ZGram - 7/11/2004 - "Charley Reese's pithy comments in 'Legal
Nonsense'"
zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org
Sun Jul 11 09:47:23 EDT 2004
ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny: Now more than ever!
July 11, 2004
Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
When people don't understand, it is usually because context is
missing. A friend who sent me the Reese column below, added "Ditto
for Nuremberg trials." There is your context or background.
A thoughtful Sunday read!
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Legal Nonsense
I love the sharp tongue of the British. A former legal adviser to the
British Foreign Office has said George Bush's war on terrorism is
"legal nonsense" and confers no more power on the United States to
detain people than the war against obesity.
That's true. The British lady, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, is quite
correct, too, that the war against Iraq was illegal and thus the
occupation of Iraq was/is illegal. I say "was/is" because that
depends on whether you believe the fairy tale of Iraqi sovereignty.
So it turns out old Saddam Hussein was correct. He is still the legal
president of Iraq; the new Iraqi government is illegal and has no
right to try him. That, of course, will not prevent him from being
tried and eventually hanged. One of the things I hope Americans are
learning, besides the fact that the war wasn't worth it, is that the
rule of law is a farce. Like language, the law is twisted to justify
what the Bush administration wants to do. This administration is
bound by neither law nor truth.
I'm no lawyer, but I pointed out some time ago that you can't declare
war on a tactic, and that's all terrorism is - a tactic. Real
terrorists, as opposed to people resisting occupation of their
country or guerrillas fighting to overthrow a government, are
criminals, and as criminals deserve to be hunted down. That, however,
is not a war.
For all time, when bad governments wanted to increase their power,
they spread fear and claimed the new power would allow them to
"protect" the people. If there were no real enemies at the gate, they
would invent them. The threat of terrorism has been enormously
exaggerated by this administration to justify a very un-American lust
for power. It has spread fear like a glutton spreads butter on hot
pancakes.
Some local law-enforcement officers also fearmonger to get bigger
budgets. Some in burgs no international terrorist could find with a
satellite are warning the local folks to suspect everybody they see.
Another word that is vastly abused in this crazy time is
"intelligence." Do you know what intelligence is? It's just
knowledge, and knowledge must be factual. Assertions are not
knowledge. Beliefs are not knowledge. Fears are not knowledge.
Regardless of what so-called "intelligence" said, the facts are that
Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, had no
programs to produce them and had no cooperative arrangements with
al-Qaida.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who probably should see a psychologist as
well as a cardiologist, continues to claim a connection, but what he
calls a connection is one or two meetings in a period of years from
which nothing ever came. If a mere meeting is a ," then all of us
have connections with every human being we've ever met, however
briefly. This is another example of language abuse.
Another architect of the illegal war, Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz, still coyly claims that just because we haven't found
the weapons doesn't mean they don't exist. That's true. We haven't
found any Martians, either, but perhaps they do exist, perhaps even
in the offices of the Pentagon. It's always been hard to prove a
negative.
This is an administration of sick puppies whose minds are haunted by
lust for power, ideological phantoms and a profound contempt for the
American people. A willingness to deceive is always proof of contempt.
Hopefully, in November, a majority of Americans will decide that this
administration, like its illegal war, isn't worth re-electing.
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http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20040712/index.php>http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20040712/index.php
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