Chris Floyd: Machine Tools: Another Terror War Triumph for the Texas Twerp

[babylonsister]

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2449/81/

Machine Tools: Another Terror War Triumph for the Texas Twerp
Written by Chris Floyd
Thursday, 20 September 2007
by Chris Floyd

How many times must a duck go "quack," before you call it a duck?
– with apologies to Bob Dylan.


The Senate has failed to move forward on a bill to restore the ancient right of habeas corpus to captives of the Bush Regime's Terror War, many of whom have proved to be innocent people — sometimes kidnapped, sometimes sold into captivity by bounty hunters — caged without legal protection, often for years on end. With a few momentarily honorable exceptions, the Republicans voted in near lock-step to support George W. Bush's perversion of the Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution. The Democrats, who soft-pedaled the legislation, making no rousing public campaign about the measure before the vote (indeed, scarcely mentioning it at all), once again saw their impotent majority go down to defeat.

The result is a further entrenching of the lawless authoritarian state that has now fully supplanted the remains of the constitutional republic founded in 1787. It's curious that on the very day the United States Senate was on bended knee once more to the shabby sovereign in the White House, over in the Old Country, where monarchy still reigns (but doesn't rule), a major political figure delivered a wholesale rejection of the Terror War and its destruction of long-held, hard-won liberties.

snip//

How much more evidence do we need — how many more years of war, how many new wars, how many more mountainous slag-heaps of corruption, how many more hammer-blows at our liberty, how many more collusions with death squads and terrorists and violent extremists, how many more smirking, stinking lies do we have to witness before we recognize the truth: that the Terror War is a machine for loot and domination by ruthless political factions, and their profiteering cronies, and their numerous sycophants who suck up the superflux of the elite's power and glory?

No matter what else the principals of the Terror War say they are doing, no matter what purposeful lies they tell or self-deceptions they practice — this rapacious, ravenous, sinister Machine is in fact and in truth the bedrock reality of the so-called War on Terror.

And any opposition or dissent or critique that does not acknowledge this bedrock reality will never be able to do anything more than just chip away a few flecks of paint from the Machine — if that. Even a majority — in Congress, or in the public as a whole — will remain impotent and ineffective as long as it doesn't recognize the true nature of what confronts us.

UPDATE: And now, in late-breaking news, comes yet another example of the powerless majority: Democrats Fall Short in Vote on Home Leave for Troops (NYT).