"Any society that would give up a little liberty to
gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
Benjamin Franklin
'Homeland security is a "one-way ratchet." It is
relatively easy for governments to decide to increase security,
particularly in response to specific threat intelligence. It is much
harder for them to decrease it.'
“The Trump administration seems to have separated itself from previous administrations in its upholding of human rights globally,”
Zeid said. The administration’s failure to appoint an ambassador to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, before withdrawing from the council altogether,
he added, was “illustrative of the lack of any deep commitment to the human rights”.
Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein
"In the United States, the Senate report on torture in the context of
counter-terrorism operations is courageous and commendable, but
profoundly disturbing. For a country that believes so strongly in human
rights to have swiftly abandoned their fundamentals at a time of crisis
is as astonishing as it is deplorable...
Under international law, the report’s recommendations must be followed
through with real accountability. There is no prescription for torture,
and torture cannot be amnestied. It should also lead to examination of
the institutional and political causes that led the US to violate the
absolute prohibition on torture, and measures to ensure this can never
recur."
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. (3/5/2015)
The GOP is literally BANNING abortion, BANNING books, BANNING Black history, BANNING transgender rights, BANNING saying gay and are now working on BANNING birth control and BANNING marriage equality. But get this: The GOP says they are all about FREEDOM.
— (((DeanObeidallah))) (@DeanObeidallah) July 1, 2022
The struggle for civil rights is the struggle of a lifetime. Our time to stand up and fight is now. That's what this movement is about. pic.twitter.com/S1bYbUdoKW
The Patriot
Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people's lives
be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead
crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent
and the workings of the government become opaque. Either one of these
outcomes would imperil democracy; together
they not only injure the
country but also cut off the avenues of repair. Elaine
Scarry
🛑THIS IS NOT A DRILL! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!
This is the answer to why 100s of millions were spent on "urban warfare" training for ICE. Holy Sh*T.
“Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its
citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public
debate through the control of information, any state that has the tools
to instantly shut down all dissent, is totalitarian. The state may not
use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened." Wages of Rebellion, the Moral Imperative of Revolt: Chris Hedges pg 54
"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They
want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without
the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or
it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it
must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never
did and it never will." Frederick
Douglass, American Abolitionist,
Letter to an associate, 1849
"Despite the mystique that surrounds it, and the
understandable impulse to treat it as aberrant behavior beyond
politics, torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool
of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability
when ever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks the consent needed
to rule...Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of
certain “indicator species” of plants and birds, torture is an
indicator species a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic
project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through
elections. Naomi Klein from her book Shock Doctrine.
All it takes is the signature of a low ranking NCO to
send someone right around the world and have them locked up
indefinitely but it takes the signature of the secretary of defense to
let them go." --Torin Nelson, Private Intelligence Contractor
... prevailing dogma in this historic moment is
escalating authoritarianism. This dogma is rooted in our understandable
paranoia toward potential terrorists, our traditional fear of too many
liberties, and our deep distrust of one another. The Patriot Act is but
the peak of an iceberg that has widened the scope of the repression of
our hard-earned rights and hard-fought liberties. The Supreme Court has
helped lead the way with its support of the Patriot Act. There are,
however, determined democrats on the Court who are deeply concerned, as
expressed in a recent speech of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “On
important issues,” she said, “like the balance between liberty and
security, if the public doesn’t care, then the security side is going
to overweigh the other.” The cowardly terrorist attacks of 9/11 have
been cannon fodder for the tightening of surveillance. The loosening of
legal protection and slow closing of meaningful access to the oversight
of governmental activities—measures deemed necessary in the myopic view
of many—are justified by the notion that safety trumps liberty and
security dictates the perimeters of freedom. Cornel West: Democracy Matters
"The royalists of the economic order have conceded
that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have
maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted
that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but
they denied that the government could do anything to protect the
citizen in his right to work and his right to live,” FDR
Second Bill of Rights.
Mexican children shiver in tents at U.S. border as temperature freezes https://t.co/2fciE22ApK
Virtually all constitutionally protected civil
liberties have been undermined by the drug war. The Court has been busy in recent
years approving mandatory drug testing of employees and students,
upholding random searches and sweeps of public schools and students,
permitting police to obtain search warrants based on an an anonymous
informant's tip, expanding the government's wiretapping authority,
legitimating the use of paid, unidentified informants by police and
prosecutors, approving the use of helicopter surveillance of homes
without a warrant, and allowing the forfeiture of cash, homes, and
other property based on unproven allegations of illegal drug activity.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow page 61.
"...the Second Amendment is not an important aspect of modern liberal democracy.
It does not protect or defend the rights of citizens; to the contrary, it results in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths every year.
One might even be tempted to conclude the opposite: that the Second Amendment presents a challenge to liberal democracy because it enables
"lone wolf" terror, mobilizes counterterror agents, necessitates heavily armed police, and perpetrates
a level of violence and murder not found in an other democracy ot the world" Democracy Betrayed :
William W Keller
Civil Liberties are being
eroded, the Constitution is
deteriorating. You won't hear that because it is not favorable to
the plutocracy. Obama did not roll
back the Patriot Act or any of the Bush
challenges to civil liberties.
The military-industrial complex
and other well-funded industries have corrupted Congress.
Military Keynsianism, empire building, military-industrial complex, are
pillars of US economy. It is going to self-destruct. You won't hear
that because major media owners are also defense profiteers. War is profitable,
so expect much more of it. Trump favored a large nuclear expansion and seemed willing to use it.
The Constitution gave Congress
the power to go to war, but gave it up so
the President can go to war on his own.
The battlefield is the entire earth.
Now that we know about the NSA's
policy of universal surveillance, it is difficult to see how we can
retain ANY of our civil liberties. As whistleblowers are vigorously
prosecuted, journalists are closely tracked, public information becomes
more limited, dissidents harassed, media corrupted,
and democracy dies.
Police
State Minus One Day And Counting. In late October Congress signed
an anti-terrorism bill that undermined basic protections against police
intrusion. It also attacks freedom of assembly. This article was
originally published on Newsforge the day before the bill (S.1510) was
passed. The only proposed provision that Congress rejected was that for
indefinite detention of noncitizens without trial; Bush
then proposed military trials as a way to get the same job done.
We should reconsider the Bill of Rights. Our loose privacy laws are a gift to large corporations and should be standardized with EU.
Some ideas ARE better than others. There are views which
should not be tolerated, so the First Amendment should not be absolute. See Religion.
The Second Amendment needs reconsideration as well. Repeal would be better.
Congratulate Connecticut librarians. In spite of a
gag order (they could tell no one about it) they heroically
challenged the Patriot Act.
It is inevitable that as the empire
expands, so does the national security state, the military budget
absorbs resources that might continue civilization, civil liberties
continue to shrink, and we continue our race for the
bottom. The ratchet up for the national security state only
works one way. Tighter.