Keith Olbermann writes:

We have lived as if in a trance. We have lived as people in fear.
And now, our rights and our freedoms in peril, we slowly awake to learn that we
have been afraid of the wrong thing. Therefore, tonight have we truly become the
inheritors of our American legacy.


For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we
now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and
melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is
the enemy it claims to protect us from. We have been here before and we have
been here before led here by men better and wiser and nobler than George W.
Bush.


We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition
Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to
jail newspaper editors. American newspaper editors, in American jails, for
things they wrote about America. We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson
insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to
watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he
disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of
advocating peace in a time of war. American public speakers, in American jails,
for things they said about America.


And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that
Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use
that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge,
General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American
citizen, he is still a Japanese." American citizens, in American camps, for
something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their
ancestors had made about coming to America.


Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the
most inescapable of reasons. And each was a betrayal of that for which the
president who advocated them claimed to be fighting. Adams and his party were
swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased. Many of the very
people Wilson silenced survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him,
and got 900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted entirely
from his jail cell. And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese was not merely
the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from
the government of the United States to the citizens of the United States whose
lives it ruined. The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of
reasons. In times of fright, we have been only human. We have let Roosevelt's
"fear of fear itself" overtake us.


We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, "the wolf is at the
door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass." We
have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government
become just a little bit like the terrorists. Just the way we once accepted that
the only way to stop the Soviets was to let the government become just a little
bit like the Soviets. Or substitute the Japanese. Or the Germans. Or the
Socialists. Or the Anarchists. Or the Immigrants. Or the British. Or the Aliens.
The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons. And, always,
always wrong.


"With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this
generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes
to defeat that threat?" Wise words. And ironic ones, Mr. Bush, your own, of
course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act. You spoke so much
more than you know, Sir. Sadly, of course, the distance of history will
recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously
was you.


We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to
Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a
little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." But even within
this history we have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that
wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.


You, sir [Mr. Bush], have now befouled that spring. You, sir, have now given us
chaos and called it order. You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it
freedom. For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.
And again, Mr. Bush, all of them, wrong.


We have handed a blank check, drawn against our freedom, to a man who has said
it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done to anything
the terrorists have ever done. We have handed a blank check, drawn against our
freedom, to a man who has insisted again that "the United States does not
torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values" and who has said it
with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories
of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him. We have handed a
blank, check drawn against our freedom, to a man who may now, if he so decides,
declare not merely any non-American citizens "unlawful enemy combatants" and
ship them somewhere, anywhere, but may now, if he so decides, declare you an
"unlawful enemy combatant" and ship you somewhere, anywhere.


And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John
Adams was president or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the
Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.


And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American
citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off
the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or
an "unlawful enemy combatant," exactly how are you going to convince them to
give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney
general is going to help you?


This President now has his blank check. He lied to get it. He lied as he
received it. Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he
intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?


"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday,
Mr. Bush, "in which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an
attorney and can hear all the evidence against them." "Presumed innocent," Mr.
Bush? The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the
detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental
and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and
may no longer even invoke the Geneva Conventions in their own defense.


"Access to an attorney," Mr. Bush? Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on
this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to
his detainee defendant on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.


"Hearing all the evidence," Mr. Bush? The Military Commissions Act specifically
permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the
defense. Your words are lies, Sir. They are lies that imperil us all.


"One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks," you told us
yesterday, "said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of
America." That terrorist, sir, could only hope. Not his actions, nor the actions
of a ceaseless line of terrorists, real or imagined, could measure up to what
you have wrought.


Habeas corpus? Gone. The Geneva Conventions? Optional. The moral force we shined
outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an
eternal protection? Snuffed out. These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they
would be "the beginning of the end of America."


And did it even occur to you once, sir, somewhere in amidst those eight
separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations yesterday of the
horrors of 9/11 -- that with only a little further shift in this world we now
know, just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots
died-did it ever occur to you once that in just 27 months and two days from now
when you leave office, some irresponsible future president and a "competent
tribunal" of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to
declare the status of "unlawful enemy combatant" for-and convene a Military
Commission to try-not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?


For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons. And
doubtless, Sir, all of them, as always, wrong.


Goodnight and good luck.