- George Orwell warned us, but what American would have
expected that in the opening years of the 21st century the United States
would become a country in which lies and deception by the President and
Vice President were the basis for a foreign policy of war and aggression,
and in which indefinite detention without charges, torture, and spying
on citizens without warrants have displaced the Bill of Rights and the
US Constitution?
-
- If anyone had predicted that the election of George W.
Bush to the presidency would result in an American police state and illegal
wars of aggression, he would have been dismissed as a lunatic.
-
- What American ever would have thought that any US president
and attorney general would defend torture or that a Republican Congress
would pass a bill legalizing torture by the executive branch and exempting
the executive branch from the Geneva Conventions?
-
- What American ever would have expected the US Congress
to accept the president's claim that he is above the law?
-
- What American could have imagined that if such crimes
and travesties occurred, nothing would be done about them and that the
media and opposition party would be largely silent?
-
- Except for a few columnists, who are denounced by "conservatives"
as traitors for defending the Bill of Rights, the defense of US civil liberty
has been limited to the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International,
and Human Rights Watch. The few federal judges who have refused to genuflect
before the Bush police state are denounced by attorney general Alberto
Gonzales as a "grave threat" to US security. Vice president Richard
Cheney called a federal judge's ruling against the Bush regime's illegal
and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program "an indefensible
act of judicial overreaching."
-
- Brainwashed "conservatives" are so accustomed
to denouncing federal judges for "judicial activism" that Cheney's
charge of overreach goes down smoothly. Vast percentages of the American
public are simply unconcerned that their liberty can be revoked at the
discretion of a police or military officer and that they can be held without
evidence, trial or access to attorney and tortured until they confess to
whatever charge their torturers wish to impose.
-
- Americans believe that such things can only happen to
"real terrorists," despite the overwhelming evidence that most
of the Bush regime's detainees have no connections to terrorism.
-
- When these points are made to fellow citizens, the reply
is usually that "I'm doing nothing wrong. I have nothing to fear."
-
- Why, then, did the Founding Fathers write the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights?
-
- American liberties are the result of an 800 year struggle
by the English people to make law a shield of the people instead of a weapon
in the hands of government. For centuries English speaking peoples have
understood that governments cannot be trusted with unaccountable power.
If the Founding Fathers believed it was necessary to tie down a very weak
and limited central government with the Constitution and Bill of Rights,
these protections are certainly more necessary now that our government
has grown in size, scope and power beyond the imagination of the Founding
Fathers.
-
- But, alas, "law and order conservatives" have
been brainwashed for decades that civil liberties are unnecessary interferences
with the ability of police to protect us from criminals. Americans have
forgotten that we need protection from government more than we need protection
from criminals. Once we cut down civil liberty so that police may better
pursue criminals and terrorists, where do we stand when government turns
on us?
-
- This is the famous question asked by Sir Thomas More
in the play, A Man for All Seasons. The answer is that we stand naked,
unprotected by law. It is an act of the utmost ignorance and stupidity
to assume that only criminals and terrorists will stand unprotected.
-
- Americans should be roused to fury that attorney general
Alberto Gonzales and vice president Cheney have condemned the defense of
American civil liberty as "a grave threat to US security." This
blatant use of an orchestrated and propagandistic fear to create a "national
security" wedge against the Bill of Rights is an impeachable offense.
-
- Mark my words, the future of civil liberty in the US
depends on the impeachment and conviction of Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales.
-
- _____
-
- Paul Craig Roberts paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com wrote
the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial
page and Contributing Editor ofNational Review. He is author or coauthor
of eight books, including The
Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous
academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political
Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University
and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He
has contributed to numerous scholar journals and testified before Congress
on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service
Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal
of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell. He is the co-author of
The
Tyranny of Good Intentions.
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