"Subpoena" Never Sounded so Sweet

I'm elated to find the New York Times highlighting many of the known damaging body blows to Democracy and our Nation inflicted by the Bushoviks. And, yes these were all abetted in almost equally criminal measure by the mainstream media - television in particular, but print also, and absolutely including the NY Times and the WA Post. Enablers all. (I had a dang good 50+-word sentence/essay going there but reluctantly sacrificed my wordy style and Pulitzer chance to succor the arbitrarily rule- and grammar-book-enslaved souls who might encounter this). But the Gray Lady's editorial is refreshingly plain-speaking and ought to resonate widely -here she be:

The Bush administration’s assault on some of the founding principles of American democracy marches onward despite the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections. The new Democratic majorities in Congress can block the sort of noxious measures that the Republican majority rubber-stamped. But preventing new assaults on civil liberties is not nearly enough.

Five years of presidential overreaching and Congressional collaboration continue to exact a high toll in human lives, America’s global reputation and the architecture of democracy. Brutality toward prisoners, and the denial of their human rights, have been institutionalized; unlawful spying on Americans continues; and the courts are being closed to legal challenges of these practices.

It will require forceful steps by this Congress to undo the damage. A few lawmakers are offering bills intended to do just that, but they are only a start. Taking on this task is a moral imperative that will show the world the United States can be tough on terrorism without sacrificing its humanity and the rule of law.

Today we’re offering a list — which, sadly, is hardly exhaustive — of things that need to be done to reverse the unwise and lawless policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Many will require a rewrite of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, an atrocious measure pushed through Congress with the help of three Republican senators, Arlen Specter, Lindsey Graham and John McCain; Senator McCain lent his moral authority to improving one part of the bill and thus obscured its many other problems.

Our list starts with three fundamental tasks:

Restore Habeas Corpus

One of the new act’s most indecent provisions denies anyone Mr. Bush labels an “illegal enemy combatant” the ancient right to challenge his imprisonment in court. The arguments for doing this were specious. Habeas corpus is nothing remotely like a get-out-of-jail-free card for terrorists, as supporters would have you believe.
It is a way to sort out those justly detained from those unjustly detained. It will not “clog the courts,” as Senator Graham claims. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has a worthy bill that would restore habeas corpus. It is essential to bringing integrity to the detention system and reviving the United States’ credibility.

Stop Illegal Spying

Mr. Bush’s program of intercepting Americans’ international calls and e-mail messages without a warrant has not ceased. The agreement announced recently — under which a secret court supposedly gave its blessing to the program — did nothing to restore judicial process or ensure that Americans’ rights are preserved. Congress needs to pass a measure, like one proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein, to force Mr. Bush to obey the law that requires warrants for electronic surveillance.

Ban Torture, Really

The provisions in the Military Commissions Act that Senator McCain trumpeted as a ban on torture are hardly that. It is still largely up to the president to decide what constitutes torture and abuse for the purpose of prosecuting anyone who breaks the rules. This amounts to rewriting the Geneva Conventions and puts every American soldier at far greater risk if captured. It allows the president to decide in secret what kinds of treatment he will permit at the Central Intelligence Agency’s prisons. The law absolves American intelligence agents and their bosses of any acts of torture and abuse they have already committed.

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I strongly encourage you to read the full NYT editorial - and I do applaud the paper for their position.

Especially considering how much doddering and shoddy non-journalism the Times has been plagued by recently, this seems like a major event. Almost like a long-lost friend. Or a conversion. Unfortunately we know from sad experience not to expect Conversion. We the sentient will from here on have to manage our own news intake. Aggressively! Distrust even the Times as a basic principle, as with any other obviously compromised mainstream (corporate) media.

The editorial plainly states that these are just some of the issues that desperately need Congress' attention.

And speaking of Long Lost, that so-called "Congress" is the Rip-van-Winkle branch I thought we elected to represent us, pass laws, reign in ridiculously overbearing executives, and possibly even perform their constitutional war-declaring (or, preferably, NOT) responsibility. Not that there was a declaration from what I can tell in the most recent disastrous case - merely an unprovoked invasion.

The Times editorial points at the need for legislation, but Glenn Greenwald gives us the reality check that a mere majority in Congress (but hey, what about 60-70% of the voters!) is not enough to avoid filibusters and vetoes. He throws his well-informed and ever-so-eloquent weight behind Congressional hearings on the multitude of wrongs we all know of but the public in general does not. It's education, and why would we want any voter left behind?

I have certainly learned to spell subpoena recently: "a written legal order directing a person to appear in court to give testimony."

Bring It On, I say! I believe there is some of that hearing stuff starting up tomorrow. This is on the topic of Attorneys who were unceremoniously ejected in the last few months from their jobs on the apparent common basis that they would not play the dirty games dictated by the "White" House.

I also encourage you to attend to the full text at Glenn's Salon post, tease here:

To their real credit, The New York Times Editorial Page (though definitely not the Times itself) was one of the earliest national media venues to recognize our country's true constitutional crisis brought about by the Bush administration's radical theories of presidential omnipotence. And they have, as relentlessly as any other media outlet, condemned those abuses and repeatedly called for actions to limit, if not altogether end, the sheer lawlessness of the Bush presidency.

Today the Times has an Editorial -- entitled "The Must-Do List" -- which identifies numerous pending Bush scandals regarding lawbreaking and abuses of presidential power, and for each one, the Editorial provides a proposed Congressional solution in the form of legislation. It is worth emphasizing, as always, that this list entails only the abuses that we have learned about (not from Congressional oversight, but from the disclosures of whistleblowers to journalists). It is beyond doubt -- as Ron Suskind recently pointed out in an interview with Spiegel-- that there are a whole array of similar, if not worse, abuses which the unprecedentedly secretive Bush administration has still managed to conceal

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Far more than legislative solutions right now (which have no chance of succeeding), what we urgently need are compelled, subpoena-driven, aggressive hearings designed for maximum revelation and drama. Hearings are able, in a dramatic and television-news-friendly environment, to shed light on how extreme and radical this administration really has been in all of these areas. More than trying to repeal the worst legislative abuses of the last Congress, hearings -- real and dramatic and probing -- were the real promise of electing Democrats to take over the Congress. It is time -- and it is beginning to be past the time -- for that to start in earnest.

You can't convince Americans of the need to stop abuses until you demonstrate to them in a dramatic and undeniable way that those absues are being perpetrated and that they are harmful and dangerous. Just as one example, FISA itself was enacted only after the Church Committee conducted a probing and aggressive investigation and exposed the decades of eavesdropping abuses on the part of the Executive branch, whereby all the heinous transgressions from J. Edgar Hoover's blackmail-motivated eavesdropping on Martin Luther King to the array of Nixonian surveillance excesses came to light in all of their unvarnished and ugly reality. Americans were not moved by abstract notions of privacy or checks and balances but by the real life anecdotes of abuses and the evidence demonstrating how widespread they were.

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