Bush Joins O’Reilly in Claiming Treason by Dissenters
As you know, the
so-called social contract which created the national government provides them the power to prosecute for treason, as it was in the Old World, but at least they made the standards pretty specific. From
Article 3 Section 3:
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted."
Now comes George W. Bush, joining
Bill O'Reilly in invoking "comfort to the enemy" while
crying about folks who point out what a
complete and
total disaster
his invasion of Iraq has been:
"I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy, not comfort to our adversaries."
So, which criticism is permissible and what isn't? What brings credit to our
democracy and what makes our enemies feel comforted?
What if I were to assert that the Iraq war is what brings comfort to our enemies? What if I were to cite the
CIA, the
RIIA [.pdf], the
Saudis, the
Israelis, all the
former CIA guys I've interviewed,
the best reporters and
academics to
back me up? That al Qaeda
has become al Qaedaism - an ideology
like neoconservatism, but for
pissed off Salafist types, that the
Kurdish Peshmergas are
preparing for war, that the
SCIRI and
Da'wa party, who lived in Iran though the Iran-Iraq war and up until the US invasion in 2003 and now
dominate the Shi'ite south, have basically secured a
giant new province for the Ayatollahs that we had
supported Saddam Hussein against?
What if I were to point out that the congress has had to raise their phony "debt ceiling" to
9 Trillion dollars?
Or that the Constitution has been
all but scrapped?
How about the fact that a high level member of the War Party has been
indicted for the leaking of the name of a CIA officer
at the center of their anti-nuclear proliferation efforts, others are under investigation for
leaking secret codes to
Iranian spy Ahmad Chalabi, and one more has
pled guilty to passing classified information to Israel?
Seems to me that if we're to start throwing around accusations of treason, the
Cheney/ex-Trotskyite cabal and their
child-leader are much more
susceptible to charges of working against America
for the benefit of
foreign states than those of us in opposition.
Update: Thank you all for your many thoughtful comments.
Scott Horton is editorial director of Antiwar.com, director of the Libertarian Institute and host of the Scott Horton Show from ScottHorton.org. He’s the author of the 2017 book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, the 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism and the 2024 book Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, and editor of The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show Interviews 2004–2019 and Hotter Than the Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. He’s conducted more than 6,000 interviews since 2003. Scott lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, investigative reporter Larisa Alexandrovna Horton. He is a fan of, but no relation to the lawyer from Harper’s.
Scott’s Twitter, YouTube, Patreon, Substack.
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