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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (75177)	2/18/2003 2:06:42 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<anti-war types claiming that their free speech rights are in danger> If you think civil rights aren't going to be severely restricted during this war(and can't see that the process is well along), then you are doing two things: 1. not paying attention to what our government is doing, and 2. ignoring historical patterns. First, the historical pattern: During every war the U.S. has ever been in, without exception, the Bill of Rights gets thrown out the window for the duration. If you try to deny that, I can bring a mountain of evidence (facts, not opinion) to back it up, so don't even bother. This is a very robust, consistent pattern. From the Napoleonic Wars (Alien and Sedition Acts), to the Cold War (McCarthyism), through the Vietnam/Civil Rights era (Hoover's spying and dirty tricks campaign on domestic reformers like MLK) the nation goes on a witch-hunt for "the enemy within" during wartime. Thinking we won't do it this time, is pure wishful thinking. We like to think that our rights are absolutes, and so we ignore that pattern, and keep on repeating it. Second, we have already seen the classic initial signs of an incipient witchhunt. SeeNoEvil, HearNoEvil is how most Americans are dealing with it. And for exactly the reasons the poem I made topical Message 18593855 says so well. The government has totally suspended all the constitutional guarantees, for young Muslim men. And nobody but the Muslim community is complaining, because everyone (else) thinks, "I'm not like Them, they'll never target me". The thing is, once the mechanisms of State Repression are in place, there is a constant temptation to expand the groups who are targetted. The geniuses who wrote the Constitution knew that, every once in a while, a man like Napolean or Nixon would be elected President. A power-hungry tyrant without morals. So they tried very hard to construct a system where freedoms would survive men like that. In practice, we, as a nation, have only followed the Constitution during peace-time. The government, today, can label an American citizen as an "Enemy Combatant", secretly arrest and try them in military tribunals, and carry out any sentence, including execution. What, exactly, is the definition of "Enemy Combatant"? In the end, it's whatever the government says it is. With no oversight, everything happening in secret, the definition could be infinitely expandable.