Constitution Takes New Hit from Senators at Gates Hearing

McGovern is right on, as usual.

That hearing was a fitting last act of a Rethug Congress that has done nothing for the last 6 years but cover-up for the most criminal administration the U.S. has ever had and seat judges in the federal courts who will go to their graves protecting said criminals.

Democrats, you had damned well better listen up. Unless there are huge changes in the next Congress, you will go the way of the GOP. You might think that we don't have a choice. We either can vote for the GOP or you.

But there is another choice, and you can bet that no one is going to like it.

Constitution Takes New Hit from Senators at Gates Hearing:

By Ray McGovern

12/08/06 'Information Clearing House' --- - At Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the nomination of Robert Gates to be secretary of defense, it felt like I was paying last respects to the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution, though, was not the recipient of the praise customarily heaped on the deceased. Rather, the bouquets were fulsomely shared back and forth among the nominee and the senators—all of them “distinguished,” but none more so than the very reverend John Warner, gentleman from Virginia and departing chair of the committee, who presided at the wake.

Distinguished? The Warner committee is indeed distinguished for the obsequious way it keeps genuflecting to the executive branch. Beneath the pomposity lies a dearth of courage. Led by gentleman Warner, the committee allowed itself to be co-opted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and sat silently as they disregarded and even ridiculed those few generals with the courage to testify truthfully—Gen. Erik Shinseki, for example, the Army Chief of Staff who warned that more troops would be needed for Iraq. In effect, the committee abnegated its constitutional responsibility to prevent misadventures like launching a war of aggression on Iraq based on transparently false pretences and feckless planning.

The Nuremberg Tribunal defined war of aggression as “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Think kidnapping, “extraordinary rendition,” torture, for example.