You owe it to yourself and your country to be well informed about the actions of our government. Included below are links to what I consider to be essential reading regarding the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (a.k.a. the Torture Bill) that was passed by Congress last week.

Have you come across other reading that should be included? On any side of the issue? Include them in a comment at the bottom of this page.

There is a profound and fundamental difference between an Executive engaging in shadowy acts of lawlessness and abuses of power on the one hand, and, on the other, having the American people, through their Congress, endorse, embrace and legalize that behavior out in the open, with barely a peep of real protest. Our laws reflect our values and beliefs. And our laws are about to explicitly codify one of the most dangerous and defining powers of tyranny -- one of the very powers this country was founded in order to prevent.
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Issue in Focus: Enemy Combatant Tribunals

The war on terror gave rise to a new kind of foe - the "enemy combatant." Not quite prisoners of war, but not a run-of-the-mill criminals either, these "enemies" are being held in a legal limbo state - mostly at Guantanamo - that's causing strains in international relations and at-home politics.
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Military Commissions Act of 2006 – Turning bad policy into bad law

It is tempting to resort to accusations of hypocrisy, particularly when the USA itself condemns the very same practices if carried out by other countries. But in seeking to challenge US conduct, perhaps it is more useful to consider how vulnerable the law is to elastic interpretation, manipulation or selective application by the state. And that, for better or worse, a government can use policy to drive the law rather than vice versa. In the USA’s case, a long-held resistance to applying international law to its own conduct compounds the problem.
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We are now officially living in a dictatorship

Many of my friends and neighbors have no clue that today USA ceased to be a democracy. They do not realize that Congress and Courts do not have any power to stop Bush from doing whatever he wants. He never cared what they said before and did it anyway. But starting today, it became legal.
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Letter to Senator McCain

I read with great sadness that Bush's torture law passed the Senate. When this issue originally came up, I read you opposed it and I applauded you for it. I held out hope more sane minds would prevail. Alas, I was very wrong.
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Detainee Bill Passes Senate And Becomes A Stain On The Pages Of History

It takes a true act of cowardice to sign into law the permission to treat other human beings in such derogatory fashion. What separates us from terrorists (of all shape, colour, and political persuasion) is that we value life, all life, whereas they do not. More than that, we value the ideals that protect life and dignity.

 

[ this links to the article posting on Digg.com. It is very interesting to read the comments on the Digg site, as well as the linked article. -sm ]
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The Fact That We Are Debating This At All Makes Me Sick

I am officially and completely all out of fucking reasonable. Understand? TORTURE IS WRONG. WE SHOULD NOT FUCKING DO IT AT ALL. The fact that we are having this debate at all means that we have already lost far more than was ever imagined when the planes hit the towers.
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Fight Damn You, Fight

I hate to say this, but I agree with President Bush that we are at war against an enemy that wants to destroy the very fabric of our civilization. We are at war with people who do not share our values, our ideals, and our morality. We are at war with people who believe that the ends justify the means, no matter how heinous, barbarous or uncivilized the act.

 

Ourselves.
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Thunder on the Mountain: The Murderers of Democracy

There is no honor in them. There is no decency, no morality, no honesty – nothing but fear, nothing but greed, nothing but base servility. Cringing, wretched little creatures, bowing to the will of a third-rate thug and his gang of moral perverts. This is their record. This is their doing. This is the shame they will have to live with. And this is the darkness, rank, fetid and smelling of blood, that now covers us all.
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Who voted for the Torture Bill?

To each and every one who voted for the passage of this abhorrent denial of our Constitution, ShadowMonkey offers the following, from Shakespeare's Life of King Henry the Fifth: Scorn and defiance; slight regard, contempt.
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Why Churchill Opposed Torture ShadowMonkey (Unregistered) 2006-10-02 16:58:56 As Winston Churchill insisted throughout the war, treating POWs well is wise, if only to increase the chances that your own men will be well treated if they too are captured. Even in World War II, there was in fact a high degree of reciprocity. The British treated Germans POWs well and were well treated by the Germans in return; the Germans treated Russian POWs abysmally and got their bloody deserts when the tables were turned. http://tinyurl.com/kz7t5 Quote

The New Enabling Act JoeR (Unregistered) 2006-10-02 23:47:32 I cannot view the current debate about the Bush Administration’s latest attempt to remove all checks on its power without thinking about how my German and Austrian grandparents must have watched with disbelief as Europe sank into the madness of fascism. I think about how unprecedented those changes were, and how difficult it must have been to believe that things could really become as bad as they did.... http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/The_New_Enabling_Act_0927.html Quote

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