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“I have been watching our message board and the message board on Democratic Underground (those are two that I pay a lot of attention to), and people on the one side are arguing that we are at war and therefore Americans who have joined the ‘other side’ are now enemy combatants and thus should be treated just like any other dangerous enemy during a time of war. They feel that if there is an imminent danger they should be killed. This is the George W. Bush argument. And the strength of it is the memory of 9/11 and this enduring belief in the minds of many Americans that 9/11 was an act of war in and of itself. It was a modern day Pearl Harbor. And therefore we are justified in pursing that war until the enemy al-Qaeda is dead or surrenders. Now, the first weakness in that argument is that our constitution and the international laws that we’ve signed on to through numerous UN and other international treaties very clearly describes what is a war and how that is different from what we call a crime. Pearl Harbor had Japan, a country. 9/11 had Bin Laden, a criminal.” – Thom Hartmann

SONALI KOLHATKAR IS ON MATERNITY LEAVE.