Glenn Greenwald is moving beyond mere blogging into something different. I think perhaps he is becoming the media we were supposed to have:
U.S. citizen Jose Padilla was kept by the Bush administration in solitary confinement in a Naval prison for 3 1/2 years without being changed with any crime and without even having access to a lawyer. He was finally charged with crimes only because the administration wanted to avoid a ruling from the Supreme Court on whether it is constitutional for the U.S. government to arrest U.S. citizens on American soil and then keep them indefinitely locked away without charges of any kind -- a power which not even the British King possessed, at least not since the Magna Carta.As an example of his oevre, here's another recent post from Greenwald, Is Bill Kristol writing George Bush's Middle East speeches?:
When the Bush administration finally indicted Padilla, they did so with extremely vague allegations that had nothing to do with the original public accusations that Padilla was a diabolical "Dirty Bomber" trying to detonate a radiological bomb in an American city. And now that the Bush administration is being forced to actually prove its accusations against Padilla in a court of law -- the way the Founders required -- they are having great difficulty doing so...
Fittingly, the President ended his address with the neoconservative prayer -- that what appears to sane and civilized people as tragic and brutal wars in Iraq and in Lebanon are really glorious "opportunities" which we should celebrate and for which we should be grateful -- beautiful "birth pangs" on the road to a majestic transformation...Go there, bookmark the site, never come back to this Loser blog again...!
The two countries on which Israel is waging war, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, both have democratically elected governments, as does, at least to some degree, the country on which we most want to wage war, Iran. By contrast, the closest and most reliable allies we have in that region -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan -- are the least democratic. The notion that we can bomb the Middle East into peace-loving, pro-U.S. democracies is painfully, self-evidently absurd by now, but the President believes it.
The neoconservative extremists are ridiculed on an almost daily basis, because the extent of their ever-increasing lunacy is truly difficult to fathom. But that mindset is not merely some fringe radicalism but, instead, has been driving our foreign policy for the last five years. And it still is, because the individual who happens to be the President, along with the omnipotent Vice President, are full-fledged adherents to this approach, and while scores of people marvel at how increasingly deranged the Bill Kristols and Richard Perles of the world seem to be, those who occupy the White House believe they speak great wisdom and are listening intently to (and outright echoing) what they have to say.
