Saturday, July 29, 2006

Your dissolving rights

I want to call your attention to an article today called "Where were you when they took away your rights?" by David Swanson. Here's the pertinent excerpt:

This morning I was a guest lecturer at a college course on modern history. We spent two hours discussing impeachment, impeachable offenses, and where the Bush Administration's actions fit in history. This is where I think they fit: as a significant threat to end the oldest democracy on the planet. Never before has an American president offered anything close to this wide-ranging assault on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the powers of the legislative and judicial branches of government.

Here's a sampling:

• Illegal spying in violation of FISA and the Fourth Amendment, openly confessed to, openly promoted in signing statements, known to involve phone calls, phone records, internet use, bank records, and observation of legal nonviolent activities.
• Illegal detentions in violation of the Fourth Amendment, International law, U.S. Law, and a recent Supreme Court ruling.
• Rounding up of thousands of citizens and legal residents for detention or deportation.
• Torture, maintenance of secret camps, and extraordinary rendition, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, International Law, US Law, and openly promoted in signing statement and administration policy papers.
• Illegal war - launched illegally under international law, launched in violation of the U.S. Constitution which requires that the Congress declare war, and launched on the basis of feloniously misleading Congress and the American public.
• Use of a variety of illegal weapons.
• Illegal targeting of civilians, journalists, and hospitals.
• Illegal seizure of another nation's resources.
• Illegal use of funds in Iraq that had been appropriated for Afghanistan.
• Leaking of classified information in order to mislead the Congress and the public, and in order to punish truth tellers.
• Leaking of identity of an undercover agent.
• Retribution against whistleblowers.
• Use of signing statements to reverse 750 laws passed by Congress.
• Production of phony news reports at home and abroad.
• Dereliction of duty in neglecting global warming, hurricanes, hunger, AIDS, and warnings of 9-11 attacks.
• Facilitating Israel's attacks on Lebanon.
• Obstruction of investigations by Congress, the 9-11 Commission, and Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
• Stealing elections.

When is it enough? When does it become clear that history will view us as those who let it all go to waste, as those who sat by as they came for the Muslims and then they came for the immigrants and then they came for the next group on the list, as those who saw the nation sliding into fascism and let it slide... or as those who rose up and resisted and restored what was most worth saving in a system of government based on the rule of law?


When is it enough, indeed? I simply do not understand why there is not more outrage.

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