Anti-Terror Laws Threaten Our Liberty, Warns Ex-President (Carter)

link... http://www.news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=1972714

~SNIP~

Former president Jimmy Carter has warned the US government
against curtailing human rights in the name of national
security, saying it makes a mockery of America’s credibility
with nations battling oppression.

Carter, speaking at the Carter Centre in Atlanta, Georgia,
said the Patriot Act, profiling of Muslims and holding
suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were against
the principles of democracy the United States preaches to
the rest of the world.

“They have been held in prison without access to their
families, or a lawyer, or without knowing the charges
against them,” Carter said. “We’ve got hundreds of people,
some of them as young as 12, captured in Afghanistan,
brought to Guantanamo Bay and kept in cages for what is
going on two years.”

Carter said it was difficult for international aid workers
to spread the message of human rights to places like Cuba,
Africa and the Middle East when the US government did not
practise fairness and equality.

eom

He speaks like an adult president. I like how he doesn't talk in soundbites and catchphrases.

Could the contrast with Der Furher be any
more extreme?

::

The Bush family has pioneered private prisons in Amerika, with their Whackenhut Prisons corporation. Since President Carter left office, and Poppy Bush first became vice president, Amerika has quadrupled it's prison population.

The 'Land of the Free' is now "The Land of Zero Tollerance.' We're number one in prisons and prison-building, with more prisoners, mostly non-violent, than anywhere else, bankrupting most of our state budgets to achieve this glorious goal. In fact, while shrinking schools and manufacturing jobs, Bush's neo-cons have rounded up one forth of all the prisoners on earth.

How dare Carter question the Constitutionality of 'Camp Halliburton.' Cheney's Cuban kennel sets the US apart from the other countries of the planet, because we have the only government currently sporting a Nazi-style concentration camp.

The razor wire used in Cheney's cages is not just the sharpest, but also the most expensive razor wire on earth. Halliburton's construction markup only cost the tax-payers...well suffice it to say, Cheney got a bonus...and anyone who questions our Vice President's kick-backs, or current Halliburton salary, is giving aid and comfort to the terrorists.

And even though Bush may eventually admit that many of those untried prisoners may have never heard of '9/11,' or even the word "Lawyer," Jimmy Carter better shut up, or the Bushovics will put him in one of their dogcages.

<“I have never been as concerned for our nation as I am now about the threat to our civil liberties,” Carter said.>

Nat Hentoff wrote about an amicus brief in the Padilla case filed by:

<...the former judges, government officials, and renowned lawyers alarmed by the president's bypassing of the Constitution. Quoted was Harold Tyler, a former federal judge, and deputy attorney general under President Gerald Ford, who brought him in to cleanse the Justice Department after Watergate:

...The amicus brief he and the other members of the establishment bar signed declares: "Throughout history totalitarian regimes have attempted to justify their acts by designating individuals as 'enemies of the state' who were unworthy of any legal rights or protections. These tactics are no less despicable, and perhaps even more so, when they occur in a country that purports to be governed by the rule of law." And George W. Bush regularly intones his allegiance to "the rule of law.">

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0339/hentoff.php


Bush Accused by Lords of the Bar
They Put Him in a Legal Black Hole
September 19th, 2003 5:00 PM

Ultimately his values are going to prevail,