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Rove, Kristol Laugh At Idea U.S. Arrested American Muslims Without
Trial: ‘We Didn’t Do It!’
Think
Progress
Friday, Dec 05, 2008
On Tuesday, Karl Rove and Bill Kristol debated
journalists Simon Jenkins and Jacob Wiesberg at an event sponsored
by BBC. The debate was whether “President Bush is the worst
president of the last 50 years“; Jenkins and Weisberg argued
in favor of the resolution, while Rove and Kristol argued against
it.
At one point, Weisberg said that the Bush administration had
never convinced the world that it had “not taken out Muslims
as a particular group.” Kristol and Rove literally laughed
at the idea that the United States had targeted and arrested American
Muslims as part of its “war on terror” effort:
KRISTOL: What have we done to Muslims in America? What has
happened?
JENKINS: Arrested them.
KRISTOL: We’ve arrested Muslims in America? [LAUGHTER]
JENKINS: Incarcerated them without trial.
KRISTOL: We’ve incarcerated Muslims in America without
trial?
ROVE: Rounded them up? Rounded, rounded them up? Name one?
KRISTOL: Nonsense.
ROVE: Name one instance.
JENKINS: The, [UNCLEAR] belabor me all day with lists of people
who have vanished. Vanished.
ROVE: You know-
KRISTOL: Well, that-
ROVE: This is on the border of lunacy, with all due respect.
JENKINS: But you didn’t need to do it, you didn’t
need to do it-
ROVE: We didn’t do it!
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
Posting the exchange — to highlight what he saw as Jenkins’
idiocy — on Contentions, Abe Greenwald dismissed Jenkins’
claims as “therapeutic mythologies” that were part
of “Bush-villification.” “With their vanishing
Muslims, torture chambers, and evil corporate overlords, Bush
haters are better suited to the Dungeons and Dragons, sci-fi convention
circuit than to the political sphere,” Greenwald wrote.
The specific targeting of Muslims in America is hardly a myth:
In a secret meeting of top Justice Department officials hours
after the [9/11] attacks, then-immigration chief James Ziglar
rebuked those in the room for proposing a “roundup”
of Arabs and Muslims. “I’m not going to be part
of this if we’re going to do things that blatantly violate
the law,” Ziglar declared, according to people there.
[Knight Ridder, 6/15/03]
The Census Bureau’s decision to give to the Department
of Homeland Security data that identified populations of Arab-Americans
was the modern-day equivalent of its pinpointing Japanese-American
communities when internment camps were opened during World War
II, members of an advisory board told the agency’s top
officials Tuesday. “This for the Arab-American community
is 1942,” said Barry Steinhardt, a civil liberties lawyer
and member of the panel, the Decennial Census Advisory Committee.
“Thousands of Arab-Americans have been rounded up and
deported.” [New York Times, 11/10/04]
83,310: Number of foreign visitors from 24 predominantly Muslim
nations who registered with the government after U.S. Atty.
Gen. John Ashcroft required them to do so. (North Koreans also
required to register.)
13,740: Number of those 83,310 who were ordered into deportation
proceedings.
0: Number who were publicly charged with terrorism, although
officials say a few have terrorism connections. [Chicago Tribune,
11/16/03]
One of the most high-profile detainees was an American citizen
— who was held for 21 months on a naval brig before being
given access to a lawyer. Jose Padilla was held for over three
years before being formally charged with a crime, and by the time
he had been convicted, he had already served 5 1/2 years. What’s
more, his harsh confinement left him with severe mental disabilities
from which psychologists warned he may never recover.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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