Guns, Barack Obama and Paranoia: Who is “Tyrannizing” Who

A Time for Change

The Daily Beast has a very good article and video on interviews conducted at gun shows showing the manner in which the FauxNews psychotainers, the NRA and their ilk have embedded the idea in their gun lovin’ sheeple that President Obama is out to destroy the American way, collect all of their guns and put people in FEMA camps.

Sound crazy?

Take a few moments to fish around the web a bit and you will see that “gun enthusiasts” have gone off the deep end. There is plenty of web traffic discussing the need for revolution because of our President who, to this day, has yet to put a single individual in a FEMA camp.

Guns, Barack Obama and Paranoia: Who is “Tyrannizing” Who

A Senate Mystery Keeps Torture Alive — and Its Practitioners Free

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

With all the lawsuits over kidnapping and torture marching toward the Bush administration, you might think the top officials running the global war on terror would be worried just a little about the prospect that some day they might end up in court — if not having nightmares about getting measured for orange jumpsuits at Danbury Federal Prison.

Alas, no. Thanks to the legerdemain of Bush administration lawyers, a provision quietly tucked into the Military Commissions Act (PL 109-366) just before it was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush on Oct. 17, would ease any worries they might’ve had. It not only redefines torture upward, removing the harshest, most controversial techniques from the definition of war crimes, it also exempts the perpetrators — interrogators and their bosses — from punishment all the way back to Nov. 1997.

The deft wording is the Bush administration’s attempt at bringing the United States’ criteria for defining a war crime into line with the Geneva Convention’s interpretation of torture.

The Supreme Court in June had declared the administration’s hastily assembled military commissions unconstitutional, saying all prisoners in U.S. custody had to be held in accordance with the Geneva Convention’s Article 3, which prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Renegotiating the Geneva Convention was out of the question. So the administration’s lawyers took what the president’s counselor, Dan Bartlett, later called “the scenic route.”

By way of the new Military Commissions Act, they effectively rewrote the U.S. enforcement mechanism for Geneva, the War Crimes Act, passed by Congress in Nov. 1997.

Never heard of this provision? That’s because coverage of the act focused more on its suspension of habeas corpus,barring anyone defined as an enemy combatant from filing suit challenging the legality of their detention or raising claims of torture and other mistreatment.

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in particular, must be pleased by this legal three-card monte.

So, too, must be President Bush.

Full story: http://public.cq.com/public/20061122_homeland.html