Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Dahlia Lithwick's Latest Slate Article


Dahlia Lithwick's Slate article starts out thus:



Javaid Iqbal is a former cable installer and Pakistani citizen who was swept up along with more than 700 Muslim and Arab men in the massive post-9/11 terrorism dragnet. Not one of them was ever charged with terrorism-related crimes. Some of those deemed, like Iqbal, to be of "high interest" were detained under a "hold until cleared" policy at a high-security facility in Brooklyn. Iqbal claims that during 150 days of detention based solely on his religion and national origin, he was subject to solitary confinement, repeated cavity searches, denied medical care, and brutally beaten. He pleaded guilty to immigration charges (unrelated to terrorism) and was sent back to Pakistan in 2003. He then sued 34 current and former government officials, right up the chain of command from the prison staff to John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller.

The defense is that John Ashcroft and Robert Muller are to "busy" to stand trail and it's a dismal read of the poison of partisanship that exist in today's US Supreme Court. There is no doubt, at least not to my mind, that if Aschoft or Mueller were associated with the Democrat Party rather than the Republican one, than US citizens would see those same, so-called conservative ideologist whom park their collective partisan butts in our nation's highest court, suddenly employ their strict constructionism legal standards to the current legal case that Dahlia is reporting here in her latest Slate column. It isn't Democrats that are above the law, it's only Republicans that have that right.

John Aschoft once talked about those "phantoms of lost liberty", but with Cheney's resent admission of torture (and waterboarding IS torture according to past legal cases), and the very real act of the Bush Administration and telecom's wiretapping along with the recent FISA Court's claim that oversight of Bush's wiretapping was not necessary, than lost liberty is not "phantoms" at all, but as real as the buckshot from Dick Cheney's gun that struck 78-year-old Harry Whittington in the face on Feb 13, 2006.

Today's Republican Party is a corrupt sickness so vast that I wonder how it is than anyone can ever vote Republican again if they value liberty. We can all see how evil and deadly the malignancy of unlawful acts are when protected by highly noticeable partisanship practiced among so-called conservative Justices, whom never see anything wrong with illegal acts so long as these crimes are committed by people belonging to the Republican Party. How is it that anyone can really deny that the Republican Party is not a mob controlled party anymore? It cannot be anything else that can explain why it is that Republicans are held unaccountable at all times.

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