I Don't know if Orwell Ever Predicted the Illegal Would Be Called the Legal, but...

[laststeamtrain]

I Don't know if Orwell Ever Predicted the Illegal Would Be Called the Legal, but...

By Coleen Rowley

...James Madison did: "No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare;" and "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."

So if the time comes when our founding fathers tire of turning over in their graves and they rise up, the first thing they might do is castigate those who have betrayed their oath to uphold the Constitution. You see, when they wrote that document, they failed to include all the Monday morning excuses we're hearing about being afraid or about political pressures involving future elections.

The founding fathers risked everything, fighting a Revolutionary War, for the freedoms they wrote into that Constitution. So I doubt they'd have much patience for the various excuses and utilitarian reasoning bleating forth from today's pusillanimous politicians and pollsters who capitulated to the fear mongering of Bush's "Global War on Terror" so they could start their August vacation on time.

The latest constitutional right shredded in the name of fighting terrorism is the basic 4th Amendment one to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. Congress just voted, after having the living bejeebers scared out of them about the imminent threat of future terrorist attacks, to legalize Bush's warrantless and perpetually secret monitoring of Americans' telephone and e-mail communications. But don't worry: Alberto Gonzales and DNI McConnell will protect our rights by restricting the wiretaps to Al Qaeda and/or "a person abroad". The same congress who witnessed Gonzales' failure to explain or even remember what he's done in the last couple years just gave him carte blanche power to secretly wiretap us all.

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Two of the biggest disappointments contributing to this terribly panic-driven and mistaken vote came from two newly elected Minnesota Democrats: Senator Amy Klobuchar and First District Representative Tim Walz, who were railroaded into abandoning the oath they swore to only 8 months ago to preserve and defend the Constitution.

It's hard to believe that Klobuchar and Walz, a former county prosecutor and schoolteacher respectively, are ignorant of the civil liberties abuses of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and its COINTELPRO program which entailed "black bag jobs" of peace groups, lawyers, civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Nixon Administration enemies. Likewise, the Watergate and other illegal burglaries under the Nixon Administration were also a natural extension of the permissive atmosphere fostered by Nixon under the rubric of "national security." The illegal actions and abuses of that era were unraveled by congressional committees who came up with the FISA law to protect us against such abuses.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/i-dont-know-if-orwell-ev_b_59380.html

[C_U_L8R]

1. It may have been Kafka

[MasonJar]

2. Orwell put it very succinctly in 1984: war is peace.