Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Obama the Executioner

Contrary to popular belief, the US did not invent freedom. In fact, its roots in the western world go back well over a thousand years - in England before there was an England. It began in tribal laws that no person could be punished for a crime without evidence that a crime had been committed, and that the accused had done it. Ideally, a killer should be caught with the blood on his hands (thus "red-handed"). Even habeus corpus, the use of a summons to arrest the accused has been in use for almost a thousand years. On that rests all our individual rights and freedoms.  No government can imprison a person without evidence that a crime was committed, without a formal charge, and without a fair trial.

Part of that was lost with George Bush, who took the right to imprison anybody indefinitely with no evidence of a crime, no charge and no trial. That alone took the US back a thousand years.

As this is being written, the Obama White House lawyers are defending President Obama's claimed right to order the assassination of any American citizen - with no warrant, no trial, not even evidence of a crime having been committed. The American Civil Liberties Union is fighting his use of such an order, in this case involving a Moslem. Given recent tendencies of the Supreme Court, it is quite possible it will rule in favour of this extroardinary power that effectively destroys the whole basis of American democracy and freedom.

(Well, it concerns a Moslem to be killed. This should be a no brainer for a Supreme Court which has recently decided that coporations are really just like people - so they should have rights just like people.)

Haven't seen much about his in the North American news media? Well, maybe that's because corporations own most of the news media. Corporations are also annoyed at Moslems for sitting on land they want. And, hey, corporations have rights. And the American people? No sweat. The only radical party in the whole country is a bunch of nutbars who want to go back to 1775. Heck, the US would have to progress at a frantic rate to get all the way up to 1775 again.

and so it goes..."not with a bang but a whimper".

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