In our reading we occasionally come across notable sayings. This is from a letter to the NY Times edition of Dec. 05, 2007 from Matthew B. Dwyer, datelined Luxembourg, responding to an article by Harry Mount, extolling the virtues of studying Latin, a not-quite-dead language that heavily informs our own.
The most important lesson I learned through Latin that Mr. Mount did not mention: that glorious civilizations fall only when they fail to uphold the ethical values upon which they were built.
Amen:
- Attacking Iraq on a false pretext.
- Abu Ghraib.
- Refusing legitimate hearings for prisoners of the war on terror (Guantanamo). Military commission hearings where attorneys are not allowed to function as attorneys by with-holding the names of witnesses from the attorney and the client are kangaroo courts, not real courts.
- Refusing the right of habeas corpus for prisoners of the war on terror (Guantanamo). The government is fighting the Boumediene case, argued yesterday before the Supreme Court, on whether the prisoners have the right to have their status (some have been held for six years w/o any sort of hearing) determined other than by their military captors.
- Torture: Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Electric shock, sexual humiliation, parading/photographing, degrading treatment unworthy of an enemy, unworthy more-so of us.
- Extraordinary rendition: placing prisoners on secret flights to secret torture chambers in secret areas of foreign countries in order to interrogate them barbarically on the pretext that they somehow know where the next big attack on us will occur.
- Refusal of new Attorney-General Michael Mukasey to denounce waterboarding as the torture it is in his confirmation hearings, perhaps out of fear that he might have to turn the big guns of the Justice Department, which he now heads, onto the man who appointed him and his top aides: Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, etc. Mukasey was confirmed anyway, supported by Sen. Diane Feinstein of San Francisco, California, to my surprise.
This is the sort of behavior by the nation which invites the next attack, indeed justifies it.
Justifies it?
Many people believe that the Allies during WWII should have bombed the railways leading to the concentration camps of Germany to halt operations of torture and mass murder. Germany had lost its soul as a nation in good standing in Western Civilization under the Nazis which so many supported out of fear of economic turmoil, Communism, and the scapegoated Jewish people.
The trick is not to let it happen here under any pretense or pretext. For this we need courageous political leadership, not a leader who tries to ignore, make up, or force facts into his ideological preconceptions.
Not that this could ever happen here, of course.
When you let the terrorists frighten you into giving up your hard won Constitution, guess what; the terrorists have won.
Has Pres. Bush let the terrorists win a second blow, more damaging than the first?
Don't give up the ship!