[lbo-talk] Decent NYT editorial

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Jan 7 05:45:25 PST 2007


[That's 2 in less than 6 months. I don't know what's gotten into them.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/opinion/07sun1.html

The New York Times

January 7, 2007

Editorial

The Imperial Presidency 2.0

<snip>

Deborah Sontag wrote in The Times last week about the sorry excuse for

a criminal case that the administration whipped up against Jose

Padilla, who was once but no longer is accused of plotting to explode

a radioactive dirty bomb in the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/washington/04padilla.html

Mr. Padilla was held

for two years without charges or access to a lawyer. Then, to avoid

having the Supreme Court review Mr. Bush's power grab, the

administration dropped those accusations and charged Mr. Padilla in a

criminal court on hazy counts of lending financial support to

terrorists.

But just as the government abandoned the dirty bomb case against Mr.

Padilla, it quietly charged an Ethiopian-born man, Binyam Mohamed,

with conspiring with Mr. Padilla to commit that very crime. Unlike Mr.

Padilla, Mr. Mohamed is not a United States citizen, so the

administration threw him into Guantánamo. Now 28, he is still being

held there as an illegal enemy combatant under the anti-constitutional

military tribunals act that was rushed through the

Republican-controlled Congress just before last Novembers elections.

Mr. Mohamed was a target of another favorite Bush administration

practice: extraordinary rendition, in which foreign citizens are

snatched off the streets of their hometowns and secretly shipped to

countries where they can be abused and tortured on behalf of the

American government. Mr. Mohamed -- whose name appears nowhere in either

of the cases against Mr. Padilla -- has said he was tortured in Morocco

until he signed a confession that he conspired with Mr. Padilla. The

Bush administration clearly has no intention of answering that claim,

and plans to keep Mr. Mohamed in extralegal detention indefinitely.

The Democratic majority in Congress has a moral responsibility to

address all these issues: fixing the profound flaws in the military

tribunals act, restoring the rule of law over Mr. Bushs rogue

intelligence operations and restoring the balance of powers between

Congress and the executive branch. So far, key Democrats, including

Mr. Leahy and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, chairman of a new

subcommittee on human rights, have said these issues are high

priorities for them.

We would lend such efforts our enthusiastic backing and hope Mr.

Leahy, Mr. Durbin and other Democratic leaders are not swayed by the

absurd notion circulating in Washington that the Democrats should now

look ahead rather than use their new majority to right the dangerous

wrongs of the last six years of Mr. Bush's one-party rule.

This is a false choice. Dealing with these issues is not about the

past. The administration's assault on some of the nations founding

principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their

responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the

Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place.

<end editorial>



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