http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051127/...NlYwMlJVRPUCUl

This certainly is ... not unexpected.

 

No, it is not unexpected. It's sad really.

 

Yeah, Ramsey Clark is a bit of a kook these days. I believe that everyone deserves a fair trial, but I don't know what to say to the guy who defended Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Taylor, members of the PLO and David freakin' drink-the-kool-aid Koresh. Milosevic was well on his way to being Hitler's successor

 

maybe he has a death wish..

 

No surprise. This asshole, Ramsey Clark, is shedding his American ideals for his radical left wing views. Liberalism is more dangerous than people think. Just look at the ACLU. An organization that supports and defends terrorism and then cries out they are just protecting people's rights. Bullshit. They are making this country a more dangerous place.

 

How does the ACLU defend terrorism? How does the ACLU make this country a more dangerous place?

 

An ACLU lawyer on Bill O'Reilly's show called the terrorist "martyrs" and then said that the terrorists are just doing what they believe in. He was practically saying that the terrorists are not wrong-- they are just dying for their faith. ACLU regularily defends terrorists kept in Guantamono Bay, Cuba, saying they are treated horrible... even though they are fed with better food than most of us are, given freedom of religion, speech, and shelter. The ACLU compared the U.S. to the Soviet Union when Josef Stalin was in rule and when he killed millions. The ACLU compared our terrorist prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba to the prisons in USSR that tortured and killed millions of innocents in the early 1900s. ACLU makes this country a more dangerous place by demanding places like Bucs stadium and NYC subways cannot do random checks on people saying it violates privacy. The ACLU fights the Patriot Act, one of the biggest laws in the U.S. that allows law enforcement to fight terrorism. ETC. ETC.!

 

A martyr is defined as a person who dies for thier faith or for principle. Do radical Muslim terrorists fit that description? Actually they do. The word martyr doesn't imply any goodness; its just a way to describe why someone died.

The ACLU defends people whose rights are being denied to them. In a free society, even criminals have rights, including the right to a fair trial, the right not to be beaten, the right to practice their religion -- so long as it does no harm to anyone else.

It sounds like you would prefer that anyone arrested as a suspected terrorist was thrown into a pit, like in the Silence of the Lambs, and then left there to rot. A dictator was recently deposed, and the President of the invading nation has said that this was one of the reasons why. Sound familiar?

Amnesty International is the group that described Gitmo as "the gulag of our times." Not the ACLU. (Thats the Soviet comparison you referred to.)

There is evidence of torture in US terrorist prisons. I think torture is wrong. This is a separate issue from the ACLU (or Ramsey Clark, for that matter).

Random bag searches on the NYC subways are unconstitutional under the 4th amendment. If you don't understand why, I'll be more than happy to explain it, but we should probably start another thread for that. It gets a little bit complicated.

Anyway, the mission of the ACLU is to defend the rights of the individual from being abridged by the government. Thats really all they do, and I can't understand how Republicans -- who are allegedly the party that holds sacrosanct the rights of the individual over the state -- would be so angry about it.

And now the PATRIOT Act. It was rushed through Congress in a state of fear shortly after 9/11 and gives an unreasonable amount of power and discretion to specific federal agencies to gather information in secret. This is exactly the kind of "big brother" government that we should all be afraid of. The kind of government that is allowed to go into your house while you're not there and look through everything you own. They don't need a warrant and they don't need your permission. They don't need to even to suspect you of anything.

These powers are granted to the FBI under section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and this is the core of the ACLU's argument against the Act. The government already had the power to do those things *with a warrant issued by a court*. If the FBI really has a reason to search my apartment, then they should have no problem explaining it to a judge.

The ACLU protects our rights and our freedoms. Why would you be against that?

 

Okay, Benjamin. The ACLU regularily threatens to file lawsuits against U.S. Government for this so-called "torture." The U.S. follows the Geneva Convention strictly. Is "torture" when an interrogator breaks down a terrorist suspect psychologically to retrieve information from the enemy? Yes, actually, the U.S. is critisized for that. Even if an interrogator contradicts Islam in front of a Muslim suspect -- torture. Now what kind of double standard is the ACLU following when they cry out "TORTURE" when our interrogators break a suspect down psychologically, but when video-tapes come out of the enemy decapitating or executing an American the ACLU is silent? Our soldiers were wrong for putting taping wires on a terrorist and telling him if he stepped off the bucket he would be zapped (even though there was no electricity in those wires) Yes it was wrong. But it was in an area that if a terrorist did that to a hostage on video-tape we would all be saying "Oh, thank God, he's not killing him." We would be THANKFUL if a terrorist did that to a hostage. Terrorists don't give their hostages trials. They decapitate, execute, and abuse. Okay, obviously I've proved that the ACLU is not patriotic. But why must they be anti-American?

We live in a world where our own military charges our soldiers with murder and assault IN A WAR. The enemy has no rules or morales. They will kill and kill all in the name of this non-existent "Allah." Should we blame these poor misguided fools though? Maybe they are brainwashed into violence. After all, have you ever read phrases from the Qu'ran? If you have you would swear you were reading a Charles Manson rant.

The point is is ACLU's policy is extremely Anti-American. They do not speak out when our soldiers and innocent civilians are kidnapped by a ruthless Muslim and decapitated, mutilated, or executed. They do, however, speak out when some guy was supposedly "racially profiled" in a NYC subway by a random search. I could go on and on about racial profiling and how it would actually benefit rooting out terrorists, but I have a feeling you would deem that "outrageous" and "unlawful!!" After all, would you, as a police officer, stop a middle-eastern man that has wires sticking out of his backpack, or a 4 year old girl on her way to Grandma's house?

 

You haven't proven that the ACLU is unpatriotic. The reason that the ACLU doesn't issue press releases when our soldiers are tortured and murdered is that it simply isn't part of their mission. The United Nations doesn't speak out against street racing because its just outside the scope of what they do. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of that video of Nick Berg being decapitated, and I imagine the employees of the ACLU feel the same way. That the organization doesn't issue a press release doesn't mean they're happy about Americans being killed.

You're wrong that the military is abiding strictly by the Geneva Conventions, and you in fact cited an example of violations in your paragraph above:

You said yourself that torture is wrong. So why are you against a group that is trying to prevent it?

I absolutely do want murderers and criminals to be captured and punished. Fortunately, our justice system is set up to do exactly those things. Torture and secret government investigations with unbridled power are not necessary to accomplish it. A man should be held responsible for his actions.

By the way -- I'm not sure if you're Christian or Jewish or something else, or not religious at all, but "Allah" is the same Judeo-Christian God that most of the world prays to. As I recall, Isaac had two sons, Jacob by his wife Sarah and Ishmael by his maid Hagar. Jacob's name later changed to Israel and he had twelve sons, literally the twelve sons of Israel that fathered the twelve tribes.

Ishmael was cast out of his father's house and his descendents-in-faith are Muslims. Allah is just a different name for God.


(If I've butchered this, somebody please correct me. I am not an expert in theology.)

Neither does the National Automobile Dealers Association, and for the same reason.

Actually, I do think that profiling, used appropriately, makes a certain amount of sense. If you told me that black people driving BMWs should all be pulled over because they're probably drug dealers, I would deem that outrageous and unlawful.

If you told me that the FBI, on the basis of substantiated evidence such as decoded messages from Al Quaida, were at Newark Airport pulling aside Arab men around 24 years old who also fit some other critical criteria and searching them, I would call that prudent.