Insanity Defense

The Moscow Times (I never thought I'd be linking to that!) has an article about Ron Suskind's new book "The One Percent Doctrine." Chris Floyd writes about how George W. Bush has ended our concept of three equal branches of government with its checks and balances. Here's what he says about the President's concept of power:

The theory holds that the president has the arbitrary right to ignore any law that he feels is an unconstitutional infringement of his power -- and a law is automatically unconstitutional if the president feels it infringes on his power. This neatly squared circle makes Congress irrelevant and removes the judiciary from the loop altogether. Thus, the only effective instrument of power left in the land is the "unitary executive": the fancy modern name that the legal minions of President George W. Bush have given to the ancient concept of "tyranny."

I've written about this several times. It may be the single most important issue facing our nation. Are we a nation of laws where even the President isn't above the law? Are we a nation where Congress and the Supreme Court are equal to the Executive Branch? Congress has clearly abrogated its powers to Bush but the Supreme Court refused to do so in the Hamdan decision last week. That matter hangs by a single thread though and his name is Justice Stevens. If John Paul Stevens retires and Bush replaces him he'll have a 5-4 majority on the Court supporting anything he wants.

Here's an example of the treatment we subjected one captive to:

The wretched Zubaydah was "waterboarded," beaten repeatedly and threatened with death. He was battered with white noise and deprived of sleep, and his medication was taken away. His broken mind snapped completely. He began spewing out whatever his tormentors wanted to hear, fantastic tales of plots aimed at targets all over America -- meat for countless "terror alerts" whenever the political situation called for a nice, juicy scare to goose the rubes.

This mentally challenged captive was tortured until he revealed all those "plots" which resulted in the convenient terror alerts during the 2004 presidential campaign. Millions of dollars were wasted and countless people worked overtime and were greatly inconvenienced. Add to that the use of fear to control the population and this is chilling.