From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Aug 30 2003 - 15:02:24 MDT
On Saturday 30 August 2003 08:54, Greg Burch wrote:
> I try to stay out of discussions of contemporary partisan politics on this
> list, because I think they have only limited relevance and it's extremely
> hard to manage the risk that they will spiral out of control into
> personalistic flame wars. But I feel compelled to speak up here. I will
> *NOT* engage in any kind of tit-for-tat discussion or argument about the
> subject of this thread, but I feel the need to note my distaste for the
> original message in this thread and the tone of posts like this.
>
Your distaste is duly noted. However, I disagree. It threw out a few talking
ponts and gathered some of what I see as real problems with the current
administration in one place. Pure and simple. I do not see what you could
object to about that. However, I do find some types of responses distasteful
myself although only one so far in this thread.
> I've worked in the legal system of the United States every day for the last
> 19 years. I've also studied the rise of fascism and other totalitarian
> systems in the 20th century as a major personal interest for over 30 years.
> With that base of experience and knowledge, I find that likening the Bush
> administration to Nazis utterly *absurd*. Yes, there have been some
> curtailments of civil liberties in some very, very few cases that have an
> arguable connection to *foreign* terrorism.
Actually the wording of Patriot and Patriot II puts us much more broadly at
risk.
>That I know of, there have
> been no real curtailments of civil liberties in wholly domestic cases.
> None. Might the cases involving suspected foreign terrorist activity be the
> first trickle in some kind of tide that would roll back the main body of
> civil liberties in the United States? I personally doubt it very
> seriously, although I'm glad they are taken seriously. But they bear no
> resemblance to the kind of wholesale destruction of civil liberties that
> accompanied the rise of real totalitarianism to which this post makes a
> comparison. Thus I feel that calling the Bush administration "Die Neue
> Reichstadt" baseless.
>
You do not consider a very soft and flexible defintion of "terror" and "aiding
and abetting terror" and the wholesale denial of fundamental rights once the
label is applied (without formal proof) to be a real danger? How is it not?
You don't consider the government granting itself the power to search any of
our homes with far fewer constraints than ever before and without our
knowledge to be dangerous and against the intent of the Constitution? You
don't consider the possibility of being accused of terror for whatever
reasons, stripped of all assets (even including citizenship), detained
indefinitely, without trial or legal counsel to be a real danger? Then
what, pray tell, would you consider dangerous?
- samantha
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