EXPORTING AMERICAN VALUES. Today in Baghdad, according to the Associated Press, gunmen stormed a Sunni television station and killed 11 people. "It was the second attack on a television station in the capital in as many weeks," reports AP writer David Rising.
No need here for some sardonic, smart-ass comment about the success of Iraq's democracy experiment. Suffice it to say that whatever they've got by way of 1st Amendment-style protections in the vaunted Constitution of theirs are, in the present situation, pretty meaningless. Of course, once President George W. Bush gets around to signing the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which as already passed both houses of Congress, whatever we've got, in that vaunted U.S. Constitution of ours, by way of 1st Amendment protections will be rendered pretty meaningless.
The president has already reserved for himself the right to declare anybody -- citizen or not -- an "enemy combatant," a category the president claims to lack standing for coverage by the Geneva Conventions. Now Congress has passed a bill which, as Jamison Foser and Marcia Kuntz of Media Matters put it two weeks ago, "include[s] a definition of unlawful enemy combatants but, notably, does not limit the category to noncitizens." In other words, although, according to Foser and Kuntz, "[t]he bill's suspension of access to habeas corpus explicitly applies only to 'aliens,' its open-ended definition of the term 'enemy combatant' leaves us all vulnerable. Once this bill is signed into law, the government could detain you because someone in power didn't like what you said, so long as you are labeled an enemy combatant."
So who's to say we haven't successfully exported good old American values to Iraq?
--Adele M. Stan
