Habeas in the Supreme Court

The only thing more amazing to me than the fact that the Supreme Court is hearing arguments regarding whether or not the President has the authority to detain someone indefinitely without bringing charges against them, is that few people seem to care. Will the death of America be silent? Legally, this case is perhaps as important as, I dunno, repealing the First Amendment.

Perhaps equally amazing is that four US Supreme Court justices will likely rule that the President does have that authority. Four will vote no. Justice Kennedy will cast the deciding vote. How did we come to this?

The arguments presented before the court are highly technical, and I suppose, they have to be. That's the way our legal system works. Unfortunately, there is little procedural room for everyone to step back and ask the question, "Are we really trying to say that people can be jailed forever at the sheer whim of the President?" But that's where we're at. And it makes my head spin.

Here is the report from NPR.

Freedom's Watch

I've heard a couple radio commercials by an organization called Freedom's Watch (okay, okay, I listen to some right-wing radio... keep your enemies close, as they say). They're an organization dedicated to increasing public support for the war and the current regime. The spot was just dripping with the worst brand of propaganda, you know, the kind even the President has begun to tone down, using phrases like "Victory can and must be achieved!", and "Some people have forgotten the sacrifices our soldiers have made", and "Congress must make an important and historic choice: Surrender to terrorist in Iraq or help that government defeat the terrorists". The ad also features an old lady fraily saying, "we've already had one 9/11, we don't need another one!"

Wow! A multi-million dollar nation-wide radio/ newspaper ad campaign whose only stated intent is to keep the war going? Hmmm. So, faster than you can say "military industrial complex", I was on a computer trying to figure out the angle on these guys. "Oh cool" I thought gleefully, "I'll be the first to expose these bastards!"

So much for that. Lot's of people beat me to it, obviously.

But it's actually a little less glamorous than the senario I was envisioning, with layers and layers of front groups covertly funnelling money from the likes of Haliburton and Lockheed Martin to finance all this propaganda by Freedom's Watch. No, no! Why so much sneaking around when nobody will even care except a bunch of liberal politicos, and they're already a lost cause?

No, the funding is right up front, and it reads like a list of who's who of American Mega-Industrialists, and Bush fundraisers. Surprise, surprise.

Freedom's Watch masquerades as some kind of grass-roots organization, calling themselves a "group of Americans who are concerned about freedom." But again, this is Bush's inner circle, exclusively.

This is remniscent of Bush's fake newscasts from a few years back, wherein, the administration produced fake taxpayer-funded newscasts on several issues he was trying to promote at the time.

Fake Grassroots movements? Fake news media? Dude, where's my country?