Guantanamo, CIA secret prisons, and Abu Ghraib represent the first round of the Bush administration’s assault on constitutional guarantees. Now they’ve introduced Round Two with an attack on habeas corpus: the right to Âpresent one’s body before an impartial interlocutor to contest the basis for unexplained, secret, or wrongful incarceration. Habeas corpus is the oldest civil right in the western world and the foundation of constitutional democracy.
In this Two-Question Interview with novelist Charles Johnson, E. Ethelbert Miller asks about the relationship between Buddhism and war.
By defining development and diplomacy as security strategies, the administration officially recognizes that building stable and sustainable peace involves preventing conflict and addressing the root causes of insecurity. The concept of Âhuman security, focusing on a wide range of threats to individuals rather than nations, is gaining wider currency. When former President Bill Clinton called AIDS one of the greatest threats to U.S. security he elevated the priority of AIDS from a health issue requiring charity to a security issue even for those who do not have AIDS.
The recent U.S. election was an exercise in redemption. At a time when many throughout the world had written off the American electorate as lifeless putty in the hands of Karl Rove, the voters woke up to deliver the Republican Party its worst blow in the last quarter of a century. Not only independents and centrists voted to repudiate Republican candidates, but a third of evangelicalsÂBush’s fundamentalist Christian baseÂvoted for Democrats.
The change in control of both houses of Congress was not the only bad news for George Bush. The day after the election, he announced the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense and the nomination of Robert Gates as his successor.
ÂWar is hell, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said 14 years after the end of the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. ÂIt is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.Â
Back on February 15, 2003 millions of people across the globe made headlines as they protested against the impending Iraq War. While that mass mobilization failed to stave off that unpopular and tragic war, it’s hard to believe that President George W. Bush will miss the message voters delivered on Election Day–it’s time to change course in Iraq.
When the news broke on November 4 that the lead editorial in the Gannet-owned Army Times newspaper group had called for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, the cable news organizations portrayed the announcement as if it were a blow like no other.
The Bush administration’s Cuba policy has reached a dead end, with no hope of success. Its objective is nothing less than to bring down the Castro regime. Or, as then-Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega put it on October 2, 2003: "The President is determined to see the end of the Castro regime and the dismantling of the apparatus that has kept him in office for so long."
Photo: Jonathan McIntosh