but whoever wrote this speech for him didn’t do a half bad job.
“[T]he President has … declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.
The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.
At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.
Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges.
This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then – until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture.”
Kinda makes you wonder how we all might me slightly freer if only his lawyers had been able to steal that thing a lttle better than the other guy, don’t it? -Yeah, Right.
It seems Sibel Edmonds liked the part about whistleblower protection, she sent me this:
NSWBC Lauds the Recent Nonpartisan Speech by Al Gore & Calls for New Whistleblower Legislation
The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition applauds Mr. Gore for his nonpartisan speech, which very eloquently and sincerely expresses our core American values based on the notions of liberty and justice. This speech can by no means be characterized as
