Your lost freedoms are just a phantom, and mentioning them helps terrorists. How do I know this? John Ashcroft (spit) tells me so:
Our efforts have been crafted carefully to avoid infringing on constitutional rights, while saving American lives."
Now, who's encouraging whom to remain silent in the face of evil?
Without further ado, JJ Johnson's "Whack'em & Stack'em: A Tactical Guide for the Young Officer".
The overseas press (an Australian newspaper reporting an interview obtained by a British reporter) is reporting that Major-General Geoffrey Miller (who is in charge of the U.S.'s Guantanamo Bay prison camp) has described plans to build a death row and execution chamber at the camp so that prisoners there can be tried, convicted, and executed without ever leaving Guantanamo Bay.
This is not the America I was born into. I am old enough, barely, to remember the Cold War, when it was the godless commies who had both prison camps and death camps and we were the ones who thought such behavior was horrifying. My father is old enough (barely) to remember World War II, when the entire civilized world felt the same way about the Nazis.
I'm not happy at the prospect of being the citizen of a country which captures people on the field of war, locks them in wire cages in a tropical hell, holds them incommunicado, "tries" them summarily and in secret without access to counsel of their choice, and then executes them quietly on the premises for unspecified crimes.
"I'm not happy" is the feeblest of understatement. The leaders who are selling America's patrimony as the righteous beacon of the unironic "free world" are traitors to everything "America" used to mean. Even an anarchist like myself, who has major reservations about even the freest of governments, must be appalled when that formerly freest of governments begins to adopt the tactics of the most brutal and murderous dictatorships in history.
Here's an article from the Washington Times which characterizes the Bush Administration as pursuing a "national greatness" neoconservative strategy. Apparently this is the actual term in use among the neocons, and the term gets used in conservative circles without any ironic intent or deliberate disapprobation.
"National Greatness?" Is there an echo in here? In Italian?
So, it's bad enough that the FBI is following you everywhere you go because they think you are a big bad terrorist even though they don't have enough evidence to charge you. But it's worse when you finally run out of patience, stop your car, and attempt to photograph the FBI chase car -- so it runs over you.
But you get the cherry on top (and never was there a more literal use of the phrase "adding insult to injury") when the local cops then give you a ticket for jaywalking.
Here's an anecdotal report that the TSA (fondly known by its own employees as the "Taking Scissors Away" agency) is lying about its customer "service" metrics:
Here's a man who finally had to pull down Old Glory. It's sad -- a lot of things the flag used to symbolize are things to be proud of -- but I can see where this guy is coming from. I've been using the Gadsden myself, when I need a flag, for a few years now.
I'm too young for Kent State to be anything but another three paragraphs in a history book. But my business partner is most of a generation older, and for him it symbolizes much the same thing as Waco does for me. One event forever disabused one man of the dangerous myth that governments can somehow have a moral status separate from the unbridled violence that is applied to all who refuse to be subjects.
He remembers Kent State today.