[Peace-discuss] ...what a falling-off was there...
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Fri Jul 2 22:23:22 CDT 2010
Keep Your Declaration of Independence
Right Next to Your Assassination Cards
By: emptywheel Friday July 2, 2010 3:51 pm
Call me crazy, but this is probably not exactly the kind of treatment Thomas
Jefferson was thinking the Declaration of Independence would receive 234 years
after he wrote it"
"Many nights an item prompts a call to wake the NCTC [National
Counterterrorism Center] director, Michael Leiter, 41, the junior member of the
nighthawks. He displays a copy of the Declaration of Independence, next to a
deck of baseball-style cards of high-value terrorist targets: 'I keep the ones
who are dead on top. It’s a little macabre, but that’s the world we live in.'
When the NCTC calls in the middle of the night, he is often half-awake."
Among those cards, after all, is probably the one that signifies that the
President has approved, with no due process, an order to assassinate US citizen
Anwar al-Awlaki. That’s the kind of thing that Jefferson objected to when he
called the following “Despotism”:
"He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the
Civil power.
[snip]
"For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
"For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders
which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
[snip]
"For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
[snip]
"For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and
altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments..."
While I’m making wildarsed Fourth of July guesses, let me also suggest that this
kind of security porn - a 24-style terror play in 9 acts - is probably not
exactly what Thomas Jefferson imagined as the role of the free press when he so
furiously defended it.
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/07/02/keep-your-declaration-of-independence-right-next-to-your-assassination-cards/#comments
More information about the Peace-discuss
mailing list