It Was Oil After All by Bill Moyers

You have to see this-----well documented. The Editor

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I have, for about a year now, been undergoing a serious renovation in my thoughts and life. It is the result of my finally coming to grips with the reality of events and patterns in my life---guided somehow I believe---and coming to grips with the reality of who I am---really.....

Renovation is really an understatement. Revolution would more describe the changes in my life that have taken place---and a new freedom that is indescribable. I am finally at home in my own skin---I finally am dealing with who I was created to be---obviously---and am attempting no more to obtain affirmation and base my identity from those around me ----made in their image, really, their idea of what and who I am.

Such is Fundamentalism. Thank Heaven I have escaped...

This blog is just a way for me to keep track---and wonder---out loud....

Jewish Wisdom.....

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

- Baruch Spinoza

It's amazing how you miss things when you allow your perception grid to overrule what the content of words actually are....and from a "heretic"-----makes it even better!....

Spinoza is an interesting guy----you should read about him and what he wrote for your own personal development.

CONSTITUTIONAL /DUE PROCESS RIGHTS DO APPLY TO ALL.....

Today, the United States Supreme Court in BOUMEDIENE ET AL. v. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE
UNITED STATES, ET AL., ruled that:


"The Suspension Clause has full effect at Guantanamo. The Government’s argument that the Clause affords petitioners no rights because the United States does not claim sovereignty over the naval station is rejected. Pp. 22–42....

...Although the United States has maintained complete and uninterrupted control of Guantanamo for over 100 years, the Government’s view is that the Constitution has no effect there, at least as to noncitizens, because the United States disclaimed formal sovereignty in its 1903 lease with Cuba. The Nation’s basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say “what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177. These concerns have particular bearing upon the Suspension Clause question here, for the habeas writ is itself an indispensable mechanism for monitoring the separation of powers. Pp. 34–36." (Emphasis added.)

IN HIS DISSENT, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia stated:

"...There is simply no support for the Court’s assertion that constitutional rights extend to aliens held outside U. S. sovereign territory, see Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S., at 271, and Eisentrager could not be clearer that the privilege of habeas corpus does not extend to aliens abroad...."The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the nation's commander in chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional republic. But it is this court's blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today." (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080612/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_guantanamo_excerpts_1;_ylt=A9j8eOIFlFFIiUEAJQGspph4)


...and then made further predictions of the increase of the burden of the war and of further deaths as a result of this ruling by the Supreme Court.

Hmmm.....still thinking about that one...as to motive and intent behind those very powerful words and very devastating predictions.

This ruling is important, in my opinion. It strikes at the very core of the issue of corporate governance----and whether or not we have jettisoned the idea---the dream maybe----that all men everywhere have inherent rights neither granted or endowed by any written document or by human institution created by human institution, though said rights are often later codified in such a manner.

The rights of which I speak (and of which the Founders of this country speak) transcend human institutions' ability to grant them. Surely our codified law, as the reflection and codification of the protection of those transcendent/precedant rights, should reflect at least basic human dignity and and an estimation of the lives which intersect ours as sacred, despite our perception of these people or purported acts which they have committed against the United States.

What utterly amazes me is that both Congress and Senate have recently allowed revisions of the habeas corpus act to reflect specifically that anyone held at Guantanamo has no constitutional right to the writ of habeas corpus as codified in the United States Code. How did this happen?

Which Democrat currently holding office in the Congress or Senate can withstand simple scrutiny on this issue as well as the War in Iraq/The Patriot Act? The Republicans already know what they want....and have convinced everyone that their acts are patriotic in nature. I find their lives disingenuous at best.

I find the War in Iraq and every other country in which we have "assets," and "interests" reprehensible.