“Fighting when you know you’re likely to lose, and fighting anyway because there’s something more at stake…”

“If they’re really no good at all, forget them. It’s time to flee the country.”Brigadier General John Stark August 16, 1777:

“There are your enemies, the Red Coats and the Tories. They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!”

“Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils.”

S.3930 is a travesty: it weakened the enforcement of the Geneva conventions in US law (and the norms that creates); legitimates beatings and any physical or mental pain not considered “severe” and effectively strips away a right against self-incrimination as a norm of international behavior by allowing coerced testimony into evidence. Moreover, as Bruce Ackerman points out, it has legally recognized the “unlawful enemy combatant” construct as “a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents”—and this applies to US citizens as well as aliens. Did anyone lend a copy of On War to an Uzbek, say? Well, our hypothetical book borrower happens to be rebel agaist the regime, you just provided material support to hostilities against a US co-belligerent. The president can declare you an enemy combatant and detainee you indefinitely.

On 28 Sep. 2006, America became ‘Amerika’ by an act of Congress.

My first impulse was the same as Steve’s, but talk about punishing the Democrats is silly. If they’re really no good at all, forget them. It’s time to flee the country. Wasting time punishing the Democrats just endangers you.

goddam but a bunch of them are a sorry-ass lot.

ou sont les Wellstones d’antan?

That’s why I’m just not able to get excited by the prospect of narrow Democratic majorities after this fall’s elections.

Then I guess you’re not that bothered by toture and indefinite detention on the executive’s say-so? Because with a narrow Democratic majority, this law would not have passed.

I’m going to check with some friends who are teaching law, but I really doubt that there are similar human rights violations legal in the Netherlands and Belgium. I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong. Surely incidents happen from time to time, but then the offenders are put to court, and it’s a violation of a law. I don’t know anything about France (re: police rights), though when I lived in England things happened that I thought were unimaginable in the EU. Nevertheless, the difference with the USA is that the USA has political power that none of these other countries has; and seems increasingly to care less about what the European heads of state think or say.

You ask, “What should those who don’t have voting rights in the US do?”

My suggestion would be, See if your own country has anything similar, and try to change it. The less cover the US has internationally, the likelier this policy is to be rejected in the long run.

(And no, I’m not joking; the French and Italian police have far more power to detain people arbitrarily than any US police force, even with this change; the British MI5 has far more surveillance capacity than any US organization. I don’t know about the Netherlands and Belgium.)

I’m with you, I’m just arguing that its not self-evident that I should be with you.

For example, I think it is disgustingly unamerican to fawn over British (or any other ) royalty. But I can’t expect the Brits to see it as self-evident that a token monarchy is a political evil.

Its just disingenous to think that the Oakland Raider motto “Just win, baby” isn’t as American as it gets. And that to this side of the american psyche, to see that in Iraq we are playing the role of the Revolutionary British and wearing uniforms and saying “no fair” to the tactics of the underdog home team is disappointing enough to support some bad laws to get back an edge.

Misguided or not that’s just the way it is in America.