Countdown’s Bushed!: Hidden Agendas Edition.

Crooks and Liars:



First up is Marc Halcon, owner of American Shooting Range in San Diego, California, who has divested himself of his interest in a vocational training school being developed by front companies for Blackwater, because of Blackwater’s growing notoreity.

Next is a sad statement on the value of healthcare and marriage today, with a Kaiser Family Foundation poll that found that 7% of respondents either was or knew someone who married solely for access to their spouse’s health benefits. And the GOP wanted me to believe that same sex marriages somehow cheapened the sanctity of my marriage.

And finally, in an ironic twist in the Nexus of Politics and Terror, the original prosecutor of the Hamdan case, Col. Morris Davis, is testifying on behalf of Salim Hamdan and speaking out over the kangaroo courts that the Bush administration is demanding to be able to claim progress in their War on Terror™.

Davis didn’t just say the Hamdan argument wasn’t right, since it permits the use of evidence obtained by coercion or torture, to say nothing of hearsay, he also quoted the former general counsel of the Defense Department who he says told him “We can’t have acquittals. We’ve been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.” Col. Davis put it simply: he was under pressure to hurry through cases and get those convictions, so President Bush could use them politically before the 2006 mid-terms (elections). And there it all is in a nutshell. The military co-opting the Constitution and the sacred freedoms for which the heroes of that military fought and died as part of some kind of crazed worship of or fear of a cheap political hack and his gang. And as distant as it all seems, just plug yourself into that equation. You somehow wind up in Gitmo, in Salim Hamdan’s place. And you say, “but I’m an American citizen!” and the guard and the torturers standing behind the guard says to you, “Oh yeah? Prove it. Without a lawyer. Without the right to trial. Prove it. And until then, you want some water? Poured up your nose?”