Life’s hard, Get a helmet.
-->Hey! I’m back!
Unfortunately just in time to post the full text of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
Just passed by Congress and on its way for approval by The President.
Another blow to freedom, and another step toward Bush’s police state.
I wonder how long it will be until those who oppose the current regime are branded terrorists and jailed without trial?
[T]he Bush administration is not big on European philosophers. So perhaps we can develop the philosophy in purely Bushian terms. To highlight its logic, I will present it in mathematical form, the way that Spinoza presented his ethics:
Axiom 1: We are good people.
Axiom 2: Our enemies are bad people.
Axiom 3: Anything that helps good people beat bad people is good.
Corollary 1: Whatever we do to beat our enemies is good.
Corollary 2: Whatever hinders us from doing what we do to beat our enemies is bad.
Theorem 1: Anything that makes us look bad is false.
(Proof: If it makes us look bad, it must be false, because, according to Corollary 1, what we do to beat our enemies is good, not bad.)Corollary 3: It can’t be true that the Guantanamo prisoners killed themselves because of how we treated them.
(Proof: That would make us look bad. Whatever makes us look bad is false.)Surprising Corollary 4: Facts that make us look bad are false.
(Proof: Follows directly from Theorem 1.)
(Comment: If you thought that facts can’t be false, you haven’t understood that truth and falsity are moral terms: truth is what good people say, falsity is what bad people say. If bad people state facts, those facts are false.)Theorem 2: Laws that constrain us are bad.
(Proof: Follows directly from Corollary 2.)Axiom 4: Good people support the rule of law, and that makes the rule of law good.
Corollary 4: We support the rule of law.
(Proof: By Axiom 1, we’re good people; and by Axiom 4, good people support the rule of law.)Surprising Theorem 3: Laws that constrain us don’t exist.
(Proof: By Theorem 2, a law that constrains us would be bad. But by Axiom 4, the rule of law is good. Therefore there cannot be such a thing as a law that constrains us.)Axiom 5: Anything that anyone uses against us is a weapon of our enemies.
Decisive Theorem: Any international forum or legal argument that might constrain us, or anything that might make us look bad, is a weapon of our enemies.
Axiom 6: We’re strong and our enemies are weak.
Corollary 5: Any international forum or legal argument that might constrain us, or anything that might make us look bad, is a weapon of the weak. To put it in other words, it is an act of asymmetric war against us.
QED
