All your rights are belong to us.

This is just getting worse and worse. First there's the wiretapping bill (which thankfully looks like it will die), now this. There's a lot of uninformed opinions on this one, but the gist of it is that Congress has approved military tribunals for "enemy combatants", with no rights of habeus corpus, and no limits on detention length severity of punishment. In fact the bill specifically states that no Federal court has the power to hear habeus corpus cases!

This effectively gives the Executive Branch judical power over anyone they label a terrorist, with no oversight by the 200+ year-old US court system. And US Citizens? Yup, they are also included, though they retain their habeus corpus rights.

We've never done this before. The terrorist that bombed the WTC in 1993 was tried in a Federal Court. The guys behind the Oklahoma City bombing were tried in a Federal court. Now they fall under this new category where everything is controlled by the military, which is part of the Executive Branch and answers to the President. Which means one branch is now judge, jury, and executioner.

I hate the current state of this country. Every day the people of American let more and more of their rights be eroded and taken away, all in the name of security. You know what's really frightening? This has happened before. In the 1940s. In Germany. Care to take a guess of whom I am speaking? Correct. Hitler set up the People's Court to handle those accused of political criminal offences. It was established after a terrorist attack on Germany known as the Reichstag fire. It had the appearance of a court, but it nothing more than a facade to facilitate the elimination of people that Hitler deemed troublesome. Most were executed or imprisoned, including people as young as 17 and college students who distributed anti-war material.

How long before a direct attack on the Bill of Rights itself? "We can't have 'terrorists' pleading the 5th, so we better get rid of that one." Or "If we have a public trial, it might be a terrorist target so we better have the trials in secret." Or even "Ah hell! We KNOW their guilty! They're TERRORISTS after all! So let's just skip the whole trial thing and kill 'em."



read more | digg story