Musharraf’s Familiar Rhetoric
There’s another story in the ‘oh crap’ news that General Musharraf has declared a ’state of emergency’ (read: ‘martial law’) in Pakistan. It’s how he’s putting it:
The general, dressed in civilian clothes, quoted Lincoln, citing the former president’s suspension of some rights during the American Civil War as justification for his own state of emergency.
He accused the country’s Supreme Court of releasing 61 men who he said were under investigation for terrorist activities. “Judicial activism,” he said, had demoralized the security forces, hurt the fight against terrorism and slowed the spread of democracy. “Obstacles are being created in the way of democratic process,” he said, “I think for vested, personal interests, against the interest of the country.”
Just as the Bush Administration made sure that the public knew that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, so here is Musharraf using our own trumped up rhetoric. It’s against his own people, to be sure, but couched in this sort of language, what else can it be an attempt to tie the hands of the US against intervention?
And again we see ‘activist judges’, a phrase used so often by the administration come back to haunt in the shape of martial law.
Not to mention that once again we seem to have backed the wrong pony. Or should I say, the most aggressively dictatorial pony.
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