This is not America Screw due process! Forget innocent until proven guilty! Down with international law and the Geneva Convention! Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't the administration's attitude toward "enemy combatants" be summed up in such a fashion? As allegations grow that "one-in-six" prisoners at the US military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba may have been tortured, the Guardian newspaper reports Monday that the US is considering a plan to hold terrorism suspects "indefinitely" even if it doesn't have enough evidence to charge them. The US will also replace temporary facilities at the base with permanent prisons. Read It: "We should not underestimate the depth of this crisis... to distain law on such a fundamental human right as protection against torture is catastrophic. We can be sure that regimes like those in Syria, Uzbekistan, Tibet, and Cuba, will torture with even greater impunity than before, but that is not even the worst of it. If it succeeds, it undermines everything the human rights movement has stood for and threatens all it has achieved. We must not allow it." Physicians for Human Rights Executive Director Leonard Rubenstein Atrios in Rare Form Atrios, one of my favorite bloggers, is in rare form as of late. The National Review, magazine of choice for neocons, is celebrating its 50th birthday, and Atrios gives them the credit they deserve: Happy Birthday National Review! My. Has it been 50 years already? Time sure does fly. K. Lo promises a lovely trip through the archives for a celebration. I thought I might help get things started. Just in case they miss a few things. My birthday gift to them. From 1957 unsigned National Review piece, "Why The South Must Prevail." (warning -- serious cooties at link). The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. . . . It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. That National Review! So ahead of it's time! Sticking up for minority rights, even in 1957. Well, white minority rights anyway, but let's not nitpick! It's a birthday celebration after all. They were wrong then, and they're wrong now. As we head in to 2005, let's fight with the same conviction and determination of Martin Luther King and prevail over the conservatives once again based upon the courage of our convictions and our hope for a better world.