Don't Just Get Angry About This Travesty -- Get Loud!

[mhatrw]

We are 100% right on this one and our opponents (in both parties) are 100% wrong.

We must engage everyone who will listen in every available venue -- online, with our email lists, with our families, in our offices, at our local hangouts, with all of our friends, acquaintances and neighbors!

Stupid, uninformed and ignorant people are obviously the target demographic for yesterday's cynical political embrace of totalitarianism. "Terrorists Don't Deserve Any Rights" is their battle cry. And I guess that battle cry sounds pretty good to anyone who is completely ignorant of the entire history of Western judicial systems and who lacks even the slightest capacity to think critically about the difference between being accused of a crime and being guilty of it. Yes, it may feel physically painful to have to explain political concepts so simple and fundamental as why totalitarianism is bad and why the rule of law is good to adult US citizens. But still we have to try!

Here is my attempt to frame the argument so that even the grade school kid of a freeper can understand it:

We all hate terrorists and terrorism. Nobody cares about the rights of guilty murderous terrorists. But every person who actually has an inkling of what it means to be American, who actually understands the freedoms that make our country great must care about the rights of the accused. Because, as the McCarthy communism scares and the Salem witch hunts have taught us, being accused of something is most surely not equivalent to being guilty of it.

Take Brandon Mayfield, for instance. Here's a guy who was accused of being involved in the Madrid bombings. He was arrested, and if he had been found guilty, a lot of promotions would have been in line for the FBI supervisors and federal prosecutors who brought him to justice. But the man was 100% innocent, and so 19 days after he was thrown in prison to wide acclaim, a judge dismissed his case.

Would you have preferred this US army veteran father to remain behind bars to this day? Indefinitely? Perhaps you would have liked to have seen this man executed for his sin of being an accused terrorist? Is your America's new motto to be, "It is better for a thousand innocent men to be put to death than for a single guilty terrorist to live"?

Now consider that most suspects accused of terrorism are arrested in the planning stages. They are arrested (and then perhaps charged) before any actual physical crime is committed. They are accused of plotting terrorist acts rather than actually committing them. The arrests of dozens or even scores of such suspects are accompanied by the resplendence of 24/7 media hoopla and huge rounds of public cheering for our intrepid protectors. Then, invariably, a number of these suspects are later released because they simply got caught up in the wide dragnet and there is no prosecutable case against them. But suppose we were to change the laws so that none of these individuals had any rights to a fair and speedy trial or even to be seen by a judge. Suppose we instead kept all of these suspects imprisoned indefinitely, even ones who were wholly innocent. Suppose we tortured all of them and then allowed our government to produce secret evidence and "evidence" extracted under torture against these suspects in secret courts.

Would you still be able to recognize the country you live in? Can you?

Now consider that every time one of these highly publicized terrorism busts go down, the political popularity of the FBI, our federal justice system and even the President himself goes up. Consider the incentive for abuse when all any of these people have to do to increase their public popularity is to stage another "highly successful" terrorist network bust with whichever poor patsies they feel like targeting this month. Even if you think our current administration is beyond reproach and would never even broach such a heinous scheme, consider a future administration in which a dishonest politician (oxymoron?) were President or a dishonest person headed the FBI, DOJ or Department of Homeland Security. Would you really put it past every single previous, current or future contender for these positions of power to "wag the dog" during a period of scandal or unpopularity by staging a fake anti-terrorism bust? Would you really put this past Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, every Bush and every Clinton? Without our court system to evaluate merits of the charges against the suspects, what would be the incentive for any less than scrupulous politician to refrain from such behavior?

[MADem]

1. Fine, push it....but after November. Let's get majorities on the Hill

first. Whining about this horse out of the barn now does nothing but help the GOP.

Or can't you see that?

[timeforchangenow]

2. The constitution is getting ripped from us

and all you can worry about is an election. You'll sell your morals and values for a majority of Senators that sold their vote for a vote?! You can't slink into power with questionable records. We need morals and spines, not wishy-washy, two sided, vote whores.

[MADem]

6. Oh bullshit. You might want to spend some TIME here before you get

all activist and fist in the air. You're talking like someone who is completely ignorant of political reality, either that, or you are spoiling to disrupt and divide with a goal to depress the voter turnout. Which is it?

Yes, all I CAN worry about IS an election, ya putz.

Because without a democratic majority, we ARE fucked.

Please, go on, take your ball and go home. Your lack of knowledge astounds.

[walldude]

13. And where are you going to find this person with a spine?

All politicians are wishy-washy two sided vote whores. It's the nature of politics. You vote for the lesser of 2 evils. Period.

Welcome to DU.. and a word to the wise, I wouldn't jump on here telling people you don't know at all that they sold their morals and values. It makes you look like a troll.

[SmokingJacket]

3. Actually... I don't see how it will help the GOP at all.

Attacking the "traitor" Dems, okay, but explaining why what the GOP just did is superbad... well I don't see how that can help them.

There could well be some teetering Republicans who might be totally disgusted by this.

[MADem]

7. Not on a national level, it's totally unhelpful.

In local races, sure, with appropriately savvy audiences who understand the full scope of the matter. But nationally, we're better off showing America how George's war has made us LESS safe.

Look, there are people who want to bring the troops home who don't have a problem torturing a terrorist. That may not be right, but it's the way it is. We can help them to understand this issue with education, certainly, but now isn't the time to educate.

We need to hit hard on issues they already understand.

[mhatrw]

9. When is it ever time to educate in your opinion?

Why are Republicans the only ones who are ever allowed to frame issues to their advantage?

[MADem]

10. When we have at least one house and the attention of the media

No one covers the minority party. We need to WIN at least one chamber. Better to win both.

Republicans get to whine and spout because they control all the branches of government nowadays. Until we get ours, no one hears us.

[mhatrw]

4. Why? This was clearly the Republicans' political ploy to confront

the Democrats as "soft on terrorists."

It was just what they always pull with flag burning. They force a vote on an issue they think they can spin to their advantage but that nobody with a shred of integrity or understanding of what it means to be American can support. Then they say, "Look, Democrats hate the flag. Look, Democrats love terrorists."

We have to fight back. We must explain to everyone why yesterday was the darkest day in our democracy in any of our lifetimes.

[MADem]

5. And now the GOP have nothing to whine about. They got their way.

I'm in the "BRING THE TROOPS HOME/IRAQ WAR IS A MESS" camp as a front and center issue. You can actually show people VIDEO of that. That's a resonator....being nice to terrorists doesn't play as well.

You might not like that assessment, and yes, the implications vis a vis Geneva ARE dire, I am not arguing that, I am just saying it ain't gonna play as well as you hope it will.

Plenty of folks don't CARE if we torture terrorists. They don't SEE the big picture.

They can be educated...but now isn't the time.

[mhatrw]

8. Read my original post. This isn't about torture.

First, this is more important than any crass political considerations. This is about legislated tyranny.

Second, just because the Repukes got their way doesn't mean that they won't turn around and use this exact same issue as a bludgeon against all Democrats -- the vast majority of whom voted against it. If you think otherwise, I have to ask you -- which Republican Party have you been fighting for the past 30 years?

Third, this issue only "doesn't play well" because so many Americans are completely ignorant of the most basic principles that our country was founded on. We need to fight such ignorance with all our might. Otherwise, the ignorance of the electorate will ever remain a cudgel in the fascists' hands.

Fourth, pretending this bill is only about torturing terrorists is THEIR FRAME. We need to reframe the issue away from torture and onto the fundamental rights of ANY accused individual that (used to) differentiate the USA from Pinochet's Chile or Stalin's USSR.

This isn't about whether we are or are not too squeamish to waterboard terrorists, folks. That's just what the Republicans and our complicit corporate media are pretending this is about. Everybody hates terrorists. Nobody wants to coddle them. Sure, many of us don't think torture should ever be legal, for many reasons including the potential for even worse abuses than those that we've already seen at Abu Ghraib and the fact that the information gleaned from this sort of questioning is almost never reliable. But the torture aspects of this bill are no more than the sensationalistic cover story for a wide ranging assault on the fundamental rights of US citizens (as well as all other human beings in the world).

This is about the same people who told us the best way to fight terrorism was to start a war that had nothing to do with it now telling us that we all have to give up our basic right to a fair and speedy trial at the whim of our monarchical executive. This bill reverses over 790 years of Anglo Saxon legal tradition starting with the Magna Carta and extending through our revered Constitution and Bill of Rights. That's the frame we have to push. That's the frame that no educated American who is proud of America's heritage can dispute.

[MADem]

11. I'm not arguing with your points at all. I just don't think they are THE

priority in the run up to the election. If the opportunity presents, and the audience is receptive, fine. But now isn't the time to go toe-to-toe and force a change of hearts and minds. People tend to dig in when you challenge their dearly held assumptions.

Once we win the House and Senate, we need to reverse what happened yesterday. But we can't reverse anything until we have some power.

[mhatrw]

12. I have yet to encounter a single individual willing to discuss this topic

rationally -- no matter what his or her political leanings -- who didn't finally respond to it with disgust for what has now been done to our country in the name of fighting terrorists.

Only complete braindead idiots who don't even know what the Bill of Rights or habeas corpus is have even attempted to argue the issue with me. For everyone else, once the proper frame is broached -- that this law demolishes the right to a fair and speedy trial even for US citizens on US soil -- they must admit that they don't agree with the law and are hoping the Supreme Court will strike it down.