New National Defense Authorization Act Provision is Dangerous to Your Tweets
Terrorism! What it can do to governments. It can make them throw out a prior body of law and reduce republics into oligarchies or dictatorships. It can justify any action by those in power.
Here are some examples: Why is this new governmental act necessary? Stop terrorism! Why is this potentially dangerous security device at airports necessary? Stop terrorism! Why funnel people into this prison without following the prior rules of law or common law? Stop terrorism.
And as Americans, governed by fear, we find ourselves abiding by the "logic and rationale" of stopping terrorism. After all, repeated in TV images again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, we saw people jumping from the Twin Towers to their deaths to escape the inferno; though actually, they, falling from a great height, didn't look like humans because the horror of such a sight made us recoil from the truth; it defied anything we had ever seen before. And after the terrible news for days, the missing loved ones, the digging out from the destruction, the lines of black limos and cars going out to cemeteries on LI and Jersey and upstate each time someone else was identified, this, going on for months, we, in the tri-state area and especially New Yorkers who experienced it live were convinced to believe in terrorism's power.
So, my goodness, yes. The Patriot Act will stop terrorism? You betcha, go for it, because terrorism must be stopped. So do what you need to carte blanche, even though it means curtailing our civil rights, because we are reeling from the devastation of 911. The controversies and problems about how The Patriot Act is being used to contravene civil rights are still going on to this day. But you see how easy it is once the ground has been prepared to eradicate the rule of law, the foundation of a republic?
Now it will be made even easier. By the end of next week, it may be a foregone conclusion that our government will have the power to present lifetime sentences at Guantanamo Bay or other military prisons to US citizens without charge and trial (Habeus corpus, what's that? Did it ever exist, George Orwell?)
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