Under the Guise of Protecting Americans' Liberties

[Adam's Apple]

The Terror Tactics of the ACLU
By Bill O'Reilly
March 7, 2005

It would be hard to imagine a better friend to Al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits than the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). If that statement shocks you, please allow me to back it up with facts.

A few days ago, the ACLU announced it will sue Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of eight foreign nationals who say they were abused by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ACLU contends that the ultimate responsibility for the physical and psychological injuries sustained by the men lies at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Thus, Rumsfeld is their poster boy. By the way, the word "alleged" is not mentioned by the ACLU in their brief.

The suit is a farce and will go nowhere, I predict. The terror war is now three and a half years old, there are more than 300,000 American forces deployed around the world, and the allegations of torture against those forces number about 300. That is very, very low. The ACLU is simply blowing far left smoke, doing what it usually does: undermining policies it dislikes.

There is no question the ACLU opposes just about every pro-active measure taken to fight terror. Consider the following:

The ACLU opposes the Patriot Act. But, in 2003, when asked by liberal Senator Dianne Feinstein to produce examples of government abuse under the act, the ACLU did not produce one.

The ACLU opposes the "No Fly List" complied by the Transportation Security Administration to keep known bad guys off American airliners.

The ACLU has sued to stop federal authorities from giving information about illegal aliens to state and local police agencies. You read that right. The ACLU does not want local authorities to know who is illegally living in their neighborhoods.

And the ACLU believes that terrorists captured wearing civilian clothing are entitled to the rights legitimate soldiers receive under the Geneva Convention. Thus, no coercive interrogation.

Now I ask you, who is Al Qaeda's best friend in the USA? Am I wrong here? I tried to find out just what anti-measures the ACLU did support but was told that was not the organization's mandate. They are committed to the protection of rights. Well, what about the right to live, ACLU, a right Al Qaeda denied 3,000 Americans on 9/11?

For full story http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/oreilly030705.asp
© 2004 Creators Syndicate

 

[SmarterThanYou]

they better be changing their name to the WCLU instead of the AMERICAN civil liberties union.

 

[musicman]

they better be changing their name to the WCLU instead of the AMERICAN civil liberties union.

Or maybe the AACLU (Anti....). I can't believe these hateful bastards even receive the time of day in this country.

Maybe we'll outgrow them....

 

[Adam's Apple]

I think the ACLU will continue in existence as long as there are liberals and as long as there are people willing to fund their activities. But with all the alternative information sources available now, there is hope that their clout will decrease in the future as more people get the picture of what a sham organization the ACLU really is.

 

[musicman]

I think the ACLU will continue in existence as long as there are liberals and as long as there are people willing to fund their activities. But with all the alternative information sources available now, there is hope that their clout will decrease in the future as more people get the picture of what a sham organization the ACLU really is.

Let's hope so. As you say, there are alternate sources of information out there now. Maybe there is reason for optimism.

 

[Bullypulpit]

Or maybe the AACLU (Anti....). I can't believe these hateful bastards even receive the time of day in this country.

Maybe we'll outgrow them....

It doesn't really matter whether they're right or wong, does it? They oppose many of the administration's policies, so they are to be smeared with the label "anti-American". You should (but since you can't bear the thought that they might actually be right about what they're talking about, you won't) be thanking them for protecting our civil-liberties from further erosion. It is you, and your fellow travelers, who will be left behind on history's midden.

 

[musicman]

It doesn't really matter whether they're right or wong, does it? They oppose many of the administration's policies, so they are to be smeared with the label "anti-American". You should (but since you can't bear the thought that they might actually be right about what they're talking about, you won't) be thanking them for protecting our civil-liberties from further erosion. It is you, and your fellow travelers, who will be left behind on history's midden.

Did you read the article at all, Bully?

 

[Annie]

It doesn't really matter whether they're right or wong, does it? They oppose many of the administration's policies, so they are to be smeared with the label "anti-American". You should (but since you can't bear the thought that they might actually be right about what they're talking about, you won't) be thanking them for protecting our civil-liberties from further erosion. It is you, and your fellow travelers, who will be left behind on history's midden.

Bully, I can't say I agree with his premise fully, but YOU and the ACLU should be asking yourself related questions:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1431571,00.html

We should not ask whether the Iraq invasion was 'legal' - we should ask whether it was 'good'

David Aaronovitch
Sunday March 6, 2005
The Observer

Last week's jilbab decision left me wondering whether the law was always this important. Wasn't there a time when schools could take decisions about the uniforms their pupils should wear without a judge having the final say? I see the advantages of greater legal protection for the individual and I also see the problems. And one of the dangers is that we may become reliant on legal processes to settle for us the question of what is right and what is wrong when, in reality, morality can neither begin nor end with the law.
Just as we talk more than we used to about law at home, so we also increasingly discuss international law. Thus it was with some fanfare that, also last week, Penguin published an important book by Professor Philippe Sands, a brilliant international lawyer. In Lawless World, Sands's central proposition is that the war on terror and the war on Iraq, as prosecuted by America and supported by Britain, pose a unique threat to a valuable system of international justice.

There is much that I can agree with in the book. In particular, I accept that the arbitrary procedures for dealing with 'terror' suspects at Guantanamo and Bagram have been a disaster, enhancing the likelihood of abuse, violating basic principles, discrediting those who laid most claim to be upholding human rights and strengthening opposition.

And yet I have some problems with other aspects of his approach. One is that, at important moments in his arguments about the law, I find that I have ceased to care as much as he wants me to about whether this or that action is, strictly speaking, legal. Instead, I find myself more concerned about whether the action is right. I'm not alone; many of those who routinely use the word 'illegal' about the war don't do so because of a detailed appreciation of Sands's judgment on UN Resolution 1,441 versus that of, say, Professor Greenwood of the LSE, but merely as meaning 'very bad'.

And a second is that I find myself wondering at the selectivity, the implied politicisation, if you like, of what are claimed to be dispassionate legal observations. It is interesting, for example, that though the book's index lists 15 references to Abu Ghraib prison and the abuses carried out there, only one mentions it was a prison under Saddam, and none details the years when executions and torture made Abu Ghraib infamous throughout the Arab world.

Let me further illustrate this problem of partiality. Before the war, a group of international lawyers, including Sands, wrote to newspapers, pointing out that an invasion of Iraq without a specific resolution of the UN Security Council would undermine the rule of law. The final paragraph added: 'Of course, even with that authorisation, serious questions would remain. A lawful war is not necessarily a just, prudent or humanitarian war.' This caveat would, presumably, have left some of the authors free to campaign against military action, even if it had been mandated by the Security Council. But it inevitably implied that an illegal war, or a non-legal war, might quite possibly be a just, prudent or humanitarian one.

Sands goes some way to suggest that a humanitarian justification of the war might have been available in the 1980s (or, one supposes, in 1991/2) when Saddam was at his most murderous. This is a position shared, I think, by Human Rights Watch. And, in giving evidence last year to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Sands even seemed to recognise that under such circumstances, no authorisation by the Security Council, explicit or implicit, might be necessary.

'My personal view,' he told the MPs, 'is very much moving towards the view that the circumstances of Kosovo [where no UN authorisation was sought or obtained] do not pose a problem in existing rules of international law.' Of course, this was a slightly unhelpful five years after the event.

Just how the sands can shift was further illustrated by his response to the committee chairman's worry that he was in danger of sanctifying the decisions of a body - the Security Council - which is notoriously susceptible to political and even capricious vetoes.

'Would not,' he was asked, 'the international law be an ass if it could not respond in those circumstances?' Sands replied that humanitarian intervention was a 'grey area, but many people are now beginning to accept that is justifiable. In those circumstances, it does not matter what the Security Council does. If there is an overriding threat to fundamental human rights on a massive scale then, irrespective of what the Security Council does, one state or a group of states may claim to be free to act.'

Amen. But in the book, Sands describes Tony Blair's suggestion that Britain was entitled to override an 'unreasonable' veto as 'outrageous'. We have set up the rules of the Security Council and we must abide by them, he writes elsewhere. Except, apparently, when we mustn't.

This is the problem. In 1972, a neo-genocide by Pakistan in what is now Bangladesh was stopped by the unilateral intervention of India. Pol Pot was ousted by the Vietnamese in 1979, though the UN continued to recognise the Khmer Rouge leadership. Idi Amin's rule in Uganda was brought to an end by Tanzanian intervention. None of these appalling situations was resolved by the UN or the international legal system. Nor were what Sands admits were the 'gross failures to intervene to prevent genocide and other atrocities' in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s the product of disregarding international law.

Sands is against what he sees as American and British illegality because 'relying on bad legal arguments destroys the credibility of governments', but he doesn't recognise that negligence in the face of mass murder, tyranny, the sponsorship of terror or massive abuses of human rights is a much worse destroyer of credibility. He observes that such events as Rwanda and the Balkans 'and most bitterly in the spring of 2003, Iraq, raised serious questions about the adequacy of international rules to protect fundamental human rights'. But why does the overthrow of a vile regime raise questions 'more bitterly' than the world's toleration of the murder of more than 800,000 people?

Nor can these negligences be somehow rectified by international courts after the event. As Peter Maguire has written: 'The UN has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to try nine men in Tanzania, and close to 100,000 remain in prison in Rwanda. Has their punishment resurrected the 800,000 hacked to death in 1994 or ended a civil war that now engulfs Congo?'

It isn't just about massacres, either. Sands believes that 'the UN's system of collective security had contained Saddam better than most would have expected'. The unstated price, of course, included sanctions that many reckoned killed far more Iraqis than any war might have done, and the reality that Saddam was allowed to remain in power.

But he recognises outcomes can alter the balance of even a legal argument. He wrote recently in the Guardian: 'There is little evidence that the world is a safer place, and a great deal more evidence that the Iraq war has provided a major distraction to the challenge posed by global terrorism and al-Qaeda. Neither can it be said that the Middle East is more stable or peaceful.' In the book, he describes the invasion as 'a dangerous fiasco'. Meanwhile, the silly, nasty, hubristic old neocons were in disgrace having predicted the spread of democracy.

This analysis looked a safer bet six months ago than it does now. Libya had already got rid of WMD capacity that it admitted possessing, but since then there have been the elections in Iraq, demonstrations against Syrian occupation in Lebanon, elections in Palestine, and suggestions of liberalisation in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Even sceptics are wondering whether something isn't afoot, something caused, in part, by the removal of Saddam.

In these circumstances, it is an act of epic solipsism to argue this outcome is negated by the affront the action posed to the international legal system, a system that seemed to permit ill-doing and penalise its prevention. And if the law prevents good actions and objectively protects bad ones, it needs to be changed. Any non-lawyer could tell you that.

 

[Avatar4321]

It doesn't really matter whether they're right or wong, does it? They oppose many of the administration's policies, so they are to be smeared with the label "anti-American". You should (but since you can't bear the thought that they might actually be right about what they're talking about, you won't) be thanking them for protecting our civil-liberties from further erosion. It is you, and your fellow travelers, who will be left behind on history's midden.

They arent protecting anyones civil liberties Bully. I protect my own civil liberties and ill defend anyone else who asks for it. However, i am not going to fight to take away peoples right to exercise religious values in a public setting. Im not going to fight to take away property rights. Im not going to fight to make tax payers pay for religious bigots who call crucifixes in piss art.

America was great before the ACLU existed. It will continue to be great long after the ACLU is in the dust. Because its not the ACLU that protects civil liberties. Its the Constitution of the United States that protects civil liberties. And its our Military who fight to defend the Constitution and to allow our fellow mankind the freedom to govern themselves as well.

Oh and BTW Ive opposed the ACLU since before President Bush was elected in 2000. my opposition to them has nothing to do with the President but to their attempts to infringe on our civil liberties such as property rights, free exercise rights, second amendment rights etc. they are hypocrites and im freakin tired of them trying to take away my friends and tell me they are protecting them. BS.

 

[Merlin1047]

It doesn't really matter whether they're right or wong, does it? They oppose many of the administration's policies, so they are to be smeared with the label "anti-American". You should (but since you can't bear the thought that they might actually be right about what they're talking about, you won't) be thanking them for protecting our civil-liberties from further erosion. It is you, and your fellow travelers, who will be left behind on history's midden.

Bah, humbug. The ACLU is nothing but a pack of idiot anarchists. They pick and choose which "rights" they defend and ignore anything that doesn't fit within their paradigm.

I've despised the ACLU a whole lot longer than the current administration has been in office, so that part of your argument doesn't hold up either.

 

[krisy]

It doesn't really matter whether they're right or wong, does it? They oppose many of the administration's policies, so they are to be smeared with the label "anti-American". You should (but since you can't bear the thought that they might actually be right about what they're talking about, you won't) be thanking them for protecting our civil-liberties from further erosion. It is you, and your fellow travelers, who will be left behind on history's midden.

Bully,isn't it understandable that some people would not like them for reasons given above. I mean really,who would support a group that opposed local authorities from having information that could save lives. Why? DO they have a good reason? Why would they oppose keeping those goons off airplanes ? The only thing this has to do with Bush is the fact that they love to start trouble for him and stir up some of the most mindless,worthless crap anyone could think up.