Antiwar.com Blog

As you know, the so-called social contract which created the national government provides them the power to prosecute for treason, as it was in the Old World, but at least they made the standards pretty specific. From Article 3 Section 3:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.”

Now comes George W. Bush, joining Bill O’Reilly in invoking “comfort to the enemy” while crying about folks who point out what a complete and total disaster his invasion of Iraq has been:

“I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy, not comfort to our adversaries.”

So, which criticism is permissible and what isn’t? What brings credit to our democracy and what makes our enemies feel comforted?

What if I were to assert that the Iraq war is what brings comfort to our enemies? What if I were to cite the CIA, the RIIA [.pdf], the Saudis, the Israelis, all the former CIA guys I’ve interviewed, the best reporters and academics to back me up? That al Qaeda has become al Qaedaism – an ideology like neoconservatism, but for pissed off Salafist types, that the Kurdish Peshmergas are preparing for war, that the SCIRI and Da’wa party, who lived in Iran though the Iran-Iraq war and up until the US invasion in 2003 and now dominate the Shi’ite south, have basically secured a giant new province for the Ayatollahs that we had supported Saddam Hussein against?

What if I were to point out that the congress has had to raise their phony “debt ceiling” to 9 Trillion dollars?

Or that the Constitution has been all but scrapped?

How about the fact that a high level member of the War Party has been indicted for the leaking of the name of a CIA officer at the center of their anti-nuclear proliferation efforts, others are under investigation for leaking secret codes to Iranian spy Ahmad Chalabi, and one more has pled guilty to passing classified information to Israel?

Seems to me that if we’re to start throwing around accusations of treason, the Cheney/ex-Trotskyite cabal and their child-leader are much more susceptible to charges of working against America for the benefit of foreign states than those of us in opposition.

Update: Thank you all for your many thoughtful comments.

Buried down at the bottom of this news article:

Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, who resigned as oil minister last week over increases in consumer fuel prices, also resumed his old post after the prime minister and president asked him to do so, Iraq’s Council of Ministers said.

I am under the impression that Ahmad Chalabi had taken over as oil minister. Well, is he or isn’t he? No mention if Chalabi has stepped down.

Repaired some broken links, deleted some defunct ones, and added four on the floor: Diana Moon, Sheldon Richman, Glaivester, and Kevin Carson. Check ’em out.

For all those who have been trying to keep up with (and make sense of) the story of Sibel Edmonds, the woman who learned terrible things while translating for the FBI, blew the whistle and was promptly fired and gagged with the court invented “state’s secrets privilege,” there is good news.

Lukery, proprietor of the excellent blog wot is it good for?, has put in the time and gray matter to piece together what we can learn from what she can say around her gag order. (Which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court without comment.)

It seems clear at this point that the many scandals of the neoconservatives who lied us into Iraq, as Edmonds told me last August 13, are connected together. It seems more and more likely that her half-told portion is the puzzle piece to hold them all together, though many questions indeed remain.

Lukery’s excellent summary is here.

Notes from his interview of her here.

More from him on the subject here, here, here, here and here.

Christopher Deliso’s interviews of Sibel are here and here.

His 3 latest articles on all this here, here and here, my December 17th interview of him on the subject here.

Sibel’s website, the notorious Vanity Fair article, and the transcript of my most recent interview of her here, mp3 here.

Check out these pathetic right-socialist warmonger types trying to claim that Americans aren’t bothered by the recent National Security Agency wiretapping scandal. Citing a Rasmussen poll, “NewsBusters” claims, “the nation doesn’t feel the Bush administration is doing anything wrong.”

“Busters” is right, because that wasn’t the question.

Media Matters has Pat Buchanan – typically right in writing and wrong on TV – making the same ridiculous claim on Hardball ,

“MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, CNBC host Lawrence Kudlow, and conservative radio host Michael Reagan referenced the Rasmussen poll in defending Bush’s authorization of the NSA eavesdropping program. The poll, conducted December 26-27, asked respondents: ‘Should the National Security Agency be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?’ Sixty-four percent of respondents answered ‘Yes.'”

Wowee, well I guess I can ignore the fact that the NSA has been tapping virtually all international calls and that the law has been broken, since this stupid unrelated poll question was tailored in such a way as to make for a useful soundbite for the warmongering and liberty hating Krauthammers of the world.

I give up. You conservatives are right. A “Democracy,” as the new leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iraq have taught us, “means accepting the will of the majority” – that is, as determined by misinterpreted phony poll questions on a day to day basis.

President Bush announced today that some U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Iraq this year. That’s great, but does anyone really think that all, or even the majority of, U.S. troops will ever be withdrawn from Iraq? We still have 69,395 troops in Germany, 35,307 in Japan, and 32,744 in Korea.