Re: More Or Less Freedom


"mg" <mgkelson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:a1f97040-0ebd-4897-b65a-c495fd5a78f4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Jul 5, 12:08 am, "Lawrence Akutagawa" <lakuNOS...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"mg" <mgkel...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:bc8a0097-b9e2-4221-9138-f714bab45306@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Jul 4, 12:47 pm, "Jerry Okamura" <okamuraj...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On this fourth of July, do we have more freedom than we had the last
fourth
of July, or less freedom?

We have less freedom since the Homeland Security Act of 2002 was
passed. We have less freedom because we let Bush abuse people's civil
rights and didn't prosecute him as a criminal. We have less freedom
because we let the federal government interfere in a husband's right
to pull the plug on his brain-dead wife. We have less freedom because
we allowed our government to rename french fries, "freedom fries", and
let our ex-president spend our blood and children in a war that didn't
need to be fought.

****
Not bad a response, but not really on topic as per Jerry's post. He
specifically asked us to compare what we have this Fourth of Jully, in
2009,
as versus what we had last Fourth of July, in 2008. That is why I
responded
as I did. Your response goes back a whole lot further than the time range
specified by Jerry.

"My specific answer to Jerry would be that we temporarily have more
freedom now because Obama isn't likely to abuse our civil rights as
Bush did. I believe that freedom is only temporary, though, because
Bush set the precedent of violating the law and limiting citizens
civil rights and getting away with it. Now that he's layed the ground
work, my assumption is that another president could do the same thing
he did in the future.

Here's an article written on Dec. 30, 2006, by the way:

"The 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, Dec. 30, 2006, at 6:30 AM ET

I love those year-end roundups?ubiquitous annual lists of greatest
films and albums and lip glosses and tractors. It's reassuring that
all human information can be wrestled into bundles of 10. In that
spirit, Slate proudly presents, the top 10 civil liberties nightmares
of the year:

10. Attempt to Get Death Penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui
Long after it was clear the hapless Frenchman was neither the "20th
hijacker" nor a key plotter in the attacks of 9/11, the government
pressed to execute him as a "conspirator" in those attacks.
Moussaoui's alleged participation? By failing to confess to what he
may have known about the plot, which may have led the government to
disrupt it, Moussaoui directly caused the deaths of thousands of
people. This massive overreading of the federal conspiracy laws would
be laughable were the stakes not so high. Thankfully, a jury rejected
the notion that Moussaoui could be executed for the crime of merely
wishing there had been a real connection between himself and 9/11.

9. Guantanamo Bay
It takes a licking but it keeps on ticking. After the Supreme Court
struck down the military tribunals planned to try hundreds of
detainees moldering on the base, and after the president agreed that
it might be a good idea to close it down, the worst public relations
fiasco since the Japanese internment camps lives on. Prisoners once
deemed "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the
face of the earth" are either quietly released (and usually set free)
or still awaiting trial. The lucky 75 to be tried there will be
cheered to hear that the Pentagon has just unveiled plans to build a
$125 million legal complex for the hearings. The government has now
officially put more thought into the design of Guantanamo's court
bathrooms than the charges against its prisoners.

8. Slagging the Media
Whether the Bush administration is reclassifying previously
declassified documents, sidestepping the FOIA, threatening journalists
for leaks on dubious legal grounds, or, most recently, using its
subpoena power to try to wring secret documents from the ACLU, the
administration has continued its "secrets at any price" campaign. Is
this a constitutional crisis? Probably not. Annoying as hell?
Definitely.

7. Slagging the Courts
It starts with the president's complaints about "activist judges," and
evolves to Congressional threats to appoint an inspector general to
oversee federal judges. As public distrust of the bench is fueled, the
stripping of courts' authority to hear whole classes of cases?most
recently any habeas corpus claims from Guantanamo detainees?almost
seems reasonable. Each tiny incursion into the independence of the
judiciary seems justified. Until you realize that the courts are often
the only places that will defend our shrinking civil liberties. This
leads to ...

6. The State-Secrets Doctrine
The Bush administration's insane argument in court is that judges
should dismiss entire lawsuits over many of the outrages detailed on
this very list. Why? Because the outrageously illegal things are
themselves matters of top-secret national security. The administration
has raised this claim in relation to its adventures in secret
wiretapping and its fun with extraordinary rendition. A government
privilege once used to sidestep civil claims has mushroomed into
sweeping immunity for the administration's sometimes criminal
behavior.

5. Government Snooping
Take your pick. There's the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program
wherein the president breezily authorized spying on the phone calls of
innocent citizens, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act. The FBI's TALON database shows the government has
been spying on nonterrorist groups, including Quakers, People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals, and Veterans for Peace. The Patriot Act
lives on. And that's just the stuff we know about.

4. Extraordinary Rendition
So, when does it start to become ordinary rendition? This government
program has us FedEx-ing unindicted terror suspects abroad for
interrogation/torture. Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen, was shipped
off to Afghanistan for such treatment and then released without
charges, based on some government confusion about his name. Heh heh.
Canadian citizen Maher Arar claims he was tortured in Syria for a
year, released without charges, and cleared by a Canadian commission.
Attempts to vindicate the rights of such men? You'd need to circle
back to the state-secrets doctrine, above.

3. Abuse of Jose Padilla
First, he was, according to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft,
"exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion
device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States." Then, he was planning
to blow up apartments. Then he was just part of a vague terror
conspiracy to commit jihad in Bosnia and Chechnya. Always, he was a
U.S. citizen. After three and a half years, in which he was denied the
most basic legal rights, it has now emerged that Padilla was either
outright tortured or near-tortured. According to a recent motion,
during Padilla's years of almost complete isolation, he was treated by
the U.S. government to sensory and sleep deprivation, extreme cold,
stress positions, threats of execution, and drugging with truth serum.
Experts say he is too mentally damaged to stand trial. The Bush
administration supported his motion for a mental competency
assessment, in hopes that will help prevent his torture claims from
ever coming to trial, or, as Yale Law School's inimitable Jack Balkin
put it: "You can't believe Padilla when he says we tortured him
because he's crazy from all the things we did to him."

2. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
This was the so-called compromise legislation that gave President Bush
even more power than he initially had to detain and try so-called
enemy combatants. He was generously handed the authority to define for
himself the parameters of interrogation and torture and the
responsibility to report upon it, since he'd been so good at that.
What we allegedly did to Jose Padilla was once a dirty national
secret. The MCA made it the law.

1. Hubris
Whenever the courts push back against the administration's
unsupportable constitutional ideas?ideas about "inherent powers" and a
"unitary executive" or the silliness of the Geneva Conventions or the
limitless sweep of presidential powers during wartime?the Bush
response is to repeat the same chorus louder: Every detainee is the
worst of the worst; every action taken is legal, necessary, and
secret. No mistakes, no apologies. No nuance, no regrets. This legal
and intellectual intractability can create the illusion that we are
standing on the same constitutional ground we stood upon in 2001, even
as that ground is sliding away under our feet.

What outrage did I forget? Send mail to Dahlia.Lithwick@xxxxxxxxxxxx
(E-mail may be quoted by name unless otherwise stipulated.)

Wishing you and yours a happy, and freer, New Year."

http://www.slate.com/id/2156397/

***************
Well...you went back from 2002 to back to 2006. I guess that can be termed
an improvement, but still not within the 2008 vs 2009 timeframe specified by
Jerry. Exactly what is it that you are smoking that your time sense is so
warped? Did Jerry send you some of that famed Maui Zowie?


.

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