CasaZaza: An Unconscionable Stain on the Fabric of American Democracy

Sunday, August 19, 2007

An Unconscionable Stain on the Fabric of American Democracy

by Anthony Wade

August 19, 2007

This week a guilty verdict was reached in the case of Jose Padilla. The White House gushed at the verdict as if they were proud of the subversion of democracy they orchestrated for years in dealing with the prosecution of this citizen.

Soon after his arrest, Padilla was designated an “unlawful enemy combatant” for the sole purpose of allowing the Bush Administration to do what they wished to him without fear of oversight, reprisal or restriction. He was “disappeared” to a brig off the coast of South Carolina where he was kept for years without contact and without legal representation. Habeas Corpus was eradicated; a key lynchpin of democratic societies for over 800 years. .... Only when it became obvious to the administration that the Supreme Court would demand that Padilla be tried or released did Bush bother to take Mr. Padilla to trial. When the administration did, they took a shell of a human being to trial, not for the crimes they alleged when they arrested him for, but rather for activities that he and friends of his engaged in during the 1990’s.

Did you get that America? Do you fully comprehend what happened? A United States citizen was arrested for alleged crimes, was stripped of all rights as a citizen, dumped into isolation in prison for years with no legal representation, and only when the hand of the administration was forced he was brought to trial for completely different crimes, discovered after the fact and after years of being tortured. That is not due process. That is not even remotely just. It has been compared to governmental behavior found during the height of the Soviet Union. Even the conservative Cato Institute had to lament that “for those of us concerned about the rule of law, the Padilla episode is not the way America is supposed to work."

Rule of law? How about basic human decency? What have we become in latter day America when this is heralded as a “victory?” If the man was that guilty, why did he have to be tortured to the point of near insanity? I do not pretend to know if Jose Padilla supported terrorism or not. I do not know if he is as bad as the government says he is. What I do know is that what happened to him is a stain on the fabric of our democracy and the conviction this week does not change that. In fact, it only highlights what happens when we become so scared that we are willing to look the other way while our civil liberties are stripped away.

Our government took an American citizen and tortured him until they drove him insane. They could not even bring charges against him for what they had originally arrested him for. Instead they reached back a decade and found anything they could that might stick. Those of you out there that think this is good for our safety miss the point of being a democracy. You miss the point of what we are supposed to stand for. If you saw this story and thought it was a positive event for our nation, you have forgotten the faces of those who have died to protect the very democracy that is crumbling around us. If Jose Padilla is all it takes for us to compromise our most basic values as human beings then where does that leave us? No better than the tyranny we have fought against for over 200 years. We have become what we abhor. We now stand for what we have loathed.

When the protection of the free requires the removal of liberty, we are left to be free no more.

May God help us all.

full article on opednews

"THE BATTLE IS NOT BETWEEN LEFT AND RIGHT"

this excerpt taken from the full Henry Makow Ph.D. article:

Conspiracy Too Monstrous To Conceive

In the 1960's British-born Dr. Anthony Sutton was a Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute when he discovered that, in spite of the Cold War, the US was supplying the USSR with its technology, including weapons used against American soldiers in Vietnam. Sutton dug deeper and discovered that Wall Street had sponsored both the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Nazi Germany. The resulting books which are on line cost Dr. Sutton his academic career.

Dr. Sutton believes the "left" versus "right" split is fraudulent and used to control the debate and condition citizens to think along certain lines. Left-wing magazines like the "The Nation" and "The New Republic" and right-wing magazines like "The National Review were "artificially set up." The former were financed by Whitney money while the latter by Buckley. Both are "The Order."
Dr. Sutton states: "Sooner or later people will wake up. First we have to dump the trap of right and left. This is a Hegelian trap to divide and control. The battle is not between right and left; it is between us and them."

Similarly, in the international field left and right political structures are artificially constructed and collapsed in the drive for one-world synthesis, i.e. authoritarian socialism controlled by monopoly capital.
Dr. Sutton believes The Order has many weaknesses resulting from an inbred gene pool, a shallow power base and a limited worldview. In any future conflict between the authoritarian state and the individual, he believes opposition will take "a million forms."
" No one is going to create the anti-The Order movement. That would be foolish and unnecessary. It could be infiltrated, bought off, or diverted all too easily. Why play by the rules set by the enemy?

The movement that will topple The Order will be extremely simple and most effective. It will be ten thousand or a million Americans who come to the conclusion that they don't want the State to be boss, that they prefer to live under the protection of the Constitution.

"They will make their own independent decision to thwart The Order and it will take ten thousand or a million forms." - Antony Sutton