[Mb-civic] VERY IMPORTANT ARTICLE PLEASE WRITE ME WHAT YOU THINK -MICHAEL

Wed Mar 2 20:53:33 PST 2005

What can be said?  Haven't many of us been saying these exact things for
months, sometimes years?  How much of this is really new to the
socio-politically "informed?"  How many times have I - and others - pointed
out very specific ways in which our world, and particularly the U.S.,
becomes more "Orwellian" by the day?  In addition to such "new truths" as
"War is Peace," our society has already become WAY too comfortable with both
"doublethink" and "newspeak."  (Indeed, many Civic members have engaged in
both, almost certainly without realizing it.  This is not accusation; simply
observation).  It has simply become so "natural" in some cases that it is
hard to avoid.

Obviously, all of this does not make the points in the article any less
horrifying, angrifying and, ultimately, sad.  What can be done?  Talking is
good, but action is better.  I trust that Civic members spend at least as
much time "doing" in the real world as they do engaging in intellectual
"give and take" in cyberspace.

Peace.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Butler" <michael at michaelbutler.com>
To: "Civic" <mb-civic at islandlists.com>; "HAIR List"
<mb-hair at islandlists.com>; "Family Finance" <michael at michaelbutler.com>;
"BEARS, DOVES & BEAVERS" <michael at michaelbutler.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 10:23 PM
Subject: [Mb-civic] VERY IMPORTANT ARTICLE PLEASE WRITE ME WHAT YOU
THINK -MICHAEL

-- From The Lair of the Bear

------ Forwarded Message
From: "TomDispatch" <tomdispatch at nationinstitute.org>
Reply-To: "TomDispatch" <tomdispatch at nationinstitute.org>
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 20:32:16 -0500
To: "Michael Butler" <michael at intrafi.com>
Subject: [TD] Tomgram:  Jonathan Schell on a Less Super Superpower

a project of the Nation Institute <http://www.nationinstitute.org/>

To send this to a friend, or to read more dispatches, go to tomdispatch.com
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/>
Tomgram:  Jonathan Schell on a Less Super Superpower
There is a bleak wondrousness to this American world of ours.  The Bush
administration, after all, loathes fundamentalists -- those dangerous
fanatics in strange lands with bizarre medieval belief systems, who wish us
such ill and are more than ready to go to some twisted paradise to prove
their fervor -- except, of course, for the fundamentalists here who believe
that they'll soon enough be snatched away and enraptured, while the Middle
East and then the world is turned into something like a giant car bomb.  Our
President proclaims the spread of freedom and won't let American officials
sit down alone with their "axis of evil" counterparts in Iran and North
Korea to negotiate nuclear dangers -- as if such contact might literally
pollute them -- and yet consorting with Saudi autocrats, Pakistan's military
ruler Musharraf, or the dictators of various Central Asian 'stans and their
associates is unremarked upon.  (Note, by the way, that one result of Bush
administration militar! y-to-military tsunami aid in Indonesia has been the
official revival <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/GC03Ae01.html>
of relations between the Pentagon and the well-bloodied Indonesian
military.)

The Bush administration calls -- quite rightly -- for the ending of the
Syrian military "occupation" of Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syria's
remaining 15,000 troops in that country -- an occupation, I learned only
yesterday from Juan Cole
<http://www.juancole.com/2005/03/lebanon-realignment-and-syria-it-is.html>
(in the single best backgrounder on the Lebanese situation I've seen), that
was green-lighted by Henry Kissinger himself back in 1976 -- and yet it
sticks grimly with its occupation (.oops, liberation) of Iraq and considers
the idea of withdrawing our 130,000 occupation troops there, no matter in
what phased or timed fashion, cut-and-run heresy.  (Why only the other day,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
<http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=574&u=/nm/20050226/wl_nm/iraq_mye
rs_dc&printer=1>  Gen. Richard Myers was saying that insurgencies around the
world tend to last. hint, hint. 7-12 years.  That would, of course, involve
Syrian-style stayin! g power.)  And we naturally welcome liberty, except
when it comes to any of the prisoners we hold under unbelievable conditions
and without rights or limit in offshore prisons around the world and even in
the United States.

Just Tuesday, in our topsy-turvy world, District Court Judge Henry F. Floyd,
appointed to the federal bench in South Carolina by George Bush in 2003,
ruled, according to R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61026-2005Feb28?language=printer>
, that the government must charge or free the imprisoned alleged terrorist
Jose Padilla because it

> "lacks statutory and constitutional authority to indefinitely imprison
without
> criminal charges a U.S. citizen who was designated an 'enemy combatant'.
Using
> a phrase often levied by conservatives to denigrate liberal judges, Floyd.
> accused the administration of engaging in 'judicial activism'... Floyd
said
> the government presented no law supporting this contention and that just
> because Bush and his appointees say Padilla's detention was consistent
with
> U.S. laws and the president's war powers, that did not make it so.
'Moreover,
> such a statement is deeply troubling. If such a position were ever adopted
by
> the courts, it would totally eviscerate the limits placed on Presidential
> authority to protect the citizenry's individual liberties.'"

Indeed.

What a world when we must rely on right-wing judges appointed by our present
President for the protection of our most basic civil liberties!  What a
world when it's clear to such a judge that a government claim of " blanket
authority under the Constitution to detain Americans on U.S. soil who are
suspected of taking or planning actions against the country" is, in fact,
nothing of the sort!

There was a time when I believed that, of the two famed dystopian novels of
the previous century, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's
1984, Huxley's was the one that best caught the most frightening tendencies
in our American world.  But I may be changing my mind.  After all, we're now
ruled by radicals who have proclaimed, in the name of freedom, that our fate
is eternal war -- a.k.a. World War IV, a.k.a. the Global War on Terror --
and Americans have indeed grown relatively comfortable with a world in which
"peace [ours] is war [against them]" -- or, as William Rivers Pitt writes in
a thoughtful essay on American empire at the Truthout.org website
<http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/030105Z.shtml> , "Now, permanent war and
rule by fear are accepted without question."

Click here to read more of this dispatch.
<http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=2235>

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