Coleen Rowley: I Don't know if Orwell Ever Predicted the Illegal Would Be Called the Legal, but...

[marmar]

from HuffPost:


Coleen Rowley
I Don't know if Orwell Ever Predicted the Illegal Would Be Called the Legal, but...



...James Madison did: "No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare;" and "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."

So if the time comes when our founding fathers tire of turning over in their graves and they rise up, the first thing they might do is castigate those who have betrayed their oath to uphold the Constitution. You see, when they wrote that document, they failed to include all the Monday morning excuses we're hearing about being afraid or about political pressures involving future elections.

The founding fathers risked everything, fighting a Revolutionary War, for the freedoms they wrote into that Constitution. So I doubt they'd have much patience for the various excuses and utilitarian reasoning bleating forth from today's pusillanimous politicians and pollsters who capitulated to the fear mongering of Bush's "Global War on Terror" so they could start their August vacation on time.

The latest constitutional right shredded in the name of fighting terrorism is the basic 4th Amendment one to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. Congress just voted, after having the living bejeebers scared out of them about the imminent threat of future terrorist attacks, to legalize Bush's warrantless and perpetually secret monitoring of Americans' telephone and e-mail communications. But don't worry: Alberto Gonzales and DNI McConnell will protect our rights by restricting the wiretaps to Al Qaeda and/or "a person abroad." The same congress who witnessed Gonzales' failure to explain or even remember what he's done in the last couple years just gave him carte blanche power to secretly wiretap us all.

Is either one of these people likely to put a halt to questionable wiretaps of anybody? Once a mountain of information is collected, nobody ever wants to destroy it. You never know when you might need it, or if some clever computer program might extract useful information. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/i-dont-know-if-orwell-ev_b_59380.html

[Mythsaje]

1. We should have started screaming

when they instituted "asset forfeiture" as a weapon in the "War On Drugs." They were testing the waters to see how much we'd tolerate and we tolerated WAY too much.

[Bonhomme Richard]

2. The Founding Fathers were willing to give up their lives and......

the current crop of politicians are terrified of losing their job.

[90-percent]

3. Colleen

Colleen is a true modern American hero. She would have been respected by the Founding Fathers.

Alternatively, the Founding Fathers would gleefully piss all over the entire current Congress!

-85% Jimmy