C H R I S W I N G O P E D P A G E

MY OPINIONS AND SLIGHTS

I don't exactly know what I'm doing

I also keep a blogspot but it is undernourished too

Let's just say I'll get back to all of this stuff eventually

.....

I have a million favorite songs - from all over my strange little map - this is one of them

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PARADISE by JOHN PRINE

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When I was a child my family would travel

Down to western Kentucky where my parents were born

There’s a backwards old town that’s often remembered

So many times that my memories are worn.

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And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County

Down by the Green River where paradise lay

Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking

Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away

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(Well, sometimes we’d travel right down the Green River

To the abandoned old prison down by Adrie Hill

Where the air smelled like snakes and we’d shoot with our pistols

But empty pop bottles was all we would kill)

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Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel

And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land

Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken

Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

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When I die let my ashes float down the Green River

Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester Dam

I’ll be halfway to heaven with paradise waitin’

Just five miles away from wherever I am

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You can follow along with this Jackie De Shannon treatment

Atlantic Records 1968 - It's the first version I heard - I'll add John Prine's original someday.

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SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

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HAVE

A

COW

MAN

IT

WAS

A

NAZI

IDEA

The torch relay of modern times

which transports the flame from Greece

to the various designated sites of the games

had no ancient precedent and was introduced by

Carl Diem, with the support of Joseph Goebbels,

at the controversial Berlin Olympics

as a means to promote Nazi ideology

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There is a detail missing from the otherwise thorough entry about the Pledge of Allegiance at usconstitution.com. We learn that Francis Bellamy wrote it and that it was introduced by thousands of school children in October of 1892. We learn that the original salute to the flag was more like the Nazi salute and was changed by law in 1942, the year it was officially sanctioned by a zealous post-Pearl Harbor congress. But we don't learn that the reason the pledge was written in the first place was to commemorate the upcoming World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 aka Chicago World's Fair. I ran across the info while reading Erik Larson's The Devil In The White City - and learned from the article cited above that the wording was changed from "my flag" to "the flag of the United States of America" also in 1942, thus obliterating Bellamy's quaintly innocent intention to universalize the pledge in honor of the coming together of nations for the Fair. I was nine years old in when I returned to school from 1954's summer vacation and was instructed that "under God" be inserted after "one nation." I remember feeling kinda "funny inside" but went ahead and recited the thing for many years. Under God sprung from McCarthyism, just as the pledge's formal adoption in 1942 sprung from zealotry. And I should mention that something called loyalty oaths continue to squelch freedom of expression all over the United States.

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The flag should never have placed on it, or attached to it,

any mark, insignia, letter, word, number, figure

or drawing of any kind.

I added the flag stuff in the wee hours of Saturday May 24 2008.

At breakfast I opened the New York Times and found this photo of an American food service contractor in Iraq.

In the next few days President Bush is expected to again claim the right to order mistreatment of prisoners that any civilized person would regard as torture.

Mr. Bush is planning to veto a law that would require the C.I.A. and all the intelligence services to abide by the restrictions on holding and interrogating prisoners contained in the United States Army Field Manual. Mr. Bush says the Army rules are too restrictive.

What are these burdens? In addition to a blanket prohibition of torture, the manual specifically bans: ¶ Forcing a prisoner to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner. ¶ Placing hoods or sacks over the head of a prisoner, and using duct tape over the eyes. ¶ Applying beatings, electric shocks, burns or other forms of physical pain. ¶ Waterboarding. ¶ Using military working dogs. ¶ Inducing hypothermia or heat injury. ¶ Conducting mock executions. ¶ Depriving a prisoner of necessary food, water or medical care.

Such practices have long been prohibited by American laws and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents. Mr. Bush, however, declared that he was unbound by the laws of civilization in responding to the barbarism of Sept. 11, 2001. And reports soon surfaced about the abuse of prisoners at detention centers in Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons.

Finally, in 2006, a compliant, Republican-controlled Congress outlawed the kinds of abuse and torture that Mr. Bush’s lawyers had turned into government policy. Unfortunately, Congress applied the prohibitions only to the military, and Mr. Bush immediately made clear that he would issue whatever orders he wanted to the intelligence agencies. In response, Congress approved an amendment to the intelligence budget bill this year that binds those agencies to the same rules as the military.

Opponents of Mr. Bush’s policies on prisoners have long argued that it is immoral, dangerous and counterproductive to abuse and torture prisoners. We do not hold out much hope that the president will heed our last, urgent plea not to veto this bill.

We urge him to read the Army Field Manual, which says: “Use of torture by U.S. personnel would bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It could also place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse.”

He could listen to 43 retired generals or a bipartisan coalition of 18 former members of Congress, secretaries of state and national security officials who all supported the anti-torture amendment.

He could check the testimony of Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who told Congress last week that waterboarding violated the Geneva Conventions.

Or he could read the letter that Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, wrote to his troops.“Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy,” General Petraeus wrote. “They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.” - New York Times Editorial 3 March 2008

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Amnesty International USA  |   Human Rights Watch  |  Freedom House  |  The Center for Victims of Torture

Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you’d have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered. It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life. On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million. While many of those pages may be sparse at first, the authors hope that the world’s scientific community will pool all of its knowledge on the pages. Unlike a page of paper, a page of the Encyclopedia of Life can hold as much information as scientists can upload. “It’s going to have everything known on it, and everything new is going to be added as we go along,” said Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and now serves as its honorary chairman. The New York Times February 26, 2008

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway — With plant species disappearing at an alarming rate, scientists and governments are creating a global network of plant banks to store seeds and sprouts, precious genetic resources that may be needed for man to adapt the world’s food supply to climate change. This week, the flagship of that effort, the Global Seed Vault near here, received its first seeds, millions of them. Bored into the middle of a frozen Arctic mountain topped with snow, the vault’s goal is to store and protect samples of every type of seed from every seed collection in the world.

Oh yeah – Bush wants democracies everywhere – Almost

The Bush administration wants to ensure military pressure is kept up on militants in the lawless tribal areas, but U.S. support for President Pervez Musharraf risks deepening anti-American sentiment among a public already fuming over Islamabad's role in the war on terror. Despite Washington's denials of any meddling in Pakistani politics, influential commentators and average citizens are convinced it is propping up the unpopular former army chief to sustain the fight against al-Qaida, even as it calls for more democracy. President Bush called Musharraf shortly after the Feb. 18 election and the White House has also praised him for working hard in the counterterrorism fight. That irked many Pakistanis who feel they have sent a loud message to Musharraf -- and by extension the U.S. -- with a resounding defeat of the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League-Q party, which won just 15 percent of National Assembly seats. The New York Times February 29, 2008

It Isn't Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" Anymore

Israel to Get $30 Billion in Military Aid From U.S.

Israel and the United States signed a deal on Thursday to give Israel $30 billion in military aid over the next decade in what officials called a long-term investment in peace. (New York Times August 17, 2007)

HANOI - Sunday, Nov. 19 — President Bush likes speed golf and speed tourism — this is the man who did the treasures of Red Square in less than 20 minutes — but here in the lake-studded capital of a nation desperately eager to connect with America, he set a record.

      On Saturday, Mr. Bush emerged from his hotel for only one nonofficial event, a 15-minute visit to the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command, which searches for the remains of the 1,800 Americans still listed as missing in the Vietnam War.

     There were almost no Vietnamese present, just a series of tables displaying photographs of the group’s painstaking work, and helmets, shoes and replicas of bones recovered by the 425 members of the command. He asked a few questions and then sped off in his motorcade.

     On Sunday morning, Mr. Bush attended an ecumenical church service in an old French-built Catholic basilica to underscore the need for greater religious freedom.

     But the mood of this trip could not have been more different from the visit of another president, Bill Clinton, exactly six years ago this weekend, when he seemed to be everywhere.

     And while the difference says much about the personalities of two presidents who both famously avoided serving in the war here, it reveals a lot about how significantly times have changed — and perhaps why America’s “public diplomacy” seems unable to shift into gear.

     In 2000, tens of thousands of Hanoi’s residents poured into the streets to witness the visit of the first American head of state since the end of the Vietnam War. Mr. Clinton toured the thousand-year-old Temple of Literature, grabbed lunch at a noodle shop, argued with Communist Party leaders about American imperialism and sifted the earth for the remains of a missing airman.

Here's the most galling part:

     On Saturday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, conceded that the president had not come into direct contact with ordinary Vietnamese, but said that they connected anyway.

     “If you’d been part of the president’s motorcade as we’ve shuttled back and forth,” he said, reporters would have seen that “the president has been doing a lot of waving and getting a lot of waving and smiles.”

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FOR THIS THEY DIE?

so unamerican it almost stifles reaction

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CIA SAYS

DETAINEES' ACCESS TO LAWYERS

IS SECURITY RISK

The CIA and the Justice Department have told a federal court that permitting lawyers access to high-level Qaeda suspects without tighter secrecy procedures could damage national security by revealing harsh “alternative interrogation methods” used in secret C.I.A. prisons overseas. But lawyers for the suspects say the insistence on secrecy is an effort to “conceal illegal conduct,” including the torture of the 14 accused Qaeda suspects who were moved from C.I.A. custody to the military’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in September.

There is a tidy, not-so-tacit agreement between the United States government and the goverment of Sudan: "If the racist Islamic leaders of Sudan will continue to feed us bits of info on suspected terrorists we will ignore the genocide." The Sudanese army is driving out all non-arabs from the country. At the present day, most Sudanese non-Arabs are confined to an area of the country called "Darfur" where many will live out their lives in squalor and deprivation, while Sudan will continue to be treated leniently by the United States. Yes, we are a shining example of what is right in the world. George Bush needs to spend a year in Darfur, and the rest of his life in shame. It also comes to light that the Sudanese middle class enjoys renewed wealth and material success, with the GNP of of Sudan up 8% since 2005. Other Islamic countries are rushing in with some $2.8 billion in investments in the last 8 months. Let's here it for the "good people" of Islam and their "beautiful" religion.

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The Words Below Are Actual Bragging Points From The Act

Can You Read Between The Lines?

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The Military Commissions Act Of 2006 Will Preserve The Tools Needed To Help Save American Lives.

The Military Commissions Act Will Allow Us To Prosecute Captured Terrorists For War Crimes

Through Full And Fair Trials.

The Military Commissions Act Will Allow The CIA To Continue Its Program For Questioning Terrorists.

The Military Commissions Authorized By This Legislation Are Lawful, Fair, And Necessary.

...

"It is a rare occasion when a President can sign a bill he knows will save American lives.

I have that privilege this morning.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is one of the most important pieces of legislation in the War on Terror.

And now, in memory of the victims of September the 11th,

it is my honor to sign the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law."

President George W. Bush, 10/17/06

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The Devil Is In The Details of this New Legislation

You Need Your Brain Examined If You Think That This Is Benign Legislation,

or, even,

The Work of a Benign Dictator.

Instead of being "in memory of the victimes of September the 11th"

it should have been signed "with regrets to the Constitution of the United States."

And while I'm at it - This Law Was Passed by "Our representatives"

in the legislative branch. Shame on them and shame on us.

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ASHCROFT SET THIS PRECEDENT FIVE YEARS AGO

A veteran art teacher has reached a settlement with the North Texas school district that had suspended her after a student caught a glimpse of nude artwork on field trip. Under the settlement, approved Monday by the school board, the teacher, Sydney McGee, gave up her job but will be paid the balance of her $57,600 annual salary through next May. The agreement ended a dispute that broke out after Ms. McGee led 89 fifth graders from Wilma Fisher Elementary School on a visit last April to the Dallas Museum of Art. Ms. McGee was berated the next day by the principal, Nancy Lawson, who later complained in a memorandum that “students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations, and time was not used wisely for learning during the trip.”

China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers' rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980s. The move underscores the government's growing concern about the wident income gap and threats of social unrest. (NYT 10/13/06) And guess who's upset about this stunning development? The good old United States, that's who. Business is afraid that the cost of manufacturing goods in China will start making prices too high. This is too ludicrous for words! It was only a few years ago that many good Americans were boycotting Chinese goods because of China's human rights and labor practices. Now it is almost impossible to buy anything that does not include a Chinese connection somewhere down the line, thus rendering such social engineering moot if not impossible to sustain. Tiannamen Square never happened. We're making miracles happen, man, miracles! Long live the Chairman of the Board.

Take heart, Industrial Barons. With costs inevitably rising in China, there is an upside! And it's an upside that can bring social liberals into the tent as well as big business. Africa! Africa! Africa! Haiti! Haiti! Haiti! Jeez Louise! Africa is so under-exploited these days - peoplewise. Its natural resources continue to be steadily and grandiously exploited. But the Emancipation Proclamation kinda put a dent in the people-moving trade. With the Chinese becoming too wealthy to exploit, Africans stand to benefit in the long run and, in the far distant future, perhaps even the Haitians can get in on the act. At last - thanks to the hunger that Big Business has for more-more-more, combined with the consumer's desire to pay less-less-less, a perfect storm of opportunity now threatens to make things "right." Later, when Africans unionize and our gluttony still needs to be satisfied, we can move on to Haiti and then, perhaps, Mexico. At some point in the distant future, things will come full circle and Americans will be most in need of exploitation.

"Overall, the United States and our partners have disrupted at least

 10

serious Al Qaeda terrorist plots since September the 11th,

including three Al Qaeda plots to attack inside the United States.

We've stopped at least five more Al Qaeda efforts to case targets

in the United States or infiltrate operatives into our country"

G W Bush at United Nations Oct 6 2005

This reminds me of a scene from John Frankenheimer's 1962 masterpiece, The Manchurian Candidate. Senator Johnny Iselin (James Gregory) keeps hollering, a la Joseph McCarthy, "There are 142 communists working at the State Department!" Later, he shouts over a crowd of reporters, "I know for a fact that there are 184 communists in our own State Department!" Over lunch just following this last outburst, he asks his wife (Angela Lansbury) from across the table, "Babe, can't we decide on a number I can remember?" With a bottle of Heinz Ketchup in hand, the scene crossfades to yet another impromptu gathering, and here's Johnny Iselin again, trimphantly screaming into a television camera: "There are exactly 57 communists in the State Department!"

I'm thinking that maybe the Dubya handlers settled on 10

because it's pretty easy to remember even in a pinch

and even though it's multiple digits

Pope Keeps Limbo in Limbo, for Now

Pope Benedict has decided to keep limbo in limbo a little longer. For nearly a year the Church's International Theological Commission has been working on a document expected to recommend he formally abolish limbo, the place where centuries of Catholic tradition held that babies who die without baptism went. The Pope said a mass with members of the commission on Friday morning, but, contrary to some media speculation, he did not mention the concept in his homily and announced no decision. The media reports had said the Pope would formally cancel limbo on Friday but a key participant, Italian Archbishop Bruno Forte, said the 30-member commission were still fine-tuning their document. Limbo, which comes from the Latin word meaning  "border" or "'edge," was considered by medieval theologians a state or place reserved for the unbaptized dead, including good people who lived before the coming of Christ.  According to Catholic teaching, baptism removes the original sin which has stained all souls since the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Hey gang, it's folks like these who wrote the bible and the koran - what kind of fool believes these things were written by god and then subjected to the whim of man.

"BEWARE OF THE  MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL  COMPLEX"

President Dwight D Eisenhower

Farewell Speech To The Nation -  January 1961

Text

I am almost too pissed off about

E V E R Y T H I N G

that it's almost impossible to rant

about anything - but I will try

"I don't want my tax dollars to be spent on aid to victims of natural disasters."

Common conservative complaint..

Hey, idiots! Nobody's spending your precious money on any of this. Not on Katrina, Rina – whatever – Iraq and other battle-grounds that you don't seem to care where that seed money comes from. They're paying for it all with debt. It isn't real money, so quit your belly-whining. What's a few billion here and there? Isn't the smallest noble cause worth a few dollars more? Oh, I forgot, many taxpayers think the only noble cause is national defense. They don't want a "weak" America. Well, I've got news: the biggest threat to our safety is the collapse of conscience. I-M-O-F-Y (In My Opinion Fuck You)

DICK CHENEY & DONALD RUMSFELD HAVE BEEN A COUPLE

SINCE THE POST-RESIGNATION NIXON ADMINISTRATION

CLICK THIS PIC FOR THE LOW-DOWN ON THE DOWN-LOW

THIS BAB'S GOT BALLS!

Here's Barbara Bush on September 5, 2005, talking about the Katrina evacuees being housed on the floor of the Houston Astrodome: "...and so many people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them."

Jim & Sarah Brady comment on the shooting of

Harry Whittington by Vice President Cheney at Armstrong Ranch TX - February 11, 2006.

"Now I understand why Dick Cheney keeps asking me to go hunting with him. I had a friend once who accidentally shot pellets into his dog - and I thought he was an idiot."- Jim Brady  | "I've thought Cheney was scary for a long time. Now I know I was right to be nervous." Sarah Brady And just in case you don't know American history: Jim Brady, a Republican, and press secretary to the President, was critically injured by John Hinkley in the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan on 3/30/81.

POLITICAL CARTOONS ABOUT THE CHENEY INCIDENT

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POLITICIANS KILLED WHILE HUNTING OR FISHING

COWARDS

"We're Fighting Them Over There So We Won't Have To Fight Them Over Here - Part One "

The American War On Terrorism talks a big talk and walks a big walk, but only because in Iraq is there a tad of distinction between the true terrorist, the earnest nationalist, and the innocent bystander. There is nothing poli-tically correct about the Department of Defense bragging that a certain action in a certain region resulted in the killing of 15 suspected terrorists (as one recent incident was actually reported by more than one news channel) with "suspected" being the operative word. And yet here in The States on any given day, the Antiterrorist Transportation Authority "randomly" selects for closer scrutiny the least likely people before allowing them to pass forward to the boarding gates. We're afraid to single out the type of individual who in fact did commit the World Trade Center atrocity because "Americans don't profile or discriminate." Yeah, right. If Homeland Security were truly engaged, they would leave the grandmothers alone. But I guess it is in keeping with the "American way" to issue non-discriminatory actions abroad. Being under the gun in Iraq is no less discriminatory than being under the wand at stateside airports. In other words, everybody's the enemy over there. We're afraid to meet the enemy here, so armed to the teeth we meet the enemy there. Trouble is, the enemy there is the one we created, and the enemy here is the one we're afraid to pull out of line.

THE LITTLE PINK MAN AND HIS BIG WHITE LIE

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"They Tried To Kill My Dad"

G W Bush in September 2002 - searching for the most "legitimate" reason he could find for attacking Iraq

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     Nowhere in the above-linked CNN story - or other that I can find - is it mentioned that there was anything more than a conspiracy to assassinate G H W Bush in 1993, not an attempt. Even Bill Clinton's White House cited an "attempt" on the Senior Bush, failing to note that a conspiracy was foiled that could have resulted in a car bomb being used in an attempt to kill Mr. Bush as he visited Iraq. A conspiracy does not an attempt make. Here is one more example of how journalism increasingly fails to illuminate the news. Fool's gold is readily foisted off on a naive public without embarrassment. The Facts surrounding the assassination "attempt" are readily available to even the most crudely equipped investigator. Just Google any variation on the theme.

      An observation: Some of my more insecure Democratic Party friends have this odd idea that George W Bush is an important and powerful man. They believe that the guy has "ideas" in some extraordinary sense. What escapes their view, however, is that George's idea of an idea is how to attack with a chainsaw an oddly shaped log. I maintain that GWB is a small man with small, less than ordinary ideas and no ideals to speak of that weren't unearthed from biblical text or recalled from something a kindergarten teacher might have said lo so many years ago. After all, if someone as brilliant as Harriet Meirs can refer to Mr. Bush as the most intelligent person she's ever known, then, knowing her qualifications as a thinker, such must be so. And yet, here's a man who is so intellectually incurious and lazy that he doesn't even read a newspaper. If it weren't for "9/11" there would be no George W Bush. This tragedy allowed the little man to seem important. His inability to comprehend nuance from fact led him to single out Iraq as a branch base for Al Qaeda operations, and prompted his uttering, "they tried to kill my dad," not realizing that in the smallest expression lay the bigger truth, the little white lie gone mad. Loyalty to Bush the Senior is what's driven Junior's entire post-9/11 train ride. And now that war profiteers appear to have more resources in Iraq than the entire battle array should further signal that George Bush has no real ideals when it comes to supporting the American soldier. The wealth and connections of the Bush family goes back several generations. It is the idea that this wealth be maintained that prompts George's idealism. That's my opinion. It is not big bad George we should be eyeing, but the fact that his smallness has led the country to the brink of Fascism if not all-out.

"You go to war with the army you have,

not the army you want."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in response to

a question from a soldier asking about

availability of better armor for

American troops in Iraq

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NO, RUMMY! THEY WENT TO WAR

WITH THE ARMY YOU MADE

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And keep this in mind: not one member of the Bush

administration; and only one member of the legislative branch

has any relatives in active military service

TOM DELAY

 Once he was an exterminator

 then he ran an extermination business

 in Sugar Land Texas

 then he became a state representative

 then a representative of the state in congress

 for the public good? as a public servant?

 HELL | NO

It was to publicly service his ego

 He's the worst kind of politician there is

 and get this - he attends church every Sunday

 and just like his christian-right friends

 he never heard a Jesus quote that he truly could

 agree with - scandalous!

A Dangerous New Order - New York Times Editorial - October 19, 2006

Once President Bush signed the new law on military tribunals, administration officials and Republican leaders in Congress wasted no time giving Americans a taste of the new order created by this unconstitutional act.

Within hours, Justice Department lawyers notified the federal courts that they no longer had the authority to hear pending lawsuits filed by attorneys on behalf of inmates of the penal camp at Guantánamo Bay. They cited passages in the bill that suspend the fundamental principle of habeas corpus, making Mr. Bush the first president since the Civil War to take that undemocratic step.

Not satisfied with having won the vote, Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, quickly issued a statement accusing Democrats who opposed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 of putting “their liberal agenda ahead of the security of America.” He said the Democrats “would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans’ lives” and create “new rights for terrorists.”

This nonsense is part of the Republicans’ scare-America-first strategy for the elections. No Democrat advocated pampering terrorists — gingerly or otherwise — or giving them new rights. Democratic amendments to the bill sought to protect everyone’s right to a fair trial while providing a legal way to convict terrorists.

Americans will hear more of this ahead of the election. They also will hear Mr. Bush say that he finally has the power to bring to justice a handful of men behind the 9/11 attacks. The truth is that Mr. Bush could have done that long ago, but chose to detain them illegally at hidden C.I.A. camps to extract information. He sent them to Guantánamo only to stampede Congress into passing the new law.

The 60 or so men at Guantánamo who are now facing tribunals — out of about 450 inmates — also could have been tried years ago if Mr. Bush had not rebuffed efforts by Congress to create suitable courts. He imposed a system of kangaroo courts that was more about expanding his power than about combating terrorism.

While the Republicans pretend that this bill will make America safer, let’s be clear about its real dangers. It sets up a separate system of justice for any foreigner whom Mr. Bush chooses to designate as an “illegal enemy combatant.” It raises insurmountable obstacles for prisoners to challenge their detentions. It does not require the government to release prisoners who are not being charged, or a prisoner who is exonerated by the tribunals.

The law does not apply to American citizens, but it does apply to other legal United States residents. And it chips away at the foundations of the judicial system in ways that all Americans should find threatening. It further damages the nation’s reputation and, by repudiating key protections of the Geneva Conventions, it needlessly increases the danger to any American soldier captured in battle.

In the short run, voters should see through the fog created by the Republican campaign machine. It will be up to the courts to repair the harm this law has done to the Constitution.