Quote:
Originally Posted by Danzig
a soldier can refuse an unlawful order. but he'd better make sure the thing IS unlawful before he refuses it.
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This from a recent article by Anthony Gregory..on Empire, and all the while, I was under the "delusion" that somehow, someway, defending "FREEDOM" was what this creation was about....
"When the Patriot Act was rammed through, conservatives gave us a very bizarre defense of it: It was absolutely necessary, and yet it didn’t give Bush any powers he didn’t already have.
We got the same runaround on Bush’s extrajudicial wiretaps. Bush had claimed in April 2004 that all his wiretaps were all being judicially approved, but this was a lie. He had the NSA wiretapping Americans even without FISA warrants, which have been notoriously easy for the administration to get, even retroactively. When he was caught in this fib in December of 2005, Bush remarkably said that “the fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.”
Alberto Gonzales defended this program in February of last year with some odd reasoning. Bush, he claimed, had this power inherently, since he was the commander in chief. The Constitution and Congress’s post-9/11 Authorization of the Use of Force granted Bush all the power he sought. Indeed, even George Washington conducted such electronic surveillance, Gonzales hysterically claimed.
But this simply defies reason. Why are they so quick to defend all these laws that empower the president if the president already has such powers? If the Patriot Act changed nothing, why was it so necessary?
In January of this year, Gonzales said the NSA spying is now being done with the approval of FISA. So either the warrantless spying wasn’t as necessary as they claimed, or perhaps the FISA oversight is even more of a rubberstamp than before. But is their attempt to work with FISA an admission they were before acting outside the law?
What they’re really doing is warming us up for totalitarianism. Thus do they refuse to outlaw torture completely, even though they claim they never practice it. Thus do they say the president has had these powers since the Washington administration, but they never relent in asking for more powers. Thus do they cross their fingers and tell us they’re doing things the old fashioned way, then say that everything changed on 9/11, we can’t do things the old-fashioned way anymore, and even discussing these matters is pro-terrorist. This is Orwellian nonsense to make us used to living in a world run by an absurdist total state.
And if this surveillance state isn’t absurd, what is? The FBI has issued over 140,000 national security letters, forcing people to reveal information to the feds and forbidding them from talking about it to anyone. The FBI admitted in August 2005 to secretly collecting thousands of files from such groups as the ACLU and the Catholic Worker Movement. They have no-fly lists and databases to keep track of such dangerous groups as antiwar Quakers in Florida."
Yeah right!!! Those Quakers are dangerous!!! Go get em Gonzo!