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."
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 forgot 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?
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.
We must stand together and renounce this national nightmare. We must undo the more than one thousand edicts and orders that are destroying the environment of the planet and space. We must retake our own institutions, especially schools and other public commons, freeing ourselves of the fascism that has become endemic to the core beliefs of most citizens. Too many of you are accepting too much, stop it!
