ViceZilla’s Views

With the writ of Habeas Corpus dead, the spying on American Citizens deemed ‘necessary’, making it illegal to protest the Iraq war, and now the legalization of torture by the CIA, only serves to move President Bush’s police state closer to fruition.

President Bush’s veto of a bill that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods saying, “the bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror, so today I vetoed it.” Bush claimed the CIA must retain use of “specialized interrogation procedures” that the military does not need. The military methods are designed for questioning “lawful combatants captured on the battlefield,” while intelligence professionals are dealing with “hardened terrorists” who have been trained to resist the techniques in the Army manual.

By Bush giving authority to the CIA to use torture, or more specifically waterboarding, it is allowing the agency to commit crimes against humanity under the guise of anti terror legislation. By ignoring international law, and the laws of this country, his veto today has turned the CIA into America’s modern day Gestapo.

Today the CIA, as was the Gestapo was in 1935, given authority to operate without judicial oversight, meaning essentially that it operates outside of the law. Bush’s secret police if you will.

The similarities between the Gestapo and Bush’s CIA are disturbingly similar, most notably that as long as the CIA carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally. Not to mention the authority to imprison people indefinitely with no access to legal representation, and using torture to get confessions of plots against the state.

Bush has already outlawed the right to free expression and dissent, which is a cornerstone of US democracy, by issuing an executive order giving him the authority to confiscate the assets of whoever opposes the US led war in Iraq. This coupled with his overturning of the Posse Comitatus Act, a law which prohibited him from using the military in domestic law enforcement issues, can now declare martial law in a “major public emergency” and use military force to suppress public disorder.

Bush has quietly given himself the authority to completely and utterly control this country the way he wants to, all under the guise of “anti-terror legislation.” Yet with each law passed, it seems to be followed by a new, more ominous threat, requiring even more sweeping laws to be enacted which erode our Constitutional rights and freedoms even more.

He claims he enacts these laws to protect America from terrorist threats, but who will protect America from his laws?

Technorati Tags: Bush, Police State, Terrorism, Torture, CIA

Tags: War on Terror //