604

It was another bad week for America. Congress passed the so-called detainee bill, with much crowing and gloating from the rabid right. But there's no happy talk here at 604 — the buzz is about all that has been lost.

In a post called Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006), Truthdig introduced a Molly Ivins piece this way:

With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.

Ralph Nader put it more bluntly:

The White House is on a rampage. The President is a documented lawless, reckless, arrogant politician whose policies are fueling more terrorism in the Middle East.

No argument here. But one of the most wrenching reactions to this soon-to-be-law came from a letter-writer in yesterday's Boston Globe:

I can be picked up and detained indefinitely, with no right to a lawyer, no right to challenge my detention or to see the evidence against me, and no right for my family to even know the location of my secret prison...This measure is advertised as an antiterrorist bill [but] I find this country a much more terrifying place than when I woke up on Thursday morning.

And then there's the buzz about the fat, damning snippets from Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial. Woodward writes that on July 10, 2001, then-CIA director George Tenet and his counterterrrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, became so worried that "something was coming" from al Qaeda that they immediately drove to the White House to talk to then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. But apparently, nothing less than a mushroom cloud or a falling building was going to convince Rice of the danger to America, because she dismissed the dire warning from these two top intelligence officials and gave them "the brush-off."

And then it gets worse:

The July 10 meeting of Rice, Tenet and Black went unmentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, and Woodward wrote that Black "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

So is anyone surprised that the July 10 meeting between Rice, Tenet, and Black is not mentioned anywhere in the 9/11 Commission Report?

And what's the White House's reaction to the allegations in Woodward's book? Tony Snow:

You know, in a lot of ways, the book is sort of like cotton candy, it kind of melts on contact.

Well that makes us feel so much better...