Note here that even a liberal such as Ackerman, in making this proposal in an attempt to stem the tyranny of the Bush White House, is accepting the logic that a terrorist attack on the U.S. justifies tyranny. All that Bush and Cheney (and any future presidents) have to do, then, to get what they want - unrestricted and unreviewable powers - is allow terrorists to attack us. And even less than that, they can arrest a bunch of people, claim that they were about to launch an attack, and use that as a pretext to impose emergency power measures.
Some game when all you have to do to win is lose. click here
Ignatieff, a Human Rights advocate and presumably a liberal, says further in this essay that:
"To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war. These are evils because each strays from national and international law and because they kill people or deprive them of freedom without due process. They can be justified only because they prevent the greater evil."
What is this greater evil? Another 9/11. Who are the victims of these so-called lesser evils of torture, pre-emptive war and assassinations? Iraqis and Afghanis who had nothing to do with 9/11.
According to Ignatieff's logic, it is moral to kill and torture people who had nothing to do with 9/11 because somehow this will protect us against another 9/11. The only way that he can get away with such an otherwise transparently false and immoral argument is to claim implicitly that American lives are worth more than other people's lives, even those who had nothing to do with the deaths of the victims of 9/11.
This logic will allow any outrage to be committed. It is a sliding slope to hell.
Every one with a functioning conscience needs to be saying everyday in every way that they can: Americans' lives are no more valuable and no more precious than anyone else's lives.
Bush and Cheney and the actions of this government are more unpopular than any in at least polling history. The closest equivalent is Richard Nixon's unpopularity months before he was forced to resign. Bush is even more unpopular today than Nixon was then. In the 1960s, mass sentiment against the war, for civil rights and equal rights for women, and so on, were expressed in people's everyday lives through the way they wore their hair, the clothes they wore, the music they listened to and wrote, and through their actions and statements, including the ubiquitous use of the peace sign. What is called for today, more than ever, is a society-wide repudiation of what Bush and Cheney are doing and stand for.
Daily proudly wearing orange (the color our government forces prisoners to wear) - a ribbon, an armband, and so on - is one way to do this. It can become our era's equivalent of the peace symbol and long hair. Can you imagine the 1960s without long hair, peace symbols everywhere and the other expressions in the day to day lives of people showing off their feelings about what was supposed to have been the "American Century?" Spreading orange click here till it's being worn and displayed by millions everyday and thereby turns mass sentiment against this rotten band of criminals and this complicit government into a visible, potent force, must be done.
Anything else, any illusions that voting in someone else to office - in six months - while Bush and Cheney continue to do their horrid deeds everyday for the next eight months, are unacceptable.
Does it make sense, if you're an Iraqi, to think: oh well, Bush and Cheney will be gone in eight months. We don't have to worry then. No one's going to die or get tortured in the meantime.
It's time that more Americans wake up and start to think beyond the bubble of narrow nationalism. Iraqis are our brothers and sisters. Afghanis and Pakistanis are our brothers and sisters. Iranians are our brothers and sisters. We have more in common with them than we do with the vampires occupying the White House.
(First posted at http://dennisloo.blogspot.com).
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