Moral Treason: Who's guilty?

President Theodore Roosevelt, 1918: To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Senator Robert A. Taft (also known as Mr. Republican), 1941 (after Pearl Harbor): I believe that there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government..... Too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think it will give some comfort to the enemy.... If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country more good than it will do the enemy, and it will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur.

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Wouldnt outing a CIA operative be classified as treason, especially in war time? What are the penalties? Wasnt it at one time death? Rove..tsk..tsk..karma is catching up to you..what goes around comes around..

Neocons Accuse �Liberal� New York Times of Treason

Monday June 26th 2006, 8:05 am

Michelle Malkin, neocon blogger and concentration camp advocate, has posted a spate of converted WWII posters on her site, taking the New York Times to task for reporting the news, albeit a year late.

According to Malkin and New York representative Peter King, the New York Times stands accused of treason �for reporting last week about a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace alleged terrorists� and disclosing �a secret domestic wiretapping program,� according to CBC News, never mind both programs violate the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. �No one elected The New York Times to do anything,� King told the New York Daily News. �They�re breaking the law to satisfy their own arrogant, liberal agenda.�

In Bushzarro world, newspapers are �elected� to report the news. If newspapers report the trashing of the Constitution, this is treason. In Malkin�s world, it follows that traitors should be thrown in concentration camps, especially if they resemble in any way Arabs or Muslims.

It would seem Mr. King and Malkin suffer from memory loss. It was Judith Miller�s �arrogant, liberal agenda� that brought us the neocon lies about illusory Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. As Antony Loewenstein writes for the Sydney Morning Herald, the �vast majority of [Miller�s] WMD claims came through Ahmed Chalabi, an indicted fraudster and one of the leading figures in the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the group keen to militarily overthrow Saddam. Miller relied on untested defectors� testimonies (usually provided by Chalabi) to write several front-page stories on this information,� stories that did not pass the smell test at the time and have found the memory hole since.

Ahmed Chalabi, convicted bank fraudster installed as a deputy prime minister in Iraq, was a neocon darling. His Iraqi National Congress, created by the CIA, was the primary source of Judith Miller�s �journalism.� In short, Judith Miller was a hack for the neocons, thus making the New York Times a neocon conduit for lies and propaganda.

Even though the New York Times serves as a shameless shill for the �arrogant, liberal agenda� of the neocons, this does not change the fact the newspaper is protected under both the First Amendment and statutory procedure (see the Supreme Court case, Bartnicki v. Vopper). In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in a per curiam decision that prior restraint (censorship) was not warranted in a government effort to stop the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers. �There�s a tone of gleeful relish in the way they [the Bush neocons] talk about dragging reporters before grand juries, their appetite for withholding information, and the hints that reporters who look too hard into the public�s business risk being branded traitors,� Bill Keller, New York Times Executive Editor, told the Washington Post.

King and Malkin, of course, have nothing but contempt for Supreme Court rulings. It is irrelevant that NSA whistleblower Russell Tice (the source behind revelations published in the New York Times) is protected by federal law. King and Malkin believe the unitary decider and his Machiavellian operatives have the right to look through your financial, medical, and library records, listen in on your telephone calls, read your email, and sneak and peek your computer hard drive and while they�re at it rifle through your underwear drawer because �we are at war� with an enemy never sufficiently documented or designated, an enemy who worked for the CIA in Afghanistan and is not specifically �wanted in connection� with the nine eleven attacks, as his FBI wanted poster reveals.

Obviously, King and Malkin, and the whole of the neocon choir, believe the phony �war on terror,� rechristened the �long war��i.e., it will last a century or more, or long enough to provide obscene profits for the death merchants�gives the �permanent revolution� Jacobins the right to trash the Constitution.

Quite naturally, this brings to mind Hitler�s Erm�chtigungsgesetz, or Enabling Act, an element of the Reichstag Fire Decree nullifying the civil liberties of German citizens after the Reichstag was torched (a fire planned by Goebbels and executed by G�ring, according to SA man Karl Ernst).

Bush, not unlike Hitler, feels he has the authority to by-pass Congress (mostly corporate purchased whores, so this is a moot point) and use the Constitution as a doormat where the unitary decider wipes off his shoes, mucky with the blood a few hundred thousand Iraqis.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded and he was one of the key architects of the 9/11 attack. You don't think he is guilty? Are you kidding me?

This man plotted and planned an attack on American soil that killed thousands of Americans and you don't think he should have been waterboarded?

You tell me this.....how many detainees were actually subjected to waterboarding....other than Khalid Mohammed that is. Did we do it to every single detainee. Do you even realize that these detainees, a lot of them, were turned in by other people in their country or caught as a direct result of interrogating other detainees.

The last time I checked, Khalid Mohammed still has his head attached to his body....which is more than I can say for Jack Hensley, Nicholas Berg and any other American who had their head cut off. It wasn't a swift cutting off either. I don't know if anyone here has seen the video of one of the beheadings but I had the misfortune of seeing one on the internet and it is an image that haunts me to this day. They basically grabbed him by his head, took a big knife and cut all the way around his neck, and then literally had to start sawing at his neck to get his head the rest of the way off. It took quite a while to accomplish the whole thing. When it was done, they threw the guy's head on his body and started cheering.

I have no compassion for terrorists and I think it is sad that some of you people do. They are ruthless people whose only desire is to rid the world of infidels....that includes you, JTBB. Yes, you. They want you dead and you want them treated fairly.

he said, she said, dem said, pub said. What difference does it make? Fix the problem. I don't believe the dems are anymore at fault for this than the pubs. If anything, I blame Bush and not because he's a pub but because he was supposed to be our leader. If he thought this was an issue, why didn't he press it? Oh, because someone told him it wasn't. Since when does he listen to anyone, and especially the dems.

I think everyone knows that he had prescriptions from more than a couple of docs.

No one on your side of the fence has answered my question posed above. If MJF had aired an ad against stem cell research, would you have had the same reaction? Would Rush have had the same reaction? I think not. I think you would have applauded him for his courage and his willingness to do such a thing especially in light of the seriousness of his disease. Another question, what do you think about Nancy Reagan and her son Ron being pro stem cell research openly?

reflection of whether or not she has a child out of wedlock. My 18-year-old niece was raised in church, had good Christian parents and got pregnant before marriage. You can only teach a child. You can't force him or her to live by your own convictions.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/12/08/Gitmo_911_suspects_to_plead_guilty/UPI-68631228752620/

Lying and the Culture of Life

What Moral Values?

Strong moral values, decency, propriety, and honesty: conservatives long ago declared these ideals essential to their belief system, achieving political ascendancy with promises of restoring honor to a government they view as tainted by liberal immorality and excess.

Barely a year into Bush's second term, the American political landscape is brimming with blatant examples of conservative deceit, dishonesty, cronyism, and hypocrisy.

Foremost among these examples is Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's right-hand man, who has been indicted on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements before a grand jury. Not that this is cause for embarrassment among conservatives--indeed, many are relieved, pointing out that Libby is in trouble only for lying. It seems conservative standards on morality have slipped a bit.

Of course, the Libby indictment is but the tip of the beast's horn. The larger case is about a vengeful administration that was bent on destroying an undercover CIA agent's career by leaking her name because her husband, Joseph Wilson, also a CIA agent, challenged shoddy evidence buttressing the case for war in Iraq.

Let us forget for a moment the value of simple honesty. Let us forget also the importance of not undermining the nation's intelligence services when one's entire platform is national security.

What does this event tell us about the oft-invoked conservative call to respect the culture of life, so often invoked in abortion debates? Let us not pander to fools: this war was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, based on manifest lies and exaggerations. Therefore, can anyone seriously claim that this administration showed even the slightest respect for the lives of the 2,000 American soldiers, or the lives countless Iraqi civilians now lost to the war's horrors? Most intriguing, then, is this culture of life--a culture which champions life when it does not yet exist, and abandons it when it does.

Surely, however, could the Republican Party not redeem itself through its philosophy of Christian compassion? Apparently not. Congressional testimony two weeks ago revealed that when FEMA's sole representative in New Orleans--who was there only accidentally--found thousands of Americans stranded without food or shelter during the hurricane, he issued a desperate call for help to FEMA chief Michael Brown. Brown's aide replied--several hours later--with the following instructive example of compassionate conservatism in action: It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner. The locale of choice? Baton Rouge. Marie Antoinette would have been impressed.

Equally impressive is the Republican Party's idea of taking responsibility and not blaming others--a key conservative tenet--in the case of Tom Delay, the House majority leader indicted for pouring corporate money into Texas' 2002 state elections, which saw the reconfiguration of the state's congressional districts along even more pro-Republican lines. Censured three times in 2004 alone by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee, Delay nonetheless views the indictment as a kind of vast left-wing conspiracy, calling the prosecutor an unabashed partisan zealot. Heaven forbid.

It goes without saying that Republican contrition for any of the outrages outlined above is unlikely: the arsonists are running the firehouse, and they take great pride in fanning the flames.

We would be sorely remiss, however, if we ignored the role of the Democrats in this affair. They have sat on their firehoses and idled their fire engines on key issues, enabling Republican misbehavior to go unchecked. Most Democrats, it must be remembered, voted in favor of granting Bush unprecedented war powers. And it was the liberal New York Times, with its neo-con pseudo-journalist Judith Miller at the helm, who led the drumbeat procession to invade Iraq based on the thinnest of lies.

Na�ve liberal Democrats were also quite pleased to see conservatives break ranks during the Harriet Miers debacle, taking it as a sign of some kind of impending right-wing implosion. They apparently forgot the basic fact that it was the far right--not what passes for the left--that tore apart Miers' chances for judicial confirmation. Now, a staunch conservative, Alito, has been nominated and the implosion has disappeared into thin air. As usual, we can soon count on the usual centrist Democrats--those Klan-minus-costume-crats and heirs to the Dixiecrat legacy--to help vote Alito onto the bench.

Thus, while conservative wrongdoing is obvious, liberals must take a long, hard look at their own party's role in producing the present state of affairs. Americans are told, after all, that there are two major parties, and that one is supposed to act in opposition to the other.