thanks to BookNotes

Even William Safire, former Nixon and Agnew speechwriter, is starting to get worried.

Seizing Dictatorial Power

Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens. Intimidated by terrorists and inflamed by a passion for rough justice, we are letting George W. Bush get away with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts.
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THE DEVIL IS ON HIS WAY

And now, thanks to an executive order, those of us who don't hold American citizenship -- visitors, green card holders, legal aliens, illegal aliens -- can forget all about the civil liberties that go with due process in the American justice system.

People of my generation shuddered at Costa Gavras' film Z, which depicted what can happen in a civilized society like Greece when the military takes over the so-called "justice" system. All of us were outraged when Alberto Fujimori's Peru introduced trial by anonymous military judges. We rail against the Chinese system of dragging dissenters before rigged courts before packing them off for decades of imprisonment. Now we seem to be ready to go down the same road.
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White House Push on Security Steps Bypasses Congress

thanks to SmirkingChimp.com

Coming soon to a former democracy near you: national ID cards

A special anti-terrorism committee created in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center will call for creation of a national identification card system, its chairman said Wednesday.
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Ashcroft On the Line

Attorney General John Ashcroft does not read newspapers or watch TV news. Instead, he's briefed by aides. It's possible, then, that Ashcroft does not know that many people don't think of him anymore as the comforting head of the Justice Department but instead as the scariest man in government. I see him as the director of the Office of Homeland Insecurity.

Ever since Sept. 11, Ashcroft has functioned as the real-life equivalent of the prefect of police in "Casablanca" -- rounding up "the usual suspects" and, like him, doing so without the usual legal safeguards. Their exact number is not known nor are their names. They exist in an American gulag -- a term I use with purposeful exaggeration. This is serious stuff.

More recently, Ashcroft broadened his powers to the point where much of the legal community snapped awake. In the name of battling terrorism, he authorized the Bureau of Prisons "to monitor mail or communications with attorneys . . . subject to specific procedural safeguards"(emphasis added). And what are those safeguards? Nothing to trouble a judge about. The feds will decide the matter for themselves.
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thanks to SmirkingChimp.com

The Daily Brew: 'Trust'

The really scary part isn't the military courts, the wiretapping of lawyers, or the arrests without charges. We expected that. After all, the Republicans had sent a mob, hired and paid for with American taxpayer dollars, to seize power in the first place. If the GOP was willing to stage a riot in broad daylight to deny Americans their right to vote in Florida, it is hardly surprising they would use Executive Orders to deny Americans their right to a fair trial back in D.C.

No, the scary part is the almost complete silence that has greeted these actions. Americans, understandably shell shocked by one disaster after another, seem unable to as much as complain as one after another of their freedoms are stripped away.

In the face of so little criticism or resistance, one can only speculate how quickly these new powers will be used by the Bush administration to stifle the Republican's domestic opposition. How long before death penalty opponents are swept up by Bush's secret police? When will the first union organizers be arrested without charge? Who will be the first environmentalists to be held without bail?

Actually, none of these scenarios are hypothetical. Leading up to last year's Republican Convention and WTO meetings, American citizens who planned on exercising their first amendment rights to peaceably assemble and freely speak criticisms of their government were arrested in "preemptive strikes" in both Philadelphia and DC. The sad fact is that the police have already used the new powers in the so-called PATRIOT Act ("Puritan Ashcroft Trashes Rights In Orwellian Travesty") to stifle domestic dissent. The new rules simply provide an ex post facto approval for these prior acts.
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First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

thanks to Scripting News