War on Terror ends; Terror wins

Didn't my old man fight in a war against this kind of thing?

From MSNBC:

I want to start by asking you about a specific part of this act that lists one of the definitions of an unlawful enemy combatant as, quote, “a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a combatant status review tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the president or the secretary of defense.”

Does that not basically mean that if Mr. Bush or Mr. Rumsfeld say so, anybody in this country, citizen or not, innocent or not, can end up being an unlawful enemy combatant?

JONATHAN TURLEY, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY CONSTITUTIONAL LAW PROFESSOR: It certainly does. In fact, later on, it says that if you even give material support to an organization that the president deems connected to one of these groups, you too can be an enemy combatant.

And the fact that he appoints this tribunal is meaningless. You know, standing behind him at the signing ceremony was his attorney general, who signed a memo that said that you could torture people, that you could do harm to them to the point of organ failure or death.

So if he appoints someone like that to be attorney general, you can imagine who he’s going be putting on this board.

IF, FOR EXAMPLE, someone were to say a hypothetical U.S. president were doing a frighteningly good impression of Il Duce, it would seem that whether that someone went to Guantanamo or not would be entirely dependent on how mad that hypothetical U.S. president was over being compared to Benito Mussolini.

So we must channel our inner cowering peasant and not be unduly critical of our betters. It could get real fatal, real fast.

I'm just sayin' that we appear to have pretty much become what we profess to hate. God help us.