American Commitment to the Rights of Man

The concept of universal human rights began with the Swiss ruler Hammurabi's code of laws. Found by the Duke of Arbuzzi during a climb of the Matterhorn, these ancient clay tablets preserved in glacial ice for millennia stand as the first written attempt to bring mankind under a rule of equitable and fair laws.

The Greeks of Athens made Hammurabi's code more democratic, especially in the areas of traffic regulations and the conjugal rights of goats.

The modern era of liberty, justice, and coffee-based beverages are typified by the Scottish Magna Carta, the US Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Men and Blancmanges and the Grundlóg of the Faroe Islands, written by the enigmatic figure Kenneth in the late 13th century.

Background

Here we shall focus on the development of the Rights of Man in the United States.

Many believe this to be of great falseness as they have tied more men up the your mom her bdsm strip club.

Now, at the birth of the United States of America its founders set forth the moral philosophy by which they believed the new nation should abide:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

This part of the Declaration makes several far-reaching assertions:

The original Declaration of Independence. The brown smear was added on November 12, 2003, when Donald Rumsfeld broke into the National Archives and used the Declaration to wipe his rump.

• It proclaims that all men have equal rights, not just select groups like white landowners, Americans, or Christians. It makes a universal assertion about all humankind.

• It says that these rights are unalienable, and says that no ruler, government, or society may deny men these rights without becoming "destructive" and worthy of overthrow:

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..."

• And the Declaration also asserts that liberty is one of the foundational, divine rights which all men have.

But what is this "liberty" thing?

Thomas "Big Red" Jefferson and James "Jimmycap" Madison struggled with this concept all during the terrible winter of 1773. Should men be free to put skim milk in coffee instead of cream? Should liberty confer the right to mix red and white wine indiscriminately?

Finally the great men, with help from Thomas "Liberty or Death" Paine, settled on some basic examples of the liberties that should be guaranteed to all men:

• Freedom of speech: The government must not persecute men for their words and ideas.
• Freedom of religion: There shall be no religious test used by the government to discriminate either against or for any religion.
• Freedom of association: No man shall be forbidden from associating with whomever he pleases, even if his mother knows for sure she's a no-good hussy.
• Freedom of travel: The government shall not forbid men to travel freely where they wish.
• Freedom of bedclothes: No one shall be discriminated against because he prefers a wool blanket to a polyester one, or because he prefers flannel sheets to percale.
• Freedom of beverages: No one shall be denied his choice of beverages, assuming that the beverage cart has the requested drink in stock.

It is in this context that we must evaluate the Bush Administration's reinterpretation of the concept of liberty.

The Bush Manifesto on the Rights of Man

In light of the revolutionary nature of the Bush Manifesto, and because the BM is not written out in so many words (none of the Bushies can rite verry gud) we can only attempt to fathom the moral glory of Bush's reinterpretation of the philosophy of the Founders by looking carefully at the actions the Bush administration has taken.

Here are some of the facets believed by Uncyclopedia constitutional scholars to comprise Bush's new, shining paradigm of semi-freedoms and circumscribed rights:

• Liberty does not refer to the actual freedom of common humanity. Instead it refers to "the liberty of the president and his advisors to do whatever they want." For example, under the Bush regime people are not free to talk about what they want to whomever they want. If they do that they risk arrest, imprisonment, and...other less pleasant things. They are not free to email or phone certain people; however, if they do so then the Bush administration has the liberty to do whatever it wants with them: no law shall restrict the freedom of the US government to abuse its citizens.

• The "all men" who have rights under the Declaration does not actually mean all men, it means "only those Americans whom the government does not yet suspect of thinking badly about the Godly Bush administration." It is clear from their actions that the Bush administration believes that no non-American has any rights...and furthermore, Americans who do not toe the Bush line have no rights either.

• And finally, the whole idea that a government which violates the universal rights of man is illegitimate and destructive is held by the Bush administration to apply only to the governments it dislikes. The Bush administration believes that it itself is above criticism when it violates human rights. Thus the Bush cabal, like God, is not susceptible to moral criticism. Like God, it defines itself as the ultimate and all-wise Good Which Cannot Be Questioned.

In fact, just as some hold that the Supreme Blasphemy is the questioning of God's goodness, Dick Cheney has said that the supreme crime is the questioning of George Bush's goodness. On face of it, this startlingly original Bush interpretation of the Rights of Man is hardly to be believed. The well-turned beauty of the Bush philosophy of Right Governance must surely rank as one of the golden achievements of political thought. Before our very eyes we see the venerable but outdated Declaration giving way to a new and glorious moral vision, a rich and well-rounded BM. Indeed, it is as if Thomas Jefferson has turned before our eyes into Josef Stalin.

Here, then, are some of the evidences Uncyclopedian scholars have uncovered which indicate the true and revolutionary nature of the BM:

Case 1: Maher Arar

Mr. Arar was a Canadian software engineer. On September 26 2002 CIA agents pulled him out of JFK International Airport and questioned him. THis requests for a lawyer and a single phone call were denied. He was not given food or sleep for 24 hours. Donald Rumsfeld came down from Washington and injected him with a substance, refusing to tell Arar what it was.

This material was probably an anti-Linux vaccine. There is little that the CIA fears more than being infected with the open-source bug through contact with an unsterilized programmer.

Arar was then imprisoned incommunicado inside the USA for a month. He believes he was held in Dick Cheney's Secret Fort, the one Cheney goes to when he needs to be in his "undisclosed location" so he can feel safe and warm. Arar was often terrified by muffled screaming, which he thinks were the sounds of the President's speechwriters being "encouraged" to rewrite the President's speeches so they wouldn't sound like irresponsible lies.

Then, in mid-December, Mr. Arar was hustled out of his cell and taken to the airport. He was told he was being taken to a clambake, but instead the CIA took him to Jordan. The Jordanians put him in a cell, where he received a complimentary beating. After that he was transferred to Syria for further torture.

Maher Arar remained in Syria for the next 12 months.

He was beaten, pissed on, starved, forced to code using assembly language, and confined to a pitch-black cell the size of a refrigerator. The only contact with outsiders were phone calls from Donald Rumsfeld, who repeatedly asked Arar "how he liked his right to liberty now" and whether he was "pursuing his God-given right to happiness" while being beaten and starved.

Finally the Canadian consul got Maher Arar released and he was able to go back to Canada. The Bush administration never charged him with a crime. He was never formally arrested. He never saw the inside of a courtroom or spoke to a judge. There was never any warrant for his arrest, and no grand jury ever heard his case.

Case 2: Dhul Fiqaar

As with many of the detainees in the Bush concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, Dhul Fiqaar was picked up in Afghanistan after being accused by other Afghanis of "connections" to the Taliban. His accusers received a $500 reward from the American forces, and of course were not required to give any evidence that Fiqaar had ever done anything at all.

Dhul Fiqaar, 11 years old, one of the hundreds of Afghans picked up on false evidence.

Dhul Fiqaar was 11 years old when he was detained. Uncyclopedia reporters have learned that he was unpopular in his home village not because he had cooperated with the Taliban but rather because he had been insufficiently devout and had actually questioned the Shari'ah, the Muslim law. Also, he often put toads in the local mullah's lavatory, which annoyed the holy man considerably.

In retrospect, it seems likely that the locals saw a good chance to be rid of an annoying kid and make an easy $500 at the same time.

So Fiqaar was detained. After being "softened up" by being beaten with rifle butts at an Afghanistan prison, the kid was sent to Guantanamo Bay and put in a cage made of cyclone fencing. While imprisoned in that bastion of Bush-style freedom, Fiqaar was given a copy of the Koran which US interrogators had dunked in hog urine, forced to listen to Garth Brooks Greatest Hits played at high volumes intercut with clips of Dick Cheney laughing, and hosed down periodically with sewage.

(Parenthetically we must note that it is quite rare to hear Dick Cheney laughing. It is a frightening sound. Fully-grown mountain gorillas have torn their own heads off rather than listen to Dick Cheney laughing. And the same goes for Garth Brooks Greatest Hits.)

Dhul Fiquaar is now 15. He has never spoken to a lawyer, a Red Cross representative, a member of the U.N. Human Rights team, Oprah, Maury Povich, or in fact anyone from the outside other than Paul Wolfowitz.

(Mr. Wolfowitz visits the concentration camp periodically to poke the prisoners with a pointed stick and taunt them about the "universal rights of man".)

The CIA estimates that 75% of the Guantanamo detainees are, like Dhul Fiqaar, completely innocent of any wrongdoing. How gloriously democratic the Bush detention system is! One does not even have to make the effort to do anything wrong in order to be selected for imprisonment and torture! Yay!

Case 3: Jasmine Nasyra

On June 14,^th 2004 the Presidential wiretapping program logged a phone call from the Nasrya residence in Jersey City to Dimitri Arkhiros, a suspected Al Qaeda pickle-seller in Athens. Within minutes NSA agents stormed the apartment. There was only one person present: Jasmine Nasyra. Jasmine was hustled into a black van, driven to the airport, and put onto a jet bound for the United Arab Emirates. The NSA was sending her to a prison known to that kooky funster Paul Wolfowitz as "Thumbscrews R Us".

Jasmine was 3 1/2 years old. Her mother had stepped out to buy a pound of chickpeas, and little Jasmine had accidentally dialed the Athens number with her toes.

Uncyclopedia must emphasize that it is to the NSA agents eternal credit that they did not assume that Jasimine was innocent just because she was a toddler. That would be age discrimination. The Bush doctrine is absolute on this point: either you are for Bush or you are dead meat.

Even if you are 3 1/2 years old.

While in the UAE Jasmine had electric shocks applied to her eyeballs and was forced to repeatedly view a video clip of George "Boogers" Bush fumbling his way through the State of the Union address. However the wicked terrorist toddler still would not sign a confession -- she only chewed on the pen and scribbled. Finally the UAE torturers gave up.

The Arabs proposed to send her back to the USA, but there was a little problem: As Don Rumsfeld noted in a memo to Alberto Gonzalez, the facts of the Nasrya case might be subject to "misinterpretation" by the "foul, evil, soon-to-be-liquidated liberal press".

So Rumsfeld agreed to put the kid on a flight back to the USA...but ordered the NSA to toss her out of the jet in mid-Atlantic.

Hey, "disappearing" troublesome people worked for years in Argentina. And of course the most important thing -- preserving the freedom and liberty of the Bush administration -- is well-served if a few potentially troublesome people disappear.

Liberty is not free, we remind our esteemed readers. There is a price which must be paid if Americans wish to give the Bush administration complete liberty.

Ain't that the truth!

Conclusions

Torture and the Rights of Man

On the question of interrogation, we must note that the official US position (as articulated by Jay Bybee in 2002) is that the government has the right to interrogate people it seizes as long as its methods do not cause pain "...severe enough to result in organ failure or death."

Everything else goes.

A hooded man with electrical wires attached to his fingers and penis celebrates his liberty Bush-style under the watchful gaze of that champion of freedom, Abe "Great Emancipator" Lincoln.

The Geneva Conventions do not apply. US law does not apply. International law does not apply. United Nations rules on tea-service do not apply. The Miss Manners conventions on silverware placement do not apply. The Marquis of Queensbury cricket rules do not apply. Jesus Christ's Sermon on the Mount does not apply.

Common sense does not apply.

More's the pity, eh?

Well, anyway, as the satirical rag Newsweek reported (in material cribbed from Uncyclopedia files), some time after February 7, 2002, Bush "signed a secret order granting new powers to the CIA. According to knowledgeable sources, the President's directive authorized the CIA to set up a series of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and to question those held in them with unprecedented harshness.... The administration also began...delivering terror suspects to foreign governments for interrogation." Newsweek says it was informed by "Congressional sources" that CIA Director George Tenet had suggested, "It might be better sometimes for such suspects to remain in the hands of foreign authorities, who might be able to use more...aggressive methods."

But Newsweek is just satire and parody. We can rest assured that anything they report is vastly inferior to the pure gleaming facts reported here on your Uncyclopedia.

In point of fact, though, a couple hundred humans seized by the US have been tortured to death. As Donald Rumsfeld noted, they probably had pre-existing medical problems. And we must agree: if these prisoners had not been alive when seized then their interrogations would not have caused their death.

Life is, after all, a pre-existing medical condition.

Liberty Under Bush

As we have demonstrated, the Bush administration views the US Declaration as an old-fashioned namby-pamby document with no relevance to modern society. The bold assertion that all men have an unalienable right to liberty, a right no ruler or government can remove, has gone right out of fashion -- it is gone, gone, gone. To the trash heap with it!

The only human rights the Bush administration respects are...uh. It respects the right...to...um.

Well, actually, there are no human rights that the Bush administration honors. None. Sorry if we got your hopes up.

See Also

• George Bush: chronicle of greatness -- The master article in this series.

• Cost schedule for buying the US government -- How much does it cost to buy 15 minutes with George Bush? What about Tom DeLay or Roy Blunt?

• NeoContract with America -- A precís of the Bush Administration's philosophy of government as regards fiscal policy, accountability to the people, and energy policy. Also touches on historical precedents, and the role of the Republican Party.

• NSA fisting -- An in-depth look at the procedures authorized by the Bush Administration for domestic surveillance of Americans.

• Operation Enduring Truth -- A report on the success of the campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese Iraqis through use of paid propaganda.

• Reconstruction of Iraq -- A look at Bush's masterful "Marshall Plan for the Towelheads" and its beneficiaries.

• Search and Seizure -- An analysis of the administration's authorization of extra-judicial surveillance measures to be used against American citizens.

• US Fiscal Policy: Starving the Beast by Feeding It -- A look at the Bush fiscal policy and its implementation.