A Sad Time To Be An American
I can accept that in a Democracy, things will be done by my government that I don't necessarily agree with. Wars will be fought, people will be imprisoned, money will be spent, and laws will be made. That's part of playing the game: once you agree to the rules of the game, you have to accept that any outcome produced by those rules is fair, even if you don't like it. The same thing could be said of the legal system as well; at the end of the day all you really have is the integrity of the process, and if the process is followed you have to accept that the outcome is just. The rule of law and due process have to be protected at all costs, as they're really all that separates a just legal system from a tyranical, arbitrary one.
I've always believed that the United States, for all its other flaws, did well on those two accounts. The elections are generally fair and without problems, happen on a regular schedule, and power transfers peacefully to the winners of the election. Our justice system certainly isn't perfect, but a person is at least always entitled to legal representation, can't be held indefinitely without charges, has a right to examine evidence against them, and evidence obtained by unlawful means (be that an illegal search, hearsay, coercion, or some other failure of due process) can't be used to convict someone. Those are two of the primary virtues that set the US apart from, say, Russia or China or most of South America.
My faith in those two pillars of the American way of lifewas pretty severely shaken this past week; I'm more shocked and saddened than even outraged at this point, simply because there's no obvious outlet at which to direct any outrage.
Most damaging was the passage by congress this week of the detainee treatment bill, a vile, despicable bit of legislation that strips the most hallowed legal protections in the British/US legal system from anyone the president deems an "unlawful enemy combatant." Such people have no ability to challenge their legal standing in court, no right to a speedy trial, no right to self-representation, no irrevocable right to examine the evidence against them, and can effectively be tortured into confessions that are then used against them at trial. All of those by themselves are morally reprehensible, but the lack of any real appeals process is truly evil. The hallowed "innocent until proven guilty" principle has been completely removed, and the president essentially now has the authority to essentially do whatever he wants to non-US citizens with absolutely no recourse on their behalf: all he has to do is declare them an enemy combatant, and away they go. In addition to being in clear violation of US treaty obligations (the bill's blunt assertions that it complies with them does nothing to alter that reality), the bill is clearly ethically vacant and demonstrates that the Bush administration, along with everyone who supported the bill, doesn't understand the true importance of due process and basic human rights. There is no room for compromise here: either you're for inalienable rights and due process, or you're against it. The line has been drawn, and this country's elected representatives have largely come down on the same side of the line as all of the most corrupt and tyrannical governments this world has ever seen. History will be unkind to these people (and to us, for electing them and allowing this to happen), and some day this bill will be as reviled as the Alien and Sedition Acts or the Japanese internment during World War II. I never thought I'd hate any piece of legislation more than the original Patriot Act, but this takes things to a far more disturbing level. I never thought I'd live to see the US Congress attempt to legalize torture, but clearly I was wrong on that count as well.
At the same time, more and more disturbing facts about the Ohio election in 2004 are coming to light. Thankfully, a legal case was won to keep the man in charge of those elections from ordering all the ballots to be shredded, so that voting irregularities have more of a chance of coming to light. I'm naturally wary of any conspiracy theories, but I'm now convinced that the Ohio election was clearly compromised. It's taken a lot to convince me, but Robert F. Kennedy's articles for Rolling Stone raise too many questions to be ignored. The first article raised serious doubts, but the latest article is even more disturbing, as it details how Diebold was essentially allowed to run the election, and how there's pretty clear evidence that the machines were tampered with and an unauthorized patch was installed. Who knows what it did? As a software engineer, though, I can tell you that if I was able to upload arbitrary software onto a voting machine, it would be very easy to rig it to do just about whatever you wanted. Combine that with the other evidence of voter rolls being purged, of improbably-long consecutive runs of ballots all marked for Bush (as discovered by researches accessing the now-legally-proceted ballots), of mysterious replacement ballots that no one can exactly explain, of official accounts of how the ballots were handled that can't possibly be true (due to election returns being posted for the precint far faster than would have been possible), of inexplicable voting patterns (voters in some precints who voted for a black court justice or against a gay marraige ban were found to have voted for Bush by a wide margain), exit polls that didn't come close to matching the reported vote count, and most blatantly of white stickers mysteriously placed on some ballots to cover up clear votes for Kerry . . . all irregularities which just so happened to favor Bush. A few irregularities could be explained away as statistical anamolies, but this many, all in the same direction, in a hotly contested state where a corporation run by a pro-Bush camp is running the election and where the Secretary of State (who oversees the elections) is running Bush's campaign? Election rigging is notoriously hard to prove, as the evidence is usually gone after the election, and doubly so in the case of electronic voting machines that don't leave any paper trail. But in this case, clearly the most rational thing, as sad and disturbing as it is, is to accept that the election was compromised. There simply isn't any way to explain all of those irregularities away.
It's a sad, sad time to be an American.
I've always believed that the United States, for all its other flaws, did well on those two accounts. The elections are generally fair and without problems, happen on a regular schedule, and power transfers peacefully to the winners of the election. Our justice system certainly isn't perfect, but a person is at least always entitled to legal representation, can't be held indefinitely without charges, has a right to examine evidence against them, and evidence obtained by unlawful means (be that an illegal search, hearsay, coercion, or some other failure of due process) can't be used to convict someone. Those are two of the primary virtues that set the US apart from, say, Russia or China or most of South America.
My faith in those two pillars of the American way of lifewas pretty severely shaken this past week; I'm more shocked and saddened than even outraged at this point, simply because there's no obvious outlet at which to direct any outrage.
Most damaging was the passage by congress this week of the detainee treatment bill, a vile, despicable bit of legislation that strips the most hallowed legal protections in the British/US legal system from anyone the president deems an "unlawful enemy combatant." Such people have no ability to challenge their legal standing in court, no right to a speedy trial, no right to self-representation, no irrevocable right to examine the evidence against them, and can effectively be tortured into confessions that are then used against them at trial. All of those by themselves are morally reprehensible, but the lack of any real appeals process is truly evil. The hallowed "innocent until proven guilty" principle has been completely removed, and the president essentially now has the authority to essentially do whatever he wants to non-US citizens with absolutely no recourse on their behalf: all he has to do is declare them an enemy combatant, and away they go. In addition to being in clear violation of US treaty obligations (the bill's blunt assertions that it complies with them does nothing to alter that reality), the bill is clearly ethically vacant and demonstrates that the Bush administration, along with everyone who supported the bill, doesn't understand the true importance of due process and basic human rights. There is no room for compromise here: either you're for inalienable rights and due process, or you're against it. The line has been drawn, and this country's elected representatives have largely come down on the same side of the line as all of the most corrupt and tyrannical governments this world has ever seen. History will be unkind to these people (and to us, for electing them and allowing this to happen), and some day this bill will be as reviled as the Alien and Sedition Acts or the Japanese internment during World War II. I never thought I'd hate any piece of legislation more than the original Patriot Act, but this takes things to a far more disturbing level. I never thought I'd live to see the US Congress attempt to legalize torture, but clearly I was wrong on that count as well.
At the same time, more and more disturbing facts about the Ohio election in 2004 are coming to light. Thankfully, a legal case was won to keep the man in charge of those elections from ordering all the ballots to be shredded, so that voting irregularities have more of a chance of coming to light. I'm naturally wary of any conspiracy theories, but I'm now convinced that the Ohio election was clearly compromised. It's taken a lot to convince me, but Robert F. Kennedy's articles for Rolling Stone raise too many questions to be ignored. The first article raised serious doubts, but the latest article is even more disturbing, as it details how Diebold was essentially allowed to run the election, and how there's pretty clear evidence that the machines were tampered with and an unauthorized patch was installed. Who knows what it did? As a software engineer, though, I can tell you that if I was able to upload arbitrary software onto a voting machine, it would be very easy to rig it to do just about whatever you wanted. Combine that with the other evidence of voter rolls being purged, of improbably-long consecutive runs of ballots all marked for Bush (as discovered by researches accessing the now-legally-proceted ballots), of mysterious replacement ballots that no one can exactly explain, of official accounts of how the ballots were handled that can't possibly be true (due to election returns being posted for the precint far faster than would have been possible), of inexplicable voting patterns (voters in some precints who voted for a black court justice or against a gay marraige ban were found to have voted for Bush by a wide margain), exit polls that didn't come close to matching the reported vote count, and most blatantly of white stickers mysteriously placed on some ballots to cover up clear votes for Kerry . . . all irregularities which just so happened to favor Bush. A few irregularities could be explained away as statistical anamolies, but this many, all in the same direction, in a hotly contested state where a corporation run by a pro-Bush camp is running the election and where the Secretary of State (who oversees the elections) is running Bush's campaign? Election rigging is notoriously hard to prove, as the evidence is usually gone after the election, and doubly so in the case of electronic voting machines that don't leave any paper trail. But in this case, clearly the most rational thing, as sad and disturbing as it is, is to accept that the election was compromised. There simply isn't any way to explain all of those irregularities away.
It's a sad, sad time to be an American.
posted by Alan Keefer at 11:46 PM
1 comments
