General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Remember how FDR authorized internment camps? [View all]Solly Mack
(90,740 posts)I've said the same before on DU.
Matters not to me who decided it was Constitutional, thereby legal. Read Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. Declaring something legal is one way to legitimize a host of horrors and abuses.
I think Bush (and all the rest) should be held accountable for war crimes. This isn't going to happen because America likes to pretend it is something it isn't. A country that cares about human rights. Oh, we give lip service to it, and we always promise to do better (As if before Bush we didn't know torture was wrong), and we most certainly chastise other countries over their human rights abuses - but let something bad happen to us and we're right back to committing abuses and declaring those abuses legal.
I don't support the "war on terror". Prior to Bush, acts of terror were handled as criminal acts. Many, many Americans, have allowed themselves to be swept up in the Bush/Cheney idea of a global battlefield, where enemies lurk in every corner, so we must bomb those corners into oblivion to feel safe. With each passing year the battlefield has grown, the enemies have multiplied - do we feel safe yet?
I've witnessed a change over the last 12 years and it has been an ugly change. More and more people are willing to accept almost anything as long as someone tells them it is legal (Thanks to the superb conditioning of the last 12 years). People have always been susceptible to the declarations of authority but I swear there was a time when more people fought against it: they questioned it - loudly. A small minority to be sure - but that minority has gotten even smaller. Sad.
I'm a registered Democrat and likely to remain so. But I was born a human. I can't just switch that on and off.