Imagine that your entire city is flooded. Now suppose that you have a canoe and, being a good caring person, you paddle around in your canoe to save people who are stranded. Being such a good samaritan, at least in Louisiana, will get you arrested by the local goons, thrown into prison, held until your family can come up with $75,000 bail.
It happened to this man, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who was arrested and held for a month on the charge of Canoeing While Muslim.
I found this story here, and you should peruse the other links in that post.
For all of the ranting of the Wingnuts and Teabaggers about "taking back our country" and "freedom" and "liberty", one thing is clear. "Freedom" and "liberty" are, to them, worship words, devoid of any true meaning. Conservatives, the very people who now populate the Tea party, cheered on as the Bush Administration rammed the Patriot Act into law. They cheered as the Bush Administration tried to assume more and more powers of a classic police state: Warrantless searches and wiretaps. Allowing the FBI to rifle through people's records without a warrant. Using illegal searches to justify search warrants. Torture. Arrest without probably cause. Imprisonment without cause. The Confederate party has done more recently than anyone else to make "your papers, please" acceptable.
This, of course, goes back further than the Bush Administration, although they need to be beaten regularly about the full-throated embrace of authoritarian powers by the true Prince of Darkness, Dick Cheney, and his coterie of evil acolytes, (David Addington being the chief one). There was a time in this country when "the knock on the door in the middle of the night" was considered to be a hallmark of nations like Hitler's Germany and the USSR; now that is an accepted police arrest tactic everywhere. At the drop of a hat and with often zero justification, the cops use their black-uniformed, coal-scuttle-helmet-wearing goon squads, all of whom seem to love to wear the same face-obscuring balaclava used by bank robbers, terrorists, and anyone else too cowardly to show their faces to the world.
Our right to be left alone, or freedom of movement, are constantly under increasing encroachment. I have written before about the use of license plate cameras to track the legal movements of Americans. The Feds mine every information database they can (I submit that anyone who thinks that they don't is naive, at best). The NSA listens in on everything they can.
The Confederates largely cheered this on. Not that this is confined to them; I've said before that no Administration would do anything other than to seek an expansion of its own power and this current one is no different in that regard.
The press cannot be counted on to defend our freedoms. Beside caving completely on the Iraq War, the story on Bush's proposal for an American Stasi broke in a foreign paper because American papers wouldn't touch the story. Only after the story broke did politicians (Joe Lieberman being a prominent exception) move to kill the program.
I don't see any politicians campaigning on a platform to roll back the American police state. As long as the powers of the American police state don't infringe on firearms ownership, it seems that the Teabaggers, among others, don't give a shit. They are out here proclaiming that they want to "take back our country" and they are screaming about the false flags of socialism, Islam and Marxism, all the while ignoring the real damage done to American freedoms and liberties by their own political allies. The Teabaggers, in particular, do not understand that freedom to only conform to their ideals is not freedom. Freedom to only pray in the houses of worship that the Teabaggers approve of is not freedom.
I see nobody, other than a few journalists, the ACLU and a handful of bloggers, both liberal and apostate conservatives, who are concerned about the growing power of the American police state. I suspect that we have probably passed the point of no return.
We are so fucked.
What… What Was His Plan?!
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10 comments:
Actually, us Canadians listened in on you Americans for years and years if not decades. Our own RCMP then our CSIS (Populated by overweight RCMP) manned a huge listening post in Ottawa. Equipment was loaned to us by your very own NSA. All legal but not so above board don't you think? It is wonderful, (sarcasm) that law enforcement can support the letter of a law but not the spirit of the law....Allan
Over in the other blog I composed a short based on this and other little bits and just went an inch further.
Interstate travel politiboro
A point is reached where the farcical prose has way too much truth. After all we can still visit CT and we don't always shoot speeders.
After reading this, I may not have been farcical enough. The truth hurts.
Eck!
Allan, I'll look into that and I'll likely dedicate a post to that subject.
Thanks for the DF steer.
E.B. I'll try and find the book that was all about us listening in on you guys for your own intelligence agencies....Allan
This is copied from Wiki, it doesn't mention CSIS but syre does allow for foreign agencies to listen to you guys...
Domestic activity
NSA's mission, as set forth in Executive Order 12333, is to collect information that constitutes "foreign intelligence or counterintelligence" while not "acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons". NSA has declared that it relies on the FBI to collect information on foreign intelligence activities within the borders of the USA, while confining its own activities within the USA to the embassies and missions of foreign nations.
NSA's domestic surveillance activities are limited by the requirements imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; however, these protections do not apply to non-U.S. persons located outside of U.S. borders, so the NSA's foreign surveillance efforts are subject to far fewer limitations under U.S. law.[27] The specific requirements for domestic surveillance operations are contained in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), which does not extend protection to non-U.S. citizens located outside of U.S. territory.[27]
These activities, especially the publicly acknowledged domestic telephone tapping and call database programs, have prompted questions about the extent of the NSA's activities and concerns about threats to privacy and the rule of law.
[edit] Wiretapping programs
Allan, I found out stuff about the CSE's listening post. Thanks for putting me on to this one.
"...both liberal and apostate conservatives..."
You forgot "apostate" in front of "liberal".
I know you meant to put it in there, because I haven't seen a liberal who has spoken out against intrusive government powers as long as they're being used against white males and various other despoilers of Gaia.
(Remember: Police state BS is only bad when used against people you sympathize with!)
Tam, as to the first part of your post, the opposition to the USA Patriot Act was, as I remember it, largely by liberals. It was signed into law willingly by Chimpy the Last.
But there is truth to what you say that both liberal and conservative politicians are willing to use the powers of the State to reduce the freedoms of people they disagree with.
We cannot trust any of those birds, they have to be watched 24/7. Unfortunately, we cannot count on the press to do the job. It seems to have fallen to the much-derided PJ-wearing bloggers to sound the alarms.
"Tam, as to the first part of your post, the opposition to the USA Patriot Act was, as I remember it, largely by liberals."
...and most every mouth-breathing GOPer on all the gun boards I was moderating at the time.
"It was signed into law willingly by Chimpy the Last."
...after being voted for by, f'rinstance, EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT SENATOR EXCEPT LEAHY. Sell that one to someone who wasn't paying attention.
Tam, Democratic politicians are a collection of spineless, pants-wetting fucktards. I wasted more than a few stamps writing to my congresscritters in opposition to the Patriot Act. Fuckers just caved in fear to the Bush Administration.
I wasn't on the gun boards, but I was on an aviation one and the conservatives there were full-throated in supporting the Patriot Act and were very wiling to construe any opposition as being unpatriotic. It might be too small a sample, but I came away with a very sour taste for the GOP.
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