How to lose a country in seven easy steps...
Point one: The Bush administration is, as this piece in today’s Washington Post puts it, working to “consolidate influence in a small circle of Republicans and to marginalize dissenting voices that would try to impede a conservative agenda.”
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Point Two: They are doing so with a historically unprecedented, at least in this country, degree of secrecy, and therefore lack of accountability.
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Point Three: These same people, acting with unprecedented centralization of power, and secrecy, have taken it upon themselves to suspend the most basic rights enumerated in our constitution, and are carrying out the functional equivalent of a police state on Guantanamo Bay, and at various prisons around the world. It is a police state in which torture is condoned and prisoners are, on occasion, murdered. According to Amnesty International, the United States is operating a “gulag” that “has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding 'ghost detainees' (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the 'rendering' or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practice torture,”
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Point Four: While they pay rhetorical tribute to “democracy,” they side with tyrants whenever convenient.
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The entire article is here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/