...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Thursday, June 19, 2003
      ( 12:23 PM )
 
Beyond 1984 - Living in the Totalitarian States of America, 2003

Not only has the federal government deemed it acceptable to do away with the bill of rights and the constitution in its bid to appear as if it is protecting the country while in reality it is expanding its empire and waging war on Islam, but its "investigative arm," the FBI, has powers to simply ruin people's lives and not look back.

In the sobering NYTimes article by Michael Moss today we read about how the FBI has snatched up dozens of people, charged them, imprisoned them and permanently put their names on terrorist watch lists, all based on false tips and testimony and without the victims ever being tried or convicted of anything.

Federal agents, facing intense pressure to avoid
another terrorist attack, have acted on information
from tipsters with questionable backgrounds and
motives, touching off needless scares and upending
the lives of innocent suspects.

[...]

In a report earlier this month, the Justice Department's
inspector general found that in the months after the
Sept. 11 attacks, many illegal immigrants with no connection
to terrorism were detained under harsh conditions.

John Ashcroft defends the fact that arab men are lifted and held in horrible conditions with no charges or convictions against them and then once released (if they are released) must live under a cloud of suspicion and often have their names on criminal lists despite being completely innocent of anything. Ashcroft thinks this just par for the course when we're "defending ourselves against another attack."

But it's not par for the course. It wasn't a good policy in WWII with Japanese Americans, it wasn't a good policy in the 1950's with people accused by McCarthy, it's not a good policy now. All it does is whittle away the rights of the citizens of this country and trample on the people who make this country run. Ashcroft and the FBI don't seem to think it's worth the time to get things right when tracking down threats:

"With terrorism you do not have the luxury of
sometimes waiting to figure out if the guy is truly
a terrorist."

Luxury? So best to just call us all terrorists and get it over with? It's the right of that person and all of us to have and depend on an investigative and judicial system that does not imprison us, ruin our lives and label us terrorists and later discover they might have made a tiny error. Who does this government think it is? These practices are wrong, and the continuation and even further empowering via Patriot II is not going to make us safer. We are now having to depend on a government that cares more about locking people up than ensuring the rights of the people that put the government there in the first place.

With these guys to protect us, I'm sure we're all sleeping a lot better these days.

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