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let's keep things civil please.
non-modmode:
i should have read the bill itself more closely before i posted reasons why i thought a permanent body was not a great idea. after reading it, i changed my mind. thanks for the link.
what's interesting about the debate above is that i think it anticipates something of the lines of defense.
the interesting question, i think, is that consent for some of the more obvious abuses of power was given by much of the political cadre, so implicates the political class (loosely used term) itself. this was enabled by an environment of manufactured hysteria, however. in that context, it seems to me that the administration clearly abused its power and manipulated congress by abusing it's status. what this seems to me to devolve onto is both the question of manufacturing hysteria and the actions of the administration within that context.
these converge onto questions about a state of exception or emergency, which the bush administration used as a space for governance after 9/11/2001. what holds their actions together is a consistent interpretation of the state of emergency and the powers that the executive can take, or in more passive term, the powers that arrogate onto the executive in that context.
there was obviously a symbiotic relation between the generated hysteria, the discourse of terrorism which exacerbated it on the one hand and gave it focus on the other, and what the administration did under that general condition.
it seems to me that the production of a climate of hysteria is central to all this, and should require some investigation. what the period after 9/2001 revealed is just how easy it is to create such a climate--to my mind, the united states imploded into a period of neo-fascism. this was fully enabled by the dominant press, partly as a function of changes in its business model, if you like, which resulted in an increased reliance on pre-packaged infotainment from the state in place of detached investigation. so for a remarkably extended period, the press functioned as a largely docile relay system for what amounted to infotainment that was shaped around and which shaped a pervasive sense of a state of emergency, which in turn generated a context that made the administration's action appear consistent to itself, and which resulted in a wholesale breakdown in the oversight functions of congress. i think this entire frame was and is deeply problematic.
but was it illegal?
there are actions within this context that the administration undertook which were clearly to my mind over any line in terms of legality.
what i expect will happen is that a commission will end up having to focus on those actions. one effect of that might be to normalize the context within which they happened. that would be a mistake.
it seems to me that there is something deeply fucked up about the role of the press in the united states now---uncritical lapdogs of the official line when that sells advertising, critical of that line when that sells advertising---wholly problematic in the interim, because the sale of advertising, and not critical reporting, is its primary function.
the closed in information model developed piecemeal since the reagan period needs to be unmade.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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