For the time being, though, I ask all of you to please read what Senator Dodd said in response to a question on international relations this Saturday in Merrimack. I know people might not generally see "Dodd" and "moving speech" as adjacent concepts -- but this set of of the cuff remarks was as potent as any of the speeches I've heard so far this season:
...one of the worst votes cast in my 26 years [in the Senate] was last fall, when the Congress of the United States, including the Senate, including too many Democrats, voted to support the Military Commissions Act, which stripped us of Habeas Corpus, allowed torture to come back in as a means of acquiring information, and walked away from the Geneva Convention.
We need to reform and change the international architecture that was created at the end of WWII. It's got to be changed to conform to the kinds of problems we face in the world today.
But I'm very worried that we're stepping away from all this, almost on a deliberate basis. Anyone that thinks we're going to deal with the problems of international terrorism on our own is deluding themselves. The strength is going to come because we have the relationships around the world that will allow us to deal effectively with these questions.
I come by this by a variety of sources. My father was ...a chief prosecutor under Robert Jackson at Nuremberg. He spent eighteen months in 1945 and 1946 at the Nuremberg trials.
...
He died so young, but I can just hear him over and over again talking about the "Rule of Law".
And what a difference it made. Churchill wanted to summarily execute every defendant at Nuremberg. The Soviets wanted to have show trial for a week and shoot 'em all. And my father and Secretary of War Stimson and the Roosevelt administration argued for a trial. Instead of a team of executioners, assemble a team of lawyers. Let 'em have a lawyer. Let them defend themselves. Let's show that we are different, that we can support the rule of law.
So even these thugs, who were hardly deserving in light of their murderous thirteen year regime, had a chance to present their case.
It was a hallmark of who we were. And from that experience, that whole international architecture came about: NATO, IMF, World Bank, the U.N. System -- it came as a result of the Nuremberg experience.
And we led the way. It was the United States. People were reluctant to do this. We were the ones out there fighting for it, saying, look, this makes sense. An international criminal court. The Kyoto deal. And so forth.
And this crowd comes along, and slowly just rips it apart...
Send me releases if you've got them. Seriously.
