Beginning of the End of America
Keith Olbermann Addresses the
Military Commissions Act of 2006
MSNBC Interactive, October 19,
2006
www.commondreams.org/
We have lived as if in a trance.
We have lived as people in fear.
And now-our rights and our freedoms in
peril-we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the
wrong thing.
Therefore, tonight have we truly become
the inheritors of our American legacy.
For, on this first full day that the Military
Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced,
at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:
A government more dangerous to our liberty,
than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.
We have been here before-and we have been
here before led here-by men better and wiser and nobler than George
W. Bush.
We have been here when President John
Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary
to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail
newspaper editors.
American newspaper editors, in American
jails, for things they wrote about America.
We have been here when President Woodrow
Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American
lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans,
especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans,"
most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of
war.
American public speakers, in American
jails, for things they said about America.
And we have been here when President Franklin
D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary
to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison
and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General
DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he
is an American citizen-he is still a Japanese."
American citizens, in American camps,
for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the
choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.
Each of these actions was undertaken for
the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And each was a betrayal of that for which
the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.
Adams and his party were swept from office,
and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.
Many of the very people Wilson silenced
survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got
900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted
entirely from his jail cell.
And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese
was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate
a formal apology from the government of the United States to the
citizens of the United States whose lives it ruined.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most
inescapable of reasons.
In times of fright, we have been only
human.
We have let Roosevelt's "fear of
fear itself" overtake us.
We have listened to the little voice inside
that has said, "the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary;
this will be precise; this too shall pass."
We have accepted that the only way to
stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little
bit like the terrorists.
Just the way we once accepted that the
only way to stop the Soviets was to let the government become
just a little bit like the Soviets.
Or substitute the Japanese.
Or the Germans.
Or the Socialists.
Or the Anarchists.
Or the Immigrants.
Or the British.
Or the Aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most
inescapable of reasons.
And, always, always wrong.
"With the distance of history, the
questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans
take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat
that threat?"
Wise words.
And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.
Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing
the Military Commissions Act.
You spoke so much more than you know,
Sir.
Sadly-of course-the distance of history
will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed
to take seriously was you.
We have a long and painful history of
ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those
who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
But even within this history we have not
before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that wellspring
of protection from which all essential liberties flow.
You, sir, have now befouled that spring.
You, sir, have now given us chaos and
called it order.
You, sir, have now imposed subjugation
and called it freedom.
For the most vital, the most urgent, the
most inescapable of reasons.
And - again, Mr. Bush - all of them, wrong.
We have handed a blank check drawn against
our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare
anything this country has ever done to anything the terrorists
have ever done.
We have handed a blank check drawn against
our freedom to a man who has insisted again that "the United
States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against
our values" and who has said it with a straight face while
the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding
figuratively fade in and out, around him.
We have handed a blank check drawn against
our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not
merely any non-American citizens "unlawful enemy combatants"
and ship them somewhere-anywhere -- but may now, if he so decides,
declare you an "unlawful enemy combatant" and ship you
somewhere - anywhere.
And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria,
ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the
pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at
Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.
And if you somehow think habeas corpus
has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody
else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow,
and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an
"unlawful enemy combatant"-exactly how are you going
to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are
not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you?
This President now has his blank check.
He lied to get it.
He lied as he received it.
Is there any reason to even hope he has
not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to
use it against?
"These military commissions will
provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush, "in
which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney
and can hear all the evidence against them."
"Presumed innocent," Mr. Bush?
The very piece of paper you signed as
you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the
point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical
trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves,
and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their
own defense.
"Access to an attorney," Mr.
Bush?
Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said
on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only
granted access to his detainee defendant on the promise that the
detainee would plead guilty.
"Hearing all the evidence,"
Mr. Bush?
The Military Commissions Act specifically
permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available
to the defense.
Your words are lies, Sir.
They are lies that imperil us all.
"One of the terrorists believed to
have planned the 9/11 attacks," you told us yesterday, "said
he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America."
That terrorist, sir, could only hope.
Not his actions, nor the actions of a
ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure
up to what you have wrought.
Habeas corpus? Gone.
The Geneva Conventions? Optional.
The moral force we shined outwards to
the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an
eternal protection? Snuffed out.
These things you have done, Mr. Bush,
they would be "the beginning of the end of America."
And did it even occur to you once, sir
- somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional,
terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 -- that with only
a little further shift in this world we now know-just a touch
more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died ---
did it ever occur to you once that in just 27 months and two days
from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future president
and a "competent tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled,
by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of "unlawful
enemy combatant" for -- and convene a Military Commission
to try -- not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?
For the most vital, the most urgent, the
most inescapable of reasons.
And doubtless, Sir, all of them-as always-wrong.
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