posted October 07, 2006 02:15 AM              

By Garrison Keillor

published October 4, 2006
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were you.

Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around.

Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an "enemy combatant" is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant -

- including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish, WITHOUT any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo, suspected of "crimes against the state" and held in prison, you'd assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore.

Be forewarned.

The Senate also decided it's up to the president to decide whether it's OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators.

This is now purely a bureaucratic matter:

The plenipotentiary stamps the file "enemy combatants" and throws the poor schnooks into prison and at his leisure he tries them by any sort of kangaroo court he wishes to assemble and they have NO RIGHT to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal.

This was passed by 65 senators and will now be signed by President Bush, put into effect, and in due course be thrown out by the courts.

It's good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would have killed him.

Go back to the Senate of 1964--Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright--and you won't find more than 10 votes for it.

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal.

Mark their names.

Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott:

Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell.
High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they'd collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded.

Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the court will dispose of this piece of garbage.

If, however, the court DOES NOT, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism.

If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why.....then it's no longer the United States as you and I always understood it.

Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

They have made us become like them.

I got some insight last week into who supports torture when I went down to Dallas to speak at Highland Park Methodist Church.

It was spooky.

I walked in, was met by two burly security men with walkie-talkies, and within 10 minutes was told by three people that this was the Bushes' church and that it would be better if I didn't talk about politics.

I was there on a book tour for "Homegrown Democrat," but they thought it better if I didn't mention it.

So I tried to make light of it:

I told the audience, "I don't need to talk politics. I have no need even to be interested in politics--I'm a citizen, I have plenty of money and my grandsons are at least 12 years away from being eligible for military service."

And the audience applauded!

Those were their sentiments exactly.

We've got ours, and who cares?

The Methodists of Dallas can be fairly sure that none of them will be snatched off the streets, flown to Guantanamo Bay, stripped naked, forced to stand for 48 hours in a freezing room with deafening noise.

So why should they worry?

It's only the Jews who are in danger, and the homosexuals and gypsies.

The Christians are doing fine.

If you can't trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?

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Garrison Keillor is a syndicated columnist and host of "A Prairie Home Companion."

posted October 07, 2006 11:09 AM            

In fact, all during the disaster known as the Clinton years, terrorists did exactly that...attack America and get away with it.

Garrison Keillor is only one of the many brain dead leftist morons infesting America who couldn't find their as$es with both hands.

And they wonder why their motives, their character, their intelligence and their patriotism is under scrutiny and open to question.

When are brain dead leftist morons going to get it through their thick heads that Islamic terrorists are not United States citizens and DO NOT have the citizenship rights of United States citizens?

When are brain dead leftist morons going to get it through their thick heads that terrorists do not have the same rights to a military court marshal that our military personnel have...our military personnel who are United States citizens and are fighting in the military uniform of the United States at the direction of the government of the United States?

Waging war against the United States but not on behalf of a foreign government and out of an identifiable military uniform makes them either spies or illegal enemy combatants. Either way, they should be shot, hung or otherwise executed....every single one of them.

Brain dead leftist moron collaborators want terrorists tried in United States criminal courts where they would have the same rights as United States citizens and where the government would be forced to lay out a case against them which would include the means and methods used to identify them, track them and also produce in court the names and testimony of those persons who gave the US information against them. Of course, doing so would immediately dry up all those avenues of information...and get the informants beheaded.

Perhaps the brain dead envision a time when one of their brain dead moron brothers would be in a position to pardon terrorists...a brain dead moron like Clinton...who did exactly that.