and unusual punishments. The military tribunals will constitute one of the most fundamental altering of our constitutional order since the founding of our nation. And it’s being done without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment.
...
The truth is that the "war on terrorism" rhetoric has been a sham from the beginning -- a sham to enable federal officials to do what they've been trying to do for decades, especially in another sham war -- the "war on drugs" -- emasculate the Bill of Rights to enable federal officials to run roughshod over people -- and not just foreigners. The military-tribunal legislation is just the culmination of decades of federal officials' mocking and ridiculing the "constitutional technicalities" whose only real purpose, U.S. officials have long claimed, is to let "guilty" people go free.
That's in fact why President Bush and the Pentagon set up their torture camp in Cuba rather than in the United States -- to avoid the constraints of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which they obviously hold in disdain. After all, what other explanation could there be for their incessant attempts to circumvent America's federal-court system?
...
[N]o one should forget the Padilla doctrine. Even though Jose Padilla, an American citizen, is in federal court now, the president and the Pentagon have made it perfectly clear that they now have the power to arrest any American for terrorism and send him to the military for punishment, bypassing the federal-court system. In fact, there's little doubt that if Padilla is acquitted in federal court, the feds intend to yank him back into military custody as an "enemy combatant" in the "war on terrorism," despite the bar on double jeopardy in the Bill of Rights.
Why are the feds fighting so hard for those military tribunals? Because the tribunals will enable them to directly control both the proceeding and the outcome of the proceedings. They can ensure that the defendants won't describe too extensively the torture and sex abuse to which they have been subjected while in captivity. They can restrict access by the press to both the defendants and the proceedings. They can ensure that the defendants will be more easily convicted, given that their right to counsel will be limited and that hearsay evidence and coerced testimony, some of which will be kept secret from the accused, will be able to be used to convict them. They can keep a short leash on the military officials presiding over the proceedings, something they cannot do with an independent federal judge. They can ensure that a jury of ordinary people will not interfere with what the prosecutors are seeking, as the jury in the Zacharias Moussaoui case did in sentencing him to life in prison instead of granting prosecutors' request to inflict the death penalty on him -- or as the jury did when it acquitted several terrorism defendants in Detroit.
The military tribunals will ensure that those in the executive branch, not those in the judicial branch, will be the final deciders of who is guilty of terrorism and who isn't and how these "terrorists" will be punished. This despite the fact that the federal "war on terrorism" dragnet has netted innocent people in the process -- innocent people who have been tortured, sexually abused, and even murdered by U.S. personnel or their duly authorized foreign agents.
[end of excerpts]
To underscore the momentous nature of the particular juncture at which we find ourselves, I emphasize the primary point by putting it in bold, capital letters:
BY ITS LANGUAGE, THE MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT APPLIES TO EVERYONE, INCLUDING ALL AMERICAN CITIZENS -- WHICH MEANS IT APPLIES TO YOU.
_________________________
And here is a somewhat long quote from Alice Miller:
...the sad truth that technology alone is not sufficient to protect us from the consequences of denied, and thus uncontrolled, emotions. Without facing up to their origins--the production of hatred in childhood--we will be unable to resolve such hatred and put an end to the work of devastation. ...
Such a person demands order and uses violence to achieve it, just as he or she learned as a child: order and cleanliness at any price is the motto, even if it is at the price of life. The victims of such an upbringing ache to do to others what was once done to them. If they don't have children, or their children refuse to make themselves available for their revenge, they line up to support new forms of fascism. Ultimately, fascism always has the same goal: the annihilation of truth and freedom. People who have been mistreated as children, but totally deny their suffering, use the mottoes and labels of the day. They thereby meet the approval of others like them because they have are also helping to conceal their truth. They are consumed by the perverse pleasure in the destruction of life that they observed in their parents when young. They long to at last be on the other side of the fence, to hold power themselves, passing it off, as Stalin, Hitler, or Ceausescu have done, as "redemption" for others. This old childhood longing determines their political "opinions" and speeches, which are therefore impervious to counter arguments. As long as they continue to ignore or distort the roots of the problem, which lie in the very real threats experienced in their childhood, reason must remain impotent against this kind of persecution complex. The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person.
________________________________
An excerpt from a NY Times editorial on this whole sad crazy mess:
October 19, 2006
Editorial
A Dangerous New Order
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/opinion/19thu1.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=b59296457c933afa&ex=1161489600&pagewanted=print
Once President Bush signed the new law on military tribunals, administration officials and Republican leaders in Congress wasted no time giving Americans a taste of the new order created by this unconstitutional act.
Within hours, Justice Department lawyers notified the federal courts that they no longer had the authority to hear pending lawsuits filed by attorneys on behalf of inmates of the penal camp at Guantánamo Bay. They cited passages in the bill that suspend the fundamental principle of habeas corpus, making Mr. Bush the first president since the Civil War to take that undemocratic step.
Not satisfied with having won the vote, Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, quickly issued a statement accusing Democrats who opposed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 of putting “their liberal agenda ahead of the security of America.” He said the Democrats “would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans’ lives” and create “new rights for terrorists.”
This nonsense is part of the Republicans’ scare-America-first strategy for the elections. No Democrat advocated pampering terrorists — gingerly or otherwise — or giving them new rights.
***
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Fifteen or so years ago, I read a lot of Alice Miller. I don’t know how many people know of her work. She was a pioneer in seeing how “poisonous pedagogy”—could utterly wreck a person’s adulthood. Teach a child to stuff back a lot of feelings, convince that kid she or he is stupid or evil, and stand back. Miller used as examples, the childhoods of many Nazi war criminals. She made her points. And the universality of her insights, I believe, is shown in the current irrational stupidity of America’s war in Iraq. It’s about tyrannical internalized rage that finds outlets where-ever it can.
I think it’s clear how these three sections tie together. In case it isn’t, here’s a short quote from Ms Miller: "The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason."
Decimating the Constitution with Military Tribunals
by Jacob G. Hornberger, September 27, 2006
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2006/09/suffering-and-death-in-world-of-empty.html
Given all the glorification being bestowed on three U.S. senators for displaying "principle" in standing against President Bush’s plan to amend the Geneva Convention to permit torture of detainees, followed by their quick compromise abandoning any semblance of principle, it is easy to lose sight of something much bigger: The military tribunals that the president and the Congress are set to approve will constitute the most radical, dangerous, and disgraceful transformation in the U.S. criminal-justice system since our nation’s inception.
...
The military tribunals that Congress is now set to enact at the behest of President Bush effectively toss those legal principles into the ashcan of the "war on terrorism." No habeas corpus, grand-jury indictments, due process of law, speedy and public trials, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, incompetent evidence, coerced testimony, and cruel and unusual punishments. The military tribunals will constitute one of the most fundamental altering of our constitutional order since the founding of our nation. And it’s being done without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment.
...
The truth is that the "war on terrorism" rhetoric has been a sham from the beginning -- a sham to enable federal officials to do what they've been trying to do for decades, especially in another sham war -- the "war on drugs" -- emasculate the Bill of Rights to enable federal officials to run roughshod over people -- and not just foreigners. The military-tribunal legislation is just the culmination of decades of federal officials' mocking and ridiculing the "constitutional technicalities" whose only real purpose, U.S. officials have long claimed, is to let "guilty" people go free.
That's in fact why President Bush and the Pentagon set up their torture camp in Cuba rather than in the United States -- to avoid the constraints of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which they obviously hold in disdain. After all, what other explanation could there be for their incessant attempts to circumvent America's federal-court system?
...
[N]o one should forget the Padilla doctrine. Even though Jose Padilla, an American citizen, is in federal court now, the president and the Pentagon have made it perfectly clear that they now have the power to arrest any American for terrorism and send him to the military for punishment, bypassing the federal-court system. In fact, there's little doubt that if Padilla is acquitted in federal court, the feds intend to yank him back into military custody as an "enemy combatant" in the "war on terrorism," despite the bar on double jeopardy in the Bill of Rights.
Why are the feds fighting so hard for those military tribunals? Because the tribunals will enable them to directly control both the proceeding and the outcome of the proceedings. They can ensure that the defendants won't describe too extensively the torture and sex abuse to which they have been subjected while in captivity. They can restrict access by the press to both the defendants and the proceedings. They can ensure that the defendants will be more easily convicted, given that their right to counsel will be limited and that hearsay evidence and coerced testimony, some of which will be kept secret from the accused, will be able to be used to convict them. They can keep a short leash on the military officials presiding over the proceedings, something they cannot do with an independent federal judge. They can ensure that a jury of ordinary people will not interfere with what the prosecutors are seeking, as the jury in the Zacharias Moussaoui case did in sentencing him to life in prison instead of granting prosecutors' request to inflict the death penalty on him -- or as the jury did when it acquitted several terrorism defendants in Detroit.
The military tribunals will ensure that those in the executive branch, not those in the judicial branch, will be the final deciders of who is guilty of terrorism and who isn't and how these "terrorists" will be punished. This despite the fact that the federal "war on terrorism" dragnet has netted innocent people in the process -- innocent people who have been tortured, sexually abused, and even murdered by U.S. personnel or their duly authorized foreign agents.
[end of excerpts]
To underscore the momentous nature of the particular juncture at which we find ourselves, I emphasize the primary point by putting it in bold, capital letters:
BY ITS LANGUAGE, THE MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT APPLIES TO EVERYONE, INCLUDING ALL AMERICAN CITIZENS -- WHICH MEANS IT APPLIES TO YOU.
_________________________
And here is a somewhat long quote from Alice Miller:
...the sad truth that technology alone is not sufficient to protect us from the consequences of denied, and thus uncontrolled, emotions. Without facing up to their origins--the production of hatred in childhood--we will be unable to resolve such hatred and put an end to the work of devastation. ...
Such a person demands order and uses violence to achieve it, just as he or she learned as a child: order and cleanliness at any price is the motto, even if it is at the price of life. The victims of such an upbringing ache to do to others what was once done to them. If they don't have children, or their children refuse to make themselves available for their revenge, they line up to support new forms of fascism. Ultimately, fascism always has the same goal: the annihilation of truth and freedom. People who have been mistreated as children, but totally deny their suffering, use the mottoes and labels of the day. They thereby meet the approval of others like them because they have are also helping to conceal their truth. They are consumed by the perverse pleasure in the destruction of life that they observed in their parents when young. They long to at last be on the other side of the fence, to hold power themselves, passing it off, as Stalin, Hitler, or Ceausescu have done, as "redemption" for others. This old childhood longing determines their political "opinions" and speeches, which are therefore impervious to counter arguments. As long as they continue to ignore or distort the roots of the problem, which lie in the very real threats experienced in their childhood, reason must remain impotent against this kind of persecution complex. The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person.
________________________________
An excerpt from a NY Times editorial on this whole sad crazy mess:
October 19, 2006
Editorial
A Dangerous New Order
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/opinion/19thu1.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=b59296457c933afa&ex=1161489600&pagewanted=print
Once President Bush signed the new law on military tribunals, administration officials and Republican leaders in Congress wasted no time giving Americans a taste of the new order created by this unconstitutional act.
Within hours, Justice Department lawyers notified the federal courts that they no longer had the authority to hear pending lawsuits filed by attorneys on behalf of inmates of the penal camp at Guantánamo Bay. They cited passages in the bill that suspend the fundamental principle of habeas corpus, making Mr. Bush the first president since the Civil War to take that undemocratic step.
Not satisfied with having won the vote, Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, quickly issued a statement accusing Democrats who opposed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 of putting “their liberal agenda ahead of the security of America.” He said the Democrats “would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans’ lives” and create “new rights for terrorists.”
This nonsense is part of the Republicans’ scare-America-first strategy for the elections. No Democrat advocated pampering terrorists — gingerly or otherwise — or giving them new rights.
***
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
