You keep saying that yet you provide no data or studies proving your case
which
means you simply don't care about the truth.

I don't need studies. I can make my own determinations based on simple
facts.

Jose Padilla has been locked up for over two years with no access to
lawyers,
no charges and no trial.

Ever hear of the Bill of Rights?

You know, Amendment Six:

"In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy
and
public trial..."

Padilla has been given access to lawyers lately, but for a long time he was
just held -- denied the due process in the Bill of Rights.

Bush needs to be voted out for that reason alone.

Walt

So your claim that "Bush is the worst president ever" is based on one case?

It's sorta like convicting someone of only one murder.

If he can arbitrarily lock up Padilla --tossing the Bill of Rights --, he can
arbitrarily lock you up too.

And you seem unfazed by the fact that the president swears an oath to ensure
that the laws be faithfully executed. I think an actual and plain provision of
the Bill of Rights would qualify. But see below.

Lincoln alone was worse on habeas corpus etc.

I was careful to state (at least once) that the courts were able to operate
now.

Lincoln did two big suspensions of the Writ. One was in the aftermath of the
roiting in Baltimore in April 1861 that killed several militia troops from
Pennsylvania as they changed trains. There was a big riot; several pro-rebel
civilians were killed also. In the same time frame, bridges were burned,
telegraph wires were cut, Lincoln was threatened with more violence if more
troops were routed through Baltimore. Some actually went through Annapolis.

It looked as if Washington itself might be captured. Lincoln understood
that 7,000 rebel troops were just across the river in Virginia. The troops
available to him numbered in the hundreds. Lincoln had to act. I don't think
the mayor of Baltimore is now engaged in bridge burning. In 1861, he was.

Lincoln's second suspension of the Writ came later after the draft was
instituted. Men who were being drafted were having writs of Habeas Corpus
taken out, to get them away from the recruiters.

In both cases, the life of the nation was actually in the balance. I don't
think that situation applies now. At least not with Jose Padilla.

And why -not- charge Padilla? Does the government have a case, or not? One
reason to hold the guy would be because they can't prove anything. I've seen
suggested that the government has no case against Padilla. Apparently he had
some vague idea of helping Al Qaeda. Surely the government can prove that?

Of course the Attorney General has been as miserable a failure at Justice as
Rumsfeld has been at Defense. The United States has secured -not-one-
conviction of any Al Qaeda or terrorist operative since 9/11. Some brain will
chime in that they haven't found any (or many). Well, what does that tell
you? They do have Mousaoui. He was arrested 8/17/01. They also have Khalid
Sheik Mohammed, arrested in Pakistan in March 2003. Although I saw a link once
that said they DIDN'T have him. KSM was the operational guy behind 9/11,
number 3 in Al Qaeda. Maybe the government does have him. Surely they do.
But he's not been charged with anything either.

But I digress.


Basically your claim that "Bush is the worst president ever" is based on you
know this to be true and have absolutely no data to prove it.

Padilla does seem to be in the brig.

Other reasons to consider Bush as the worst president ever.

Allowing the war on terror to lose momentum by invading Iraq.

Doing a maladroit job in invading Iraq by committing numerous errors including:

Not involving the UN in the war. Basically, as events have shown, without UN
involvement (i.e. more troops), we can't subdue the country.

Misreading (unless he just lied) the intelligence on Iraqi complicity/duplicity
in Al Quaida's attacks on the US.

Ditto on weapons of mass destruction supposedly held by Saddam.

Dismissing the Iraqi army. We could have paid them $200,000,000 for three
months (vice 5,000,000,000,000 a month that we are spending now) and not had
hundreds of thousands of military trained men hanging around unemployed.

Dismissing Ba'ath party officials. It's now suggested that at least some
Ba'athists be brought back.

Ignoring the estimate of the Army Chief of Staff in Feb, 2003. Gen.
Shinseki said "several hundred thousand" US troops would be needed. The
Bushies just ignored that -- it didn't fit the plan.

Focusing on Iraq when Al Quaida is in Afghanistan. Afghan countryside is now
run by the warlords.

Turning Iraq into a recruiting ground for Al Qaeda.

Almost 3 years after 9/11, the intelligence apparatus is a shambles.

Mo

Errors on Terror

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 25, 2004

"Tonight, I am instructing the leaders of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Homeland
Security and the Department of Defense to develop a Terrorist Threat
Integration Center, to merge and analyze all threat information in a single
location. Our government must have the very best information possible." Thus
spoke President Bush in the 2003 State of the Union address. A White House fact
sheet called the center "the next phase in the dramatic enhancement of the
government's counterterrorism effort."

Among other things, the center took over the job of preparing the government's
annual report on "Patterns of Global Terrorism." The latest report, released in
April, claimed to document a sharp fall in terrorism. "You will find in these
pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage declared. But this week the government admitted making
major errors.

In fact, in 2003 the number of significant terrorist attacks reached a 20-year
peak.

How could they get it so wrong? The answer tells you a lot about the state of
the "war on terror."...

The erroneous good news on terrorism also came at a very convenient moment. The
White House was still reeling from the revelations of the former
counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who finally gave public voice to the
view of many intelligence insiders that the Bush administration is doing a
terrible job of fighting Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush was on a "Winning the
War on Terror" campaign bus tour in the Midwest.

Mr. Krueger, a forgiving soul, believes that the report was botched through
simple incompetence. Maybe — though we can be sure that if the statistics had
told the administration something it didn't want to hear, they would have been
carefully checked. By the way, while the report's tables and charts have been
fixed, the revised summary still gives little hint of how bad the data really
are.

In any case, the incompetence explanation is hardly comforting. In a press
conference announcing the release of the revised report, the counterterrorism
coordinator Cofer Black attributed the errors to "inattention, personnel
shortages and [a] database that is awkward and antiquated." Remember: we're
talking about the government's central clearinghouse for terrorism information,
whose creation was touted as part of a "dramatic enhancement" of
counterterrorism efforts more than a year before this report was produced. And
it still can't input data into its own computers? (It should be no surprise, in
this age of Halliburton, that the job of data input was given to — and
botched by — private contractors.)

Think of it as just one more indication that Mr. Bush isn't really serious
about this terrorism thing. He talks about terror a lot, and invokes it to
justify unrelated wars he feels like fighting. But when it comes to devoting
resources to the unglamorous work of protecting the nation from attack —
well, never mind.

6/25/04

Keep in mind also that the SOTU speech was early in 2003. In June, 2004 one of
the 9/11 commissioners, John Lehman, who was Reagan's SecNav, said the
intelligence community couldn't tell the difference between a bike wreck and a
train wreck.

Do we have time to waste? Bush's administration of the government has been
disastrously incompetent.

Bush has screwed up on -every- important decision point. He's in charge and
he's responsible and if the "American People" are worthy of that name, his
sorry ass is done.


You obviously
haven't done so much as a cursory examinations of the facts.

I see by the papers that Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was arrested on
American soil at a time when the courts can freely operate, and I can't help
but notice that after over two years, he has not been chraged with a crime or
brought to trial.

That's a pretty big fact.


Walt