A BIPARTISAN NEED FOR LIBERTY

By: thebeerdoctor

The reaction was to be expected from those accustomed to the daily cat and mouse game called politics. The experts always know. That is why Representative Dennis Kucinich's articles of impeachment were ridiculed as worthless, "a waste of time" from a "annoying gnat". While the movers and shakers of his own political party have more important matters to attend to than defending the Constitution and the rule of law.

Something ironically similar was happening across the pond, in the United Kingdom.
That is where Gordon Brown's Labour party government is trying to enact a law that enables the government to hold terror suspects, or as they say, persons of interest, for 42 days without any redress. Tory Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, resigned from the House of Commons in disgust.

"I had always viewed membership of this House as a noble endeavor," said David Davis. "Not least because we and our forebears defended the fundamental freedoms of our citizens. Or we did, up until yesterday."

"This Sunday is the anniversary of Magna Carta --the document that guarantees that most fundamental of British freedoms-- Habeus Corpus."

Here in the United States, I begin to wonder how many people still remember that the Magna Carta is the root document of the United States Constitution. It is where it was officially established that no one is to be above the law. As Winston Churchill said in 1956: "here is a law which is above the King and which even he must not break."

Evidently, this is not the case for President Bush, who attempts to shrug off the Supreme Court ruling on the rights of detainees, simply because it was a 5-4 decision. Senator Barack Obama said the Supreme Court ruling refutes "the Bush Administration's attempt to create a legal black hole in Guantanamo." But that legal black hole most certainly exists, simply by making the false claim that human legal standards do not apply to military tribunals. Yes, it is what it is: a breathtaking argument for legalized torture.

Meanwhile, over in England, David Davis has remarked that the British have "the most intrusive identity card system in the world. A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with thousands of innocent children and a million innocent citizens on it... the creation of a database state opening our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers..."

It is wise to remember that these objections to the Orwellian order, come from a conservative Tory member. That is also why Dennis Kucinich said his articles of impeachment were not about politics, but the rule of Constitutional law. How strange that a few persons in high powerful positions think it is perfectly acceptable to ignore the law upon which all of western civilization is based: the liberty of its citizens. A state sponsored abolition of basic freedoms becomes a final victory for terror. To say you are defending freedom by destroying it, using the cafard of security, is to be sure, very strange indeed.