Left, Right, and Centered

You Have The Right To Remain…Imprisoned November 30, 2011

The Constitution ain’t what it used to be.  That whole business about warrants, due process, just cause, the right to an attorney and a speedy trial before a jury of your peers…that’s just a quaint remnant of the innocent days before 9/11…the days before we declared a war without end against an enemy with no borders.  The argument goes that because we’re “at war”, constitutional protections have to be suspended in the abiding interest of national security.  Yesterday the Senate voted 61-37 to retain a law that lets the military “detain” anyone accused of being a “terrorist”, even American citizens, indefinitely, without trial, without counsel, without recourse.  Strangely, it wasn’t strictly a right vs. left or liberal vs. conservative vote.  Plenty of supposedly progressive Democrats voted for the measure.  Republican Rand Paul, who is a Tea Party conservative, voted against it.  This speaks to some kind of Orwellian perversion of cherished American values, where suddenly right is wrong, freedom is imprisonment, and torture is “enhanced interrogation”. Remember the good old days of the Cold War, when we were appalled that that KGB in the Soviet Union or the Stassi in East Germany could just “disappear” someone?  When they could be declared an “enemy of the state” and summarily shipped to a mental institution, a salt mine in Siberia, or be dispatched with a quick shot to the back of the head after two weeks of being sucked dry of information in the basement of Lubyanka?  That sort of abuse of power could never occur in the US, right?  We’re only suspending the rights of terrorists…which is fine unless someone high enough up the ladder decides that you or someone you love would be better off out of the way and accuses you of being a terrorist.  Then it might not look like such a good idea.

BW