Liberty's revenge in the USA?

[Ldvs]

A vote was passed to amend the Patriot Act, used to help investigators monitor terrorist activities, which restricts fundamental liberties.



Bush snubbed on 'terror book' law

Powers to gather information on the books people buy in US bookshops and rent from libraries should be repealed, the House of Representatives has said.

The House voted by 238-187 to pass an amendment to the USA Patriot Act, despite threats from the White House to veto changes to the anti-terror law.

Backers of the amendment said elements of the act were unconstitutional.

The US Senate, which needs to approve any bill for it to become law, has not yet voted on the measure.

"We can fight terrorism without undermining basic constitutional rights," said Bernie Sanders, an independent representative from the north-eastern state of Vermont, who proposed the measure.

"Parents want to know that just because their kid is researching the life of Osama bin Laden, or researching terrorism, that that fact should not place the student on a government list," he added.

Liberty argument

The White House has strongly opposed any changes to the Patriot Act, which was passed by a strong majority in both the House and the Senate in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001.

The US Counterterrorism Center in Virginia
Millions of dollars have been invested in counter-terrorism

Under current legislation US investigators have the right to access library records and details of which books people buy in bookshops.

There is no requirement to prove that those under observation are suspected of committing or planning any crime or act of terror.

The Patriot Act has become a key issue for civil libertarians in the US, who allege that the provisions of the act undermine the US constitution and restrict basic freedoms.

"If the government suspects someone is looking up how to make atom bombs, go to a court and get a search warrant," New York Democrat Jerold Nadler said.

Government angry

Mr Sanders' amendment was passed with the help of 38 Republican members, who voted for the measure alongside Democrats.

A similar measure that also proposed outlawing the right to monitor internet use was defeated in the House last year.

"The passage of this amendment helps rein in an administration intent on chipping away at the very civil liberties that define us as a nation," he said.

But Assistant Attorney General William Moschella lambasted the amendment in a letter to Congress.

"[Bookshops and libraries] should not be carved out as safe havens for terrorists and spies, who have, in fact, used public libraries to do research and communicate with their co-conspirators," he wrote.

Source (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4098886.stm)
See also this (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3703676.stm) and this (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3164785.stm)

[doc_bean]

Good , they're regaining their senses ~:cheers:

[zelda12]

Took them long enough though....

[Al Khalifah]

I never actually realised this was covered under the Patriot Act, but I guess it's the sort of thing I assumed would be contained in its grim words.

I (small) triumph in the battle to regain our civil liberties.

[PanzerJaeger]

If youre not a terrorist, why should you worry?


I (small) triumph in the battle to regain our civil liberties.

Oh please.. How have you or your liberties been affected by the Patriot Act?

[Tribesman]

If youre not a terrorist, why should you worry?
Well that depends on what they do with the information , if you buy a copy of Mein Kampf do you appear on the list of possible neo-nazis , if you buy a Koran do you appear on the list of possible Muslim fundamentalists , if you buy a biography of Che Guevara do you appear on the list of possible communist revolutionaries ?

[Don Corleone]

Actually, from what I understand, access to those memory banks isn't all that secure. There's a lawsuit pending in Nebraska where 4 employees were fired from an insurance company. They were fired because their employers accessed the book list through a 3rd party vendor, and discovered that these employees had bought porn at a local adult bookstore (on their own time). So they got canned on 'ethics & morality' clause in their contract.

[Blodrast]

If youre not a terrorist, why should you worry?

Oh please.. How have you or your liberties been affected by the Patriot Act?

sooo...I take it it's ok with you that the government knows what books you're reading, what TV programs you're watching, what you're thinking and who you're talking to...

perhaps a re-read of 1984 is in order ? ...

hold on a sec, there's a couple of gentlemen dressed in black suits that are loo-

[Ser Clegane]

Actually, from what I understand, access to those memory banks isn't all that secure. There's a lawsuit pending in Nebraska where 4 employees were fired from an insurance company. They were fired because their employers accessed the book list through a 3rd party vendor, and discovered that these employees had bought porn at a local adult bookstore (on their own time). So they got canned on 'ethics & morality' clause in their contract.

I am not quite sure what I find more disturbing about this - that the employer got access to this kind of information or that people can get fired for buying porn in their freetime :inquisitive:

[PanzerJaeger]

Does it really matter what "list" your on? If you arent a criminal such a list, that may or may not exist, means nothing.

I just dont see it as the Bush administration's goal to create some big brother state.

This whole thing is just like Gitmo - a mountain made out of a mole hill for political reasons.

Ive been living under the patriot act for a few years now and - big surprise - nothing has changed. That might have to do with the fact Im a law abiding citizen though. ~;)

[PanzerJaeger]

sooo...I take it it's ok with you that the government knows what books you're reading, what TV programs you're watching, what you're thinking and who you're talking to...

perhaps a re-read of 1984 is in order ? ...

hold on a sec, there's a couple of gentlemen dressed in black suits that are loo-

^A perfect example of what im talking about. Leave the hysterics and Orwellian references at home please, they dont apply here. ~:rolleyes:

[zelda12]

The applied force of a Democratic Government (I know its a republic but democracy sounds snazzier) is something that is one of the most brilliant inventions of Mankind. It has many flaws but it works, it may not work well at times but it is as fair and just a system of Government that we have come up with that will work on a large scale.

However when a Democratic Government takes one step beyond the line then it is no longer a Democratic Government (or Republic) it is only a totalitarian regime in the making.

That line is very simple, it is the line that says that every man is entitled to freedom within the law and that he will receive a fair and just trial, which he knows that he knows that what he does cannot be recorded by the Government and used against him, unless he was committing a crime.

Panzer if you think the Orwellian references are just silly I suggest you take a long hard look at what the Patriot act does, it allows the US Government to pry further and harder into almost every aspect of your life. That information will be stored, it won't go away and someday maybe a government official will have a reason to get you arrested and will use the records as evidence.

The Patriot act took the Republic of the United States of America closer to the invisible line than any Government should ever go, it is sitting right on the line, and if hinging towards the step over.

A democracy is a fragile and beautiful thing, it is our greatest hope for our children and any move that constricts the freedom of its citizens without them committing a crime is a crime itself, even more so as it may or may not have been introduced to heighten fears as well as protect the country.

[PanzerJaeger]

Panzer if you think the Orwellian references are just silly I suggest you take a long hard look at what the Patriot act does, it allows the US Government to pry further and harder into almost every aspect of your life. That information will be stored, it won't go away and someday maybe a government official will have a reason to get you arrested and will use the records as evidence.

You would have legs to stand on if you had been saying this in the 1930s, but unfortunately the government already knows far more important things about us than what books we check out of the library.

Its idiotic to throw a hissy fit about the government being able to look at your library books if you currently have and use a social security number. The intrusion has been going on a long before the Bush administration and its been much more intrusive.

Simply being a normal citizen in modern America means the government has all kinds of information on you - this whole Patriot Act fit is simply that - an act. Its just another tool against the Bush administration.


The Patriot act took the Republic of the United States of America closer to the invisible line than any Government should ever go, it is sitting right on the line, and if hinging towards the step over.

If thats the line between Republic and Big Brother, weve already crossed it years ago.

But its not the line. The real distinction is what the government does with the information. As I said, if youre not a criminal - how does this affect you?


A democracy is a fragile and beautiful thing, it is our greatest hope for our children and any move that constricts the freedom of its citizens without them committing a crime is a crime itself, even more so as it may or may not have been introduced to heighten fears as well as protect the country.

Democracy is nothing sacred and hardly beautiful - but thats another discussion altogether.

Now please tell me how my freedoms have been constricted. :inquisitive:

[zelda12]

Well according you your own words you don't have any any way...see you in the concentration camp. :help:

Also as I said just because your not a criminal doesn't mean the data they collect can't be used to falsely say you are a criminal. ~;) Try to remember the utter bastards who who are in charge, if they don't like you, then you my friend are as good as guilty no matter what you do. The Patriot act just makes it easier for them to do it and harder for you to contest it.

[PanzerJaeger]

Well according you your own words you don't have any any way...see you in the concentration camp.

More hysterics.. why is it so impossible to discuss this without evoking such emotional buzzwords?


Try to remember the utter bastards who who are in charge, if they don't like you, then you my friend are as good as guilty no matter what you do. The Patriot act just makes it easier for them to do it and harder for you to contest it.

Ahh now I see where you are coming from.. Just as I said: people who dont like Bush blow this so far out of porportion, the reality is almost unrecognizable when compared to the fictional portrayal that the liberals try to push on normal Americans who arent informed.

[zelda12]

Oh no not old Dubya, but politicians in general, both democratics and republicans, tories and Labour. They're almost all, with some exceptions, lieing cheating devious bastards whose lust for power is only equaled by their enormous ego's.

The buzzwords are how you win debates, take the moral high ground and don't use them if you must but don't complain when other people do.

[Goofball]

sooo...I take it it's ok with you that the government knows what books you're reading, what TV programs you're watching, what you're thinking and who you're talking to...

perhaps a re-read of 1984 is in order ? ...

hold on a sec, there's a couple of gentlemen dressed in black suits that are loo-^A perfect example of what im talking about. Leave the hysterics and Orwellian references at home please, they dont apply here. ~:rolleyes:

Now you know how us lefties feel when you guys swear that the inevitable result of allowing gays to marry will be farmers shagging their livestock and fathers impregnating their daughters. You can't belittle somebody else for using "slippery slope" arguments if you use them yourself.

[Blodrast]

Panzer, do you think you can have an argument without insulting people ?
So far you have called me and Zelda hysterics, and him an idiot, without any kind of insult from our side.
Is that the only way tou can take part to a conversation ?

I would have liked to be part of this discussion, but if by replying to your baits is the only way to do it, I'd rather not.

Edit: Oh, and I honestly can't see anything in my or Zelda's posts that can be qualified as hysteric, not by a lng shot. I only see calm, lucid statements. Nobody "threw a hissy fit" or went into a frenzy...

[_Martyr_]

So let me get this straight...?

You see no potential or very real problems with this sort of carry-on. But, you view a safety law requiring people to wear seatbelts as an assault on your personal liberties!!! ~:confused:

Say what!??

[Goofball]

So let me get this straight...?

You see no potential or very real problems with this sort of carry-on. But, you view a safety law requiring people to wear seatbelts as an assault on your personal liberties!!! ~:confused:

Say what!??

_Martyr_, get out of my head!

From the other thread:



Couldnt have said it better myself. I thought i was the only one who had a problem with these "safety laws".

Goofball also had a point that this is a minor thing.. It should be included in a broader fight against all these safety laws.

Like the Patriot Act?

~;)

I find it ironic (to say the least) that you defend the right of your government to search you home without telling you and compile lists of what books you read, but you feel that forcing you to complete a physical act that takes less than one second and will possibly save your life is an infringement upon your freedom.
~:cheers:

[Lazul]

God im so happy im living in Sweden, and I feel sorry for you americans to have such stupid laws in your country!
Hope they go away faster then.... ehr... something fast. :bow:

[Kaiser of Arabia]

We're doomed.

[PanzerJaeger]

Panzer, do you think you can have an argument without insulting people ?
So far you have called me and Zelda hysterics, and him an idiot, without any kind of insult from our side.
Is that the only way tou can take part to a conversation ?

Show me where I called either of you hysterics or idiots please.


So let me get this straight...?

You see no potential or very real problems with this sort of carry-on. But, you view a safety law requiring people to wear seatbelts as an assault on your personal liberties!!!

Say what!??

The seatbelt law actually affects me. The Patriot Act does not in any way, shape or form. Is that so hard to understand?

You can try as hard as you like to trash Bush by claiming this is harming our rights as citizens, but until it does, youre only fulfilling your own fantasies about Bush.

When this law affects me, anyone I know, or even anyone ive ever heard of, then Ill treat it like the seatbelt law.

I guarantee you that more people's individual freedom have been breached by the government forcing them to wear seatbelts in their own vehicles than by the Patriot Act.

[zelda12]

More hysterics.. why is it so impossible to discuss this without evoking such emotional buzzwords?

Don't you just love being wrong... ~;)

[PanzerJaeger]

God im so happy im living in Sweden, and I feel sorry for you americans to have such stupid laws in your country!
Hope they go away faster then.... ehr... something fast.

Id take America over your socialist paradise anyday. ~;)

[Tribesman]

Does it really matter what "list" your on? If you arent a criminal such a list, that may or may not exist, means nothing.
Oh forgive my presumptions , being placed on a "list" means nothing unless you are a criminal . ~:confused:
I must be getting old and senile as my memory seems to be failing me .
Could you refresh my memory about some incidents involving some well known public figures in America , in fact I think they may have been so well known that people actually voted for them and made them part of the government .
They were not allowed to board aeroplanes bacause they were on a list of suspected terrorists , even when they identified themselves as members of the US government and proved their identities beyond any possible doubt they were still not allowed to travel because they were on a "list" .
But of course it means nothing does it , as they were not terrorists and being placed on a list didn't affect them in any way at all did it ? :dizzy2:

When this law affects me, anyone I know, or even anyone ive ever heard of, then Ill treat it like the seatbelt law.
Have you ever heard of Cat Stephens ? ~D ~D ~D

[Proletariat]

Well according you your own words you don't have any any way...see you in the concentration camp. :help:


As an American who is against what the Patriot Act could become, I must say this comment is stupid.

Were you joking or do you really think that America sometime in the future will be shoveling people who have bought a Koran into ovens?

[Kanamori]

HONEST, DECENT, WRONG
by LOUIS MENAND
The invention of George Orwell.
Issue of 2003-01-27
Posted 2003-01-20

"Animal Farm," George Orwell's satire, which became the Cold War "Candide," was finished in 1944, the high point of the Soviet-Western alliance against fascism. It was a warning against dealing with Stalin and, in the circumstances, a prescient book. Orwell had trouble finding a publisher, though, and by the time the book finally appeared, in August, 1945, the month of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, the Cold War was already on the horizon. "Animal Farm" was an instant success in England and the United States. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection; it was quickly translated into many languages and distributed, in some countries, by the United States government; and it made Orwell, who had spent most of his life scraping by, famous and rich. "1984," published four years later, had even greater success. Orwell was fatally ill with pulmonary tuberculosis when he wrote it, and he died in January, 1950. He was forty-six.

The revision began almost immediately. Frances Stonor Saunders, in her fascinating study "The Cultural Cold War," reports that right after Orwell's death the C.I.A. (Howard Hunt was the agent on the case) secretly bought the film rights to "Animal Farm" from his widow, Sonia, and had an animated-film version produced in England, which it distributed throughout the world. The book's final scene, in which the pigs (the Bolsheviks, in Orwell's allegory) can no longer be distinguished from the animals' previous exploiters, the humans (the capitalists), was omitted. A new ending was provided, in which the animals storm the farmhouse where the pigs have moved and liberate themselves all over again. The great enemy of propaganda was subjected, after his death, to the deceptions and evasions of propaganda—and by the very people, American Cold Warriors, who would canonize him as the great enemy of propaganda.

Howard Hunt at least kept the story pegged to the history of the Soviet Union, which is what Orwell intended. Virtually every detail in "Animal Farm" allegorizes some incident in that history: the Kronstadt rebellion, the five-year plan, the Moscow trials, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Tehran conference. But although Orwell didn't want Communism, he didn't want capitalism, either. This part of his thought was carefully elided, and "Animal Farm" became a warning against political change per se. It remains so today. The cover of the current Harcourt paperback glosses the contents as follows:

As ferociously fresh as it was more than half a century ago, "Animal Farm" is a parable about would-be liberators everywhere. As we witness the rise and bloody fall of the revolutionary animals through the lens of our own history, we see the seeds of totalitarianism in the most idealistic organizations; and in our most charismatic leaders, the souls of our cruelest oppressors.

This is the opposite of what Orwell intended. But almost everything in the popular understanding of Orwell is a distortion of what he really thought and the kind of writer he was.

Writers are not entirely responsible for their admirers. It is unlikely that Jane Austen, if she were here today, would wish to become a member of the Jane Austen Society. In his lifetime, George Orwell was regarded, even by his friends, as a contrary man. It was said that the closer you got to him the colder and more critical he became. As a writer, he was often hardest on his allies. He was a middle-class intellectual who despised the middle class and was contemptuous of intellectuals, a Socialist whose abuse of Socialists—"all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking toward the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat"—was as vicious as any Tory's. He preached solidarity, but he had the habits of a dropout, and the works for which he is most celebrated, "Animal Farm," "1984," and the essay "Politics and the English Language," were attacks on people who purported to share his political views. He was not looking to make friends. But after his death he suddenly acquired an army of fans—all middle-class intellectuals eager to suggest that a writer who approved of little would have approved of them.

Orwell's army is one of the most ideologically mixed up ever to assemble. John Rodden, whose "George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation" was published in 1989 and recently reprinted, with a new introduction (Transaction; $30), has catalogued it exhaustively. It has included, over the years, ex-Communists, Socialists, left-wing anarchists, right-wing libertarians, liberals, conservatives, doves, hawks, the Partisan Review editorial board, and the John Birch Society: every group in a different uniform, but with the same button pinned to the lapel—Orwell Was Right. Irving Howe claimed Orwell, and so did Norman Podhoretz. Almost the only thing Orwell's posthumous admirers have in common, besides the button, is anti-Communism. But they all somehow found support for their particular bouquet of moral and political values in Orwell's writings, which have been universally praised as "honest," "decent," and "clear." In what sense, though, can writings that have been taken to mean so many incompatible things be called "clear"? And what, exactly, was Orwell right about?

Indifferent to his own person as Orwell genuinely was, his writing is essentially personal. He put himself at the center of all his nonfiction books and many of his essays, and he often used personal anecdotes in his political journalism to make, or reinforce, his points. He never figured himself as the hero of these stories, in part because his tendency to self-abnegation was fairly remorseless. But self-abnegation was perhaps the most seductive aspect of the persona he devised. Orwell had the rare talent for making readers feel that they were dealing not with a reporter or a columnist or a literary man—not with a writer—but with an ordinary person. His method for making people believe what he wrote was to make them believe, first of all, in him.

He was a writer, of course—he was a graphomaniac, in fact: writing was what he lived for—and there was not much that was ordinary about him. He was born, a hundred years ago, in Bengal, where his father was a sub-agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, and he came to England when he was one, and was brought up there by his mother. (The family name was Blair, and Orwell's given name was Eric.) Orwell's father visited the family for three months in 1907, engaging in domestic life with sufficient industry to leave his wife pregnant, and did not come back until 1912. By then, Orwell was boarding as a scholarship student at St. Cyprian's, the school he wrote about, many years later, in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys." He studied hard and won a scholarship to Eton, and it was there that he began his career in self-denial. He deliberately slacked off, finishing a hundred and thirty-eighth in a class of a hundred and sixty-seven, and then, instead of taking the exams for university, joined the Imperial Police and went to Burma, the scene of the essays "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant." In 1927, after five years in Burma, while on leave in England and with no employment prospects, he resigned.

He spent the next four years as a tramp and an itinerant worker, experiences that became the basis for "Down and Out in Paris and London," the first work to appear under the pen name George Orwell, in 1933. He taught school briefly, worked in a bookstore (the subject of the essay "Bookshop Memories"), and spent two months travelling around the industrial districts in the North of England gathering material for "The Road to Wigan Pier," which came out in 1937. Orwell spent the first half of 1937 fighting with the Loyalists in Spain, where he was shot in the throat by a fascist sniper, and where he witnessed the brutal Communist suppression of the revolutionary parties in the Republican alliance. His account of these events, "Homage to Catalonia," which appeared in 1938, was, indeed, brave and iconoclastic (though not the only work of its kind), and it established Orwell in the position that he would maintain for the rest of his life, as the leading anti-Stalinist writer of the British left.

During the war, Orwell took a job with the Indian section of the BBC's Eastern Service, where he produced and, with T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Louis MacNeice, and other distinguished writers, delivered radio talks, mostly on literary subjects, intended to rally the support of Indians for the British war effort. For the first time since 1927, he received the salary he had once enjoyed as a policeman in Burma, but he regarded the work as propaganda—he felt, he said, like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot"—and, in 1943, he quit. He worked for a while as literary editor and as a columnist at the Tribune, a Socialist paper edited by Aneurin Bevan, the leader of the left wing of the Labour Party in Britain and a man Orwell admired. In 1946, after the success of "Animal Farm," and knowing that he was desperately ill with lung disease, he removed himself to one of the dankest places in the British Isles: the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland. When he was not too sick to type, he sat in a room all day smoking black shag tobacco, and writing "1984." His biographers have noted that the life of Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth in that novel is based in part on Orwell's own career (as he experienced it) at the BBC. Room 101, the torture chamber in the climactic scene, was the name of the room where the Eastern Service held compulsory committee meetings. Orwell (is it necessary to say?) hated committees.

His first wife, Eileen, with whom he adopted a son, died in 1945. He proposed to several women thereafter, sometimes suggesting, as an inducement, that he would probably die soon and leave his widow with a valuable estate; but he struck out. Then, in 1949, when he really was on his deathbed, he married Sonia Brownell, a woman whose sex appeal was widely appreciated. Brownell had slept with Orwell once, in 1945, apparently from the mixed motives of pity and the desire to sleep with famous writers, one of her hobbies. The marriage was performed in a hospital room; Orwell died three months later. He ended up selling more books than any other serious writer of the twentieth century—"Animal Farm" and "1984" were together translated into more than sixty languages; in 1973, English-language editions of "1984" were still selling at a rate of 1,340 copies a day—and he left all his royalties to Sonia. She squandered them and died more or less in poverty, in 1980. Today, Orwell's gravesite, in a churchyard in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, is tended by volunteers.

Orwell has been posthumously psychoanalyzed, but there is no great mystery behind the choices he made in his life. He explained his motive plainly and repeatedly in his writing: he wanted to de-class himself. From his days at St. Cyprian's, and possibly even earlier, he saw the class system as a system of oppression—and nothing but a system of oppression. The guilt (his term) that he felt about his position as a member of the white imperialist bourgeoisie preceded his interest in politics as such. He spent much of his time criticizing professional Socialists, particularly the leaders of the British Labour Party, because, apart from the commitment to equality, there was not much about Socialism that was important to him. His economics were rudimentary, and he had little patience for the temporizing that ordinary politics requires. In 1945, after Germany surrendered, Churchill and the Conservatives were voted out and a Labour government came in (with Bevan as Minister of Health). In less than a year, Orwell was complaining that no steps had been taken to abolish the House of Lords.

He didn't merely go on adventures in class-crossing. He turned his life into an experiment in classlessness, and the intensity of his commitment to that experiment was the main reason that his friends and colleagues found him a perverse and sometimes exasperating man. His insistence on living in uncomfortable conditions, his refusal (despite his bad lungs) to wear a hat or coat in winter, his habit of pouring his tea into the saucer and slurping it noisily (in the working-class manner) struck his friends not as colorful eccentricities but as reproaches directed at their own bourgeois addiction to comfort and decorum. Which they were. Orwell was a brilliant and cultured man, with an Eton accent and an anomalous, vaguely French mustache, who wore the same beat-up tweed jacket nearly every day, made (very badly) his own furniture, and lived, most of the time, one step up from squalor. He read Joyce and kept a goat in the back yard. He was completely authentic and completely inauthentic at the same time—a man who believed that to write honestly he needed to publish under a false name.

Orwell's writing is effortlessly compelling. He was in the tradition of writers who—as Leslie Stephen said of Defoe—understand that there is a literary fascination in a clear recitation of the facts. There is much more to Orwell than this, though. As Christopher Hitchens points out in "Why Orwell Matters" (Basic; $24), a book more critical of Orwell than the title might suggest, "Homage to Catalonia" survives as a model of political journalism, and "Animal Farm" and "1984" belong permanently to the literature of resistance. Whatever uses they were made to serve in the West, they gave courage to people in the East. The territory that Orwell covered in "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier"—the lower-class extremes—was by no means new to nonfiction prose. Engels wrote about it feelingly in "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844"; Jacob Riis studied it in "How the Other Half Lives." But Orwell discovered a tone—"generous anger" is the phrase he once used to describe Dickens, and it has been applied to him, but "cool indignation" seems a little more accurate—that has retained its freshness after seventy years.

Orwell's essays have recently been collected, with exceptional thoroughness, by John Carey (Everyman; $35). The essay on Dickens, published in 1940, is weaker criticism than Edmund Wilson's "Dickens: The Two Scrooges," which came out the same year. But Orwell's essay on Henry Miller, "Inside the Whale," which also appeared in 1940, was original and unexpected. His personal essays, especially "Shooting an Elephant" and "Such, Such Were the Joys," are models of the form. Still, his qualities as a writer are obscured by the need of his admirers to claim for his work impossible virtues.

Honesty was important to Orwell. He was certainly quick enough to accuse people he disagreed with of dishonesty. But there is sometimes a confusion, when people talk about Orwell's writing, between honesty and objectivity. "He said what he believed" and "He told it like it was" refer to different virtues. One of the effects of the tone Orwell achieved—the tone of a reasonable, modest, supremely undogmatic man, hoping for the best but resigned to the worst—was the impression of transparency, something that Orwell himself, in an essay called "Why I Write," identified as the ideal of good prose. It was therefore a shock when Bernard Crick, in the first major biography of Orwell, authorized by Sonia Orwell and published the year of her death, confessed that he had found it difficult to corroborate some of the incidents in Orwell's autobiographical writings. Jeffrey Meyers, whose biography "Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation" came out in 2000, concluded that Orwell sometimes "heightened reality to achieve dramatic effects."

Crick has doubts that the event Orwell recounted in remarkably fine detail in "A Hanging"—he describes the condemned man stepping aside to avoid a puddle of water on his way to the scaffold—ever happened, and Meyers notes that, during his years as a tramp, Orwell would take time off to rest and write in the homes of family and friends, something he does not mention in "Down and Out in Paris and London," where the narrator is sometimes on the verge of death by starvation. Both Crick and Meyers suspect that "Shooting an Elephant" has fabricated elements. And everything that Orwell wrote was inflected by his predilection for the worm's-eye view. When biographers asked Orwell's contemporaries what it was really like at St. Cyprian's, or in Burma, or working at the bookshop, the usual answer was "It was bad, but it wasn't that bad."

The point is not that Orwell made things up. The point is that he used writing in a literary, not a documentary, way: he wrote in order to make you see what he wanted you to see, to persuade. During the war, Orwell began contributing a "London Letter" to Partisan Review. In one letter, he wrote that park railings in London were being torn down for scrap metal, but that only working-class neighborhoods were being plundered; parks and squares in upper-class neighborhoods, he reported, were untouched. The story, Crick says, was widely circulated. When a friend pointed out that it was untrue, Orwell is supposed to have replied that it didn't matter, "it was essentially true."

You need to grasp Orwell's premises, in other words, before you can start talking about the "truth" of what he writes. He is not saying, This is the way it objectively was from any possible point of view. He is saying, This is the way it looked to someone with my beliefs. Otherwise, his work can be puzzling. "Down and Out in Paris and London" is a powerful book, but you are always wondering what this obviously decent, well-read, talented person is doing washing dishes in the kitchen of a Paris hotel. In "The Road to Wigan Pier," Orwell gave the reader some help with this problem by explaining, at length, where he came from, what his views were, and why he went to live with the miners. Orwell was not a reporter or a sociologist. He was an advocate. He had very definite political opinions, and promoting them was his reason for writing. "No book is genuinely free of political bias," he asserted in "Why I Write." "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."

Here we arrive at the challenge presented by the "Orwell Was Right" button. Hitchens says that there were three great issues in the twentieth century, and that Orwell was right on all three: imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism. What does this mean, though? Orwell was against imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism. Excellent. Many people were against them in Orwell's time, and a great many more people have been against them since. The important question, after condemning those things, was what to do about them, and how to understand the implications for the future. On this level, Orwell was almost always wrong.

Orwell thought that any Englishman who boasted of liberty and prosperity while India was still a colony was a hypocrite. "In order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream," he wrote in "The Road to Wigan Pier." Still, he did not believe that India was capable of complete independence, and was still saying so as late as 1943. At first, he had the idea that the British Empire should be turned into "a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics," but eventually he arrived at another solution. In 1943, entering a controversy in the pages of the Tribune over the future of Burma, which had been invaded by Japan, he laid out his position. The notion of an independent Burma, he explained, was as ludicrous as the notion of an independent Lithuania or Luxembourg. To grant those countries independence would be to create a bunch of "comic opera states," he wrote. "The plain fact is that small nationalities cannot be independent, because they cannot defend themselves." The answer was to place "the whole main-land of south-east Asia, together with Formosa, under the guidance of China, while leaving the islands under an Anglo-American-Dutch condominium." Orwell was against colonial exploitation, in other words, but not in favor of national self-determination. If this is anti-imperialism, make the most of it.

Orwell took a particular dislike to Gandhi. He referred to him, in private correspondence, as a "bit of a charlatan"; in 1943, he wrote that "there is indeed a sort of apocalyptic truth in the statement of the German radio that the teachings of Hitler and Gandhi are the same." One of his last essays was on Gandhi, written two years after India, and one year after Burma, became independent, and a year after Gandhi's assassination. It is a grudging piece of writing. The method of Satyagraha, Orwell said, might have been effective against the British, but he was doubtful about its future as a tactic for political struggle. (A few years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., would find a use for it.) He confessed to "a sort of aesthetic distaste" for Gandhi himself—Gandhi was, after all, just the sort of sandal-wearing, vegetarian mystic Orwell had always abhorred—and he attributed the success of the Indian independence movement as much to the election of a Labour government in Britain as to Gandhi's efforts. "I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure" was the most that he could bring himself to say.

Hitler, on the other hand, Orwell did find personally appealing. "I have never been able to dislike Hitler," he admitted, in 1940. Hitler, it seems, "grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life," which Orwell called the attitude of "nearly all Western thought since the last war, certainly all 'progressive' thought." This response—the idea that fascism, whatever might be wrong with it, is at least about the necessity of struggle and self-sacrifice—is not that far from the response of the relatively few people in England (there were more in France) who actively endorsed fascism.

Orwell was opposed to Nazi Germany. But he thought that Britain, as an imperial power, had no moral right to go to war against Hitler, and he was sure that a war would make Britain fascist. This is a theme in his novel "Coming Up for Air," which was published in 1939, and that winter he was urging friends to begin planning "illegal anti-war activities." He thought that it would be a good idea to set up an underground antiwar organization, in anticipation of what he called the "pre-war fascising processes," and predicted that he would end up in a British concentration camp because of his views. He kept up his antiwar agitation until August, 1939. Then, with the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, he flipped completely. In "The Lion and the Unicorn," in 1941, he accused British antiwar intellectuals of "sabotage." They had become "Europeanized"; they sneered at patriotism. (This from a man who, two years earlier, had been proposing an illegal campaign against government policy.) They had weakened the morale of the English people, "so that the Fascist nations judged that they were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war. . . . Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces." The prediction of a fascist Britain had evidently been forgotten.

What were Orwell's political opinions? Orwell was a revolutionary Socialist. That is, he hoped that there would be a Socialist revolution in England, and, as he said more than once, if violence was necessary, violence there should be. "I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood," he wrote in "My Country Right or Left," in 1940. And a year later, in "The Lion and the Unicorn," "It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. . . . Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place." Orwell had concluded long before that capitalism had failed unambiguously, and he never changed his opinion. He thought that Hitler's military success on the Continent proved once and for all the superiority of a planned economy. "It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption," he wrote. "The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them."

A Socialist England, as Orwell described it, would be a classless society with virtually no private property. The State would own everything, and would require "that nobody shall live without working." Orwell thought that perhaps fifteen acres of land, "at the very most," might be permitted, presumably to allow subsistence farming, but that there would be no ownership of land in town areas. Incomes would be equalized, so that the highest income would never be greater than ten times the lowest. Above that, the tax rate should be a hundred per cent. The House of Lords would be abolished, though Orwell thought that the monarchy might be preserved. (Everybody would drink at the same pub, presumably, but one of the blokes would get to wear a crown.) As for its foreign policy: a Socialist state "will not have the smallest scruple about attacking hostile neutrals or stirring up native rebellions in enemy colonies."

Orwell was not a cultural radical. Democracy and moral decency (once the blood was cleaned off the pavement, anyway) were central to his vision of Socialism. His admirers remembered the democracy and the decency, and managed to forget most of the rest. When "Homage to Catalonia" was finally published in the United States, in 1952, Lionel Trilling wrote an introduction, which Jeffrey Meyers has called "probably the most influential essay on Orwell." It is a work of short fiction. "Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order," Trilling wrote; he exemplified the meaning of the phrase "my station and its duties," and respected "the old bourgeois virtues." He even "came to love things, material possessions." A fully housebroken anti-Communist. It is amusing to imagine Orwell slurping his tea at the Columbia Faculty House.

Understanding Orwell's politics helps to explain that largely inaccurate prediction about postwar life "1984." There was, Hitchens points out, an enormous blind spot in Orwell's view of the world: the United States. Orwell never visited the United States and, as Hitchens says, showed little curiosity about what went on there. To the extent that he gave it any attention, he tended to regard the United States as vulgar, materialistic, and a threat to the English language. ("Many Americans pronounce . . . water as though it had no t in it, or even as though it had no consonant in it at all, except the w," he claimed. "On the whole we are justified in regarding the American language with suspicion.") He thought that, all things considered, Britain was better off as a client-state of Washington than as a client-state of Moscow, but he did not look on an increased American role in the world with hope. Since Orwell was certain that capitalism was doomed, the only future he could imagine for the United States was as some sort of totalitarian regime.

He laid out his view in 1947, in the pages of Partisan Review. There were, he explained, three possible futures in a nuclear world: a preëmptive nuclear strike by the United States against the Soviet Union; a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, wiping out most of the race and returning life to the Bronze Age; and a stalemate created by the fear of actually using atomic bombs and other weapons of mass destruction—what would be known as the policy of mutually assured destruction. This third possibility, Orwell argued, was the worst of all:

It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast superstates, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion. In all probability their structure would be hierarchic, with a semi-divine caste at the top and outright slavery at the bottom, and the crushing out of liberty would exceed anything that the world has yet seen. Within each state the necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world, and by a continuous phony war against rival states. Civilizations of this type might remain static for thousands of years.

Orwell's third possibility was, of course, the path that history took. Mutually assured destruction was the guiding policy of the arms race and the Cold War. Orwell himself coined the term "Cold War," and after his death he became a hero to Cold Warriors, liberal and conservative alike. But he hated the idea of a Cold War—he preferred being bombed back to the Bronze Age—because it seems never to have entered his mind that the United States would be a force for liberty and democracy. "1984" is, precisely, Orwell's vision of what the Cold War might be like: a mindless and interminable struggle among totalitarian monsters. Was he right?

Some people in 1949 received "1984" as an attack on the Labour Party (in the book, the regime of Big Brother is said to have derived from the principles of "Ingsoc"; that is, English Socialism), and Orwell was compelled to issue, through his publisher, a statement clarifying his intentions. He was a supporter of the Labour Party, he said. "I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive," he continued, "but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences."

The attitude behind this last sentence seems to me the regrettable part of Orwell's legacy. If ideas were to stand or fall on the basis of their logically possible consequences, we would have no ideas, because the ultimate conceivable consequence of every idea is an absurdity—is, in some way, "against life." We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices, intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation; a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition—to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all. Orwell did not invent this kind of argument, but he provided, in "1984," a vocabulary for its deployment.

"Big Brother" and "doublethink" and "thought police" are frequently cited as contributions to the language. They are, but they belong to the same category as "liar" and "pervert" and "madman." They are conversation-stoppers. When a court allows videotape from a hidden camera to be used in a trial, people shout "Big Brother." When a politician refers to his proposal to permit logging on national land as "environmentally friendly," he is charged with "doublethink." When a critic finds sexism in a poem, she is accused of being a member of the "thought police." The terms can be used to discredit virtually any position, which is one of the reasons that Orwell became everyone's favorite political thinker. People learned to make any deviation from their own platform seem the first step on the slippery slope to "1984."

There are Big Brothers and thought police in the world, just as there are liars and madmen. "1984" may have been intended to expose the true character of Soviet Communism, but, because it describes a world in which there are no moral distinctions among the three fictional regimes that dominate the globe, it ended up encouraging people to see totalitarian "tendencies" everywhere. There was visible totalitarianism, in Russia and in Eastern Europe; but there was also the invisible totalitarianism of the so-called "free world." When people talk about Big Brother, they generally mean a system of covert surveillance and manipulation, oppression in democratic disguise (unlike the system in Orwell's book, which is so overt that it is advertised). "1984" taught people to imagine government as a conspiracy against liberty. This is why the John Birch Society used 1984 as the last four digits in the phone number of its Washington office.

Orwell himself was a sniffer of tendencies. He, too, could blur moral distinctions among the things he disliked, between the BBC and the Ministry of Love, for instance; he apparently thought of the Ministry of Love as the logical consequence of the mass media's "tendency" to thought control. His most celebrated conflation of dislikes is the essay, for many years a staple of the freshman-composition syllabus, "Politics and the English Language."

Orwell wrote many strong essays, but "Politics and the English Language," published in 1946, is not one of them. Half of the essay is an attack on bad prose. Orwell is against abstractions, mixed metaphors, Latinate roots, polysyllabic words, clichés, and most of the other stylistic vices identified in Fowler's "Modern English Usage" (in its fourth printing in 1946). The other half is an attack on political dishonesty. Certain political terms, Orwell argues, are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.

Fowler would have found nothing to complain about, though, in the sentences Orwell objects to. They are as clear as can be. Somehow, Orwell has run together his distaste for flowery, stale prose with his distaste for fascism, Stalinism, and Roman Catholicism. He makes it seem that the problem with fascism (and the rest) is, at bottom, a problem of style. They're bad, we are encouraged to feel, because their language is bad, because they're ugly.

This is not an isolated instance of this way of thinking in Orwell. From his earliest work, he was obsessed with body odor, and olfactory metaphors are probably the most consistent figure in his prose, right to the end of his life, when he congratulated Gandhi for leaving a clean smell when he died. But Orwell didn't think of the relation between smell and virtue as only metaphorical. He took quite seriously the question of whether it was ever possible to feel true solidarity with a man who smelled. Many pages in "The Road to Wigan Pier" are devoted to the problem. In his fiction, a bad character is, often, an ugly, sweaty, smelly character.

Smell has no relation to virtue, however. Ugliness has no relation to insincerity or evil, and short words with Anglo-Saxon roots have no relation to truth or goodness. Political speech, like etiquette, has its codes and its euphemisms, and Orwell is right to insist that it is important to be able to decipher them. He says that if what he calls political speech—by which he appears to mean political clichés—were translated into plain, everyday speech, confusion and insincerity would begin to evaporate. It is a worthy, if unrealistic, hope. But he does not stop there. All politics, he writes, "is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." And by the end of the essay he has damned the whole discourse: "Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable." All political parties? Orwell had sniffed out a tendency.

Orwell's prose was so effective that it seduced many readers into imagining, mistakenly, that he was saying what they wanted him to say, and what they themselves thought. Orwell was not clairvoyant; he was not infallible; he was not even consistent. He changed his mind about things, as most writers do. He dramatized out of a desire to make the world more the way he wished it to be, as most writers do. He also said what he thought without hedging or trimming, as few writers do all the time. It is strange how selectively he was heard. It is no tribute to him to turn his books into anthems to a status quo he hated. Orwell is admired for being a paragon when he was, self-consciously, a naysayer and a misfit. If he is going to be welcomed into the pantheon of right-thinking liberals, he should at least be allowed to bring along his goat.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?030127crat_atlarge

[Goofball]

As an American who is against what the Patriot Act could become, I must say this comment is stupid.

Were you joking or do you really think that America sometime in the future will be shoveling people who have bought a Koran into ovens?

Who said anything about ovens?


concentration camp
n.

A camp where civilians, enemy aliens, political prisoners, and sometimes prisoners of war are detained and confined, typically under harsh conditions.
A place or situation characterized by extremely harsh conditions.
And the comment is far from stupid, given that the U.S. has already established a konzentrationslager where they are holding undesirables indefinitely without charge.

I think Gitmo fills the definition quite accurately.

[Proletariat]

concentration camp
n.

1. A camp where civilians, enemy aliens, political prisoners, and sometimes prisoners of war are detained and confined, typically under harsh conditions.
2. A place or situation characterized by extremely harsh conditions.

Forcing the 20th hijacker to listen to Aguilera into the wee hours of the night?



I think Gitmo fills the definition quite accurately.

Big deal. So do some high schools.

[_Martyr_]

The seatbelt law actually affects me. The Patriot Act does not in any way, shape or form. Is that so hard to understand?


Surely it affects all Americans, and all foreigners in America at any given time? Just because it hasn't impacted you does not mean it doesnt affect you. The war in Iraq hasn't impacted me in the slightest... it still affects me.



You can try as hard as you like to trash Bush by claiming this is harming our rights as citizens, but until it does, youre only fulfilling your own fantasies about Bush.

I never said anything about Bush...? Its not Bush I would be worried about in relation to the Patriot Act or civil liberties. He's a jolly ould Texan with a distinctly "defined" view of the world, something of the sort that I personally would view as perhaps a little simplistic, but he certainly is not a bad man. More than anything else he is a puppet figurehead for much more sinister forces. If you question and oppose a seat belt safety law on the grounds that it could potentially be part of a broader movement that could lead to an Orwellian, big-brother state (as I believe you pointed out in the other thread). Then surely THIS is something to take note of for its massive potential for undoing core values. For someone who repeditively praises the merrits of small government, this seems remarkably inconsistant...? Could this be partisanism? Im not saying it is, but objectively evaluate your own position and at least allow yourself the oppertunity...







When this law affects me, anyone I know, or even anyone ive ever heard of, then Ill treat it like the seatbelt law.

But isnt that the dark beauty of totalitarianism, it is something that is permissably on the grounds of security (or whatever happens to be the flavour of the month... ) until it is impossible to stop, because any emerging totalitarian worth his weight in rice will first target the very things that can remove him. Im not saying that the Patriot Act IS designed as a direct plot to turn America into a fascist dictatorship, (...but then again, I'm not saying it isnt ~;) ) but was the "Rule by Decree" Article (Article 48) of the Weimar Constitution really designed to enable Hitler's rise? It was seen as a vital in ensuring that Germany could survive in the face of dangers, (and lets face it, the domestic issues that Weimar had to deal with, the shaking to the very core it received on an almost annual basis, I would say dwarf the dangers faced by the US from terrorism today). Yet it turned out to be one of the (if not, THE) biggest factors in Hitler's rise. These checks on Government control may not be removed by those that will abuse their absence, but once gone you have no protection from those that would. Once it begins to impact the majority of the population, its allready far too late. And one thing is clear as day, a liberty gone is a liberty gone. Once you wave goodbye to a civil liberty, your not likely to see it again. ~:(

[Tribesman]

Forcing the 20th hijacker to listen to Aguilera into the wee hours of the night?
Now that is an inhumane torture , stop it , have you no pity ~;)

No its more harsh as in indefinate detention without charge , let alone conviction .

[Goofball]

I don't mind listening to her music, as long as I can watch the video too.

Warning: Gratuitous cheesecake ahead:



































http://www.davidlachapelle.com/videos/aguilera.jpg

[zelda12]

As an American who is against what the Patriot Act could become, I must say this comment is stupid.

Were you joking or do you really think that America sometime in the future will be shoveling people who have bought a Koran into ovens?


Bit of both, the humour was in the extremes of dark. But there is a cause and effect dominoes possibilty whereby the Patriot act could set of a reaction of ever harsher laws aimed at, "protecting the people". The Patriot act is just one step in the direction, but one step can beget another unless constrained and forced back.

However it was slightly offensive and in bad taste so I apologise if I offended you.

[PanzerJaeger]

Surely it affects all Americans, and all foreigners in America at any given time? Just because it hasn't impacted you does not mean it doesnt affect you. The war in Iraq hasn't impacted me in the slightest... it still affects me.

How? Please, Mr. Irish Man explain to this dumb american how it has affected me, because I live here and Im having a hard time coming up with any impact, effect, or whatever you want to call it that the law has had on me or anyone i know or have even heard of. ~:confused:


never said anything about Bush...? Its not Bush I would be worried about in relation to the Patriot Act or civil liberties. He's a jolly ould Texan with a distinctly "defined" view of the world, something of the sort that I personally would view as perhaps a little simplistic, but he certainly is not a bad man. More than anything else he is a puppet figurehead for much more sinister forces.

Yawn. The sinister neocons havent hurt me, in fact im enjoying the tax breaks. ~;)


If you question and oppose a seat belt safety law on the grounds that it could potentially be part of a broader movement that could lead to an Orwellian, big-brother state (as I believe you pointed out in the other thread).

Actually I said the seatbelt law was not a big deal. However, a law that will help the government stop future 9/11's is a big deal.


Then surely THIS is something to take note of for its massive potential for undoing core values. For someone who repeditively praises the merrits of small government, this seems remarkably inconsistant...? Could this be partisanism? Im not saying it is, but objectively evaluate your own position and at least allow yourself the oppertunity...

This battle should have been fought during the FDR administration. The "information" gained by the government from the patriot act is tiny compared to what it already has.

I dont like the huge federal government we have here but im not going to make a mountain out of a mole hill over a law designed to protect us.

If you liberals are all of a sudden so worried about the government holding information on you, why dont you ever talk about Social Security or any of the other huge programs we have here? Why is it only a law supported by Bush? Could it be partisanship?


But isnt that the dark beauty of totalitarianism, it is something that is permissably on the grounds of security (or whatever happens to be the flavour of the month... ) until it is impossible to stop, because any emerging totalitarian worth his weight in rice will first target the very things that can remove him. Im not saying that the Patriot Act IS designed as a direct plot to turn America into a fascist dictatorship, (...but then again, I'm not saying it isnt ) but was the "Rule by Decree" Article (Article 48) of the Weimar Constitution really designed to enable Hitler's rise? It was seen as a vital in ensuring that Germany could survive in the face of dangers, (and lets face it, the domestic issues that Weimar had to deal with, the shaking to the very core it received on an almost annual basis, I would say dwarf the dangers faced by the US from terrorism today). Yet it turned out to be one of the (if not, THE) biggest factors in Hitler's rise. These checks on Government control may not be removed by those that will abuse their absence, but once gone you have no protection from those that would. Once it begins to impact the majority of the population, its allready far too late. And one thing is clear as day, a liberty gone is a liberty gone. Once you wave goodbye to a civil liberty, your not likely to see it again.

The difference is that Hitler burned down the Stag, or more correctly, had it burned down. 9/11 was an attack by a real enemy, and we need real protections against them.

It bothers me to see 9/11 increasingly downplayed by people with an agenda. You and your ilk should really go back and watch the videos before comparing the Patriot Act to Art. 48. Its disgusting, and it all has its roots in this unrational hatred of the President. I guarantee you that if Kerry had pushed for the renewal of the Patriot Act, not a word would be mentioned. :no:

[Ronin]

If youre not a terrorist, why should you worry?



Oh please.. How have you or your liberties been affected by the Patriot Act?

in this forum i read just yesterday someone describing the compulsory seat belt law like an infringement on personal liberties......

but the patriot act is no problem......go figure... :dizzy2:

[PanzerJaeger]

Said By PanzerJager in the seatbelt thread..


Couldnt have said it better myself. I thought i was the only one who had a problem with these "safety laws".

Goofball also had a point that this is a minor thing.. It should be included in a broader fight against all these safety laws.

[Tribesman]

anyone i know or have even heard of.
Ummm read post 26 , if you havn't heard of Cat Stephens I am sure you heard of Ted Kennedy or that Republican Congressman whose name eludes me at the moment .

[_Martyr_]

How? Please, Mr. Irish Man explain to this dumb american how it has affected me, because I live here and Im having a hard time coming up with any impact, effect, or whatever you want to call it that the law has had on me or anyone i know or have even heard of.
Well Mr. American Man (...hey, lets remember that we are both German citizens, if we are going to start throwing nationalities around for some reason! ;) ) something affects you when it can potentially impact you. The Patriot Act affects you because the FBI or NSA or some agency neither of us know exists, CAN barge in on you in the next 4 seconds, imprison you or generally do with you as they wish, and you wouldnt even get a lawyer. It hasnt impacted you (...yet) and may never (lets hope so), but it still affects you directly. To bring the German thing back into it, Im sure if youve got German Grandparents, you can hear all about it from them. Hitler and the Nazi's didnt impact my Grandparents at all, untill my Grandfather was made join the Luftwaffe, and my Grandmother's brother was killed in Russia. Ask 99% of that generation in 1935 if Hitler's coercive policies against the perceicved threat bothered them, and you would have got a good resounding "NO". Many would have praised them for their affect of seemingly preventing another Reichstag fire (even if van der Lubbe didnt do it, we are talking about perception here not fact).



If you liberals are all of a sudden so worried about the government holding information on you, why dont you ever talk about Social Security or any of the other huge programs we have here? Why is it only a law supported by Bush? Could it be partisanship?
On the risk of sounding a little offensive, but what a bloody typical stereotypical American way of responding. "you liberals"... as if anything was as simple as liberals/conservatives, black/white, with us/against us, etc... etc.. for crying out load, PLEASE dont lump me and any/everyone who happens not to agree with you in as "Liberal". As if that somehow makes it easier to dismiss what they have to say. Its pathetic! There are infinite shades of grey, something that is being quickly lost in the increasingly polarised America of today. Sorry for this little outburst, but its infuriating! :bomb:

Perhaps I'm misinformed, but can Social Security come into your home, arrest you without charge? Do anything remotely like what the Patriot Act allows, are they even at all comparible, or are you just muddying the waters with something you disagree with? Anyway, I would rate the American Democratic party as on almost the same level as the Republican, I'm no fan of either, believe me! Its not Partisan in my case at least...



The difference is that Hitler burned down the Stag, or more correctly, had it burned down. 9/11 was an attack by a real enemy, and we need real protections against them.

Maybe you misunderstood exactly what I said, or are not familiar with this particular period of German History, but Article 48 had nothing to do with Hitler in its conception. It was part of the 1919 Weimar Constitution as a security measure against domestic subversive forces (ironically, including Hitler and his Munich boys himself!!!), which staged coup after revolution after revolt. It was a miracle that the Government survived at all IMO. Fascism as we know it had not even been born properly yet, but it was a fatal weakness in the armour of democracy. Then when Hitler came into the picture, this avenue opened a clear path to Total control, it was almost handed to him on a plate. All that was needed was another "national emergency", the Reichstag Fire, and the by now senile von Hindenburg practically declared Hitler Fuhrer! Im not equating the Sept 11 attacks with the Reichstag fire, Im saying that they are similar to the tumultous political evens that prompted German lawmakers to include such foolish provisions in their laws. Which then were exploited a generation later by a certain failed artist from Veinna to acheive his goals.

:oops:

[PanzerJaeger]

Well Mr. American Man (...hey, lets remember that we are both German citizens, if we are going to start throwing nationalities around for some reason! ;) ) something affects you when it can potentially impact you. The Patriot Act affects you because the FBI or NSA or some agency neither of us know exists, CAN barge in on you in the next 4 seconds, imprison you or generally do with you as they wish, and you wouldnt even get a lawyer. It hasnt impacted you (...yet) and may never (lets hope so), but it still affects you directly. To bring the German thing back into it, Im sure if youve got German Grandparents, you can hear all about it from them. Hitler and the Nazi's didnt impact my Grandparents at all, untill my Grandfather was made join the Luftwaffe, and my Grandmother's brother was killed in Russia. Ask 99% of that generation in 1935 if Hitler's coercive policies against the perceicved threat bothered them, and you would have got a good resounding "NO". Many would have praised them for their affect of seemingly preventing another Reichstag fire (even if van der Lubbe didnt do it, we are talking about perception here not fact).

Again with Nazi Germany. The comparisons are almost as infuriating as me calling you a liberal. ~;)

The thing is these powers are already held by the government. The patriot act only makes it easier. Instead of having to wait 5 days to see a judge for a warrent theyll just do what they would have done anyway. With or without the Patriot act, the government can already do all sorts of monitoring if it feels you are a criminal.

The difference between America and Nazi Germany is that people who are not criminals need not fear the intrusion. To be perfectly honest, American citizens lost much of their privacy from the government before I was even a citizen - i dont see the big deal made over a law that continues down that path.. Why didnt people rise up earlier when all the government needed was a rubber stamp from a circuit court judge to do the exact same thing to a citizen who was not a criminal?


Perhaps I'm misinformed, but can Social Security come into your home, arrest you without charge? Do anything remotely like what the Patriot Act allows, are they even at all comparible, or are you just muddying the waters with something you disagree with? Anyway, I would rate the American Democratic party as on almost the same level as the Republican, I'm no fan of either, believe me! Its not Partisan in my case at least...

The original argument was over the information the government could obtain about you - that is why I brought SS into the equation.

As I said earlier, if the argument has shifted to the scary fact that the government can come into your house and grab you if they feel it neccessary - well thats been existent long before the Patriot Act and America is still a republic.


Maybe you misunderstood exactly what I said, or are not familiar with this particular period of German History, but Article 48 had nothing to do with Hitler in its conception. It was part of the 1919 Weimar Constitution as a security measure against domestic subversive forces (ironically, including Hitler and his Munich boys himself!!!), which staged coup after revolution after revolt. It was a miracle that the Government survived at all IMO. Fascism as we know it had not even been born properly yet, but it was a fatal weakness in the armour of democracy. Then when Hitler came into the picture, this avenue opened a clear path to Total control, it was almost handed to him on a plate. All that was needed was another "national emergency", the Reichstag Fire, and the by now senile von Hindenburg practically declared Hitler Fuhrer! Im not equating the Sept 11 attacks with the Reichstag fire, Im saying that they are similar to the tumultous political evens that prompted German lawmakers to include such foolish provisions in their laws. Which then were exploited a generation later by a certain failed artist from Veinna to acheive his goals.

Im very familiar with that period of history. That is why I took your point to its logical conclusion - the Stag fire. What I am saying is that the Patriot Act is being used against real enemies, not percieved ones.

As I said earlier, if people who are so upset by the Patriot act are truly worried about America becoming a totalitarian state, why did they only choose to speak up after so many years of having such a large government?

The time to fight against intrusive laws and big government were in the 30s and 40s - not in 2005 against a law that is helping us fight against the people who perpetrated 9/11.

If a future leader wants to take power much in the same way Hitler did, the framework was established long before the Patriot Act. Its simply up to us to make informed decisions about our leaders.

[_Martyr_]

The answer to most of your questions is that the Patriot Act removes the Judicary, the one branch of the government that is independent of the Legislators and the Executive (at least its meant to be...) from this process. Pretty dangerous wouldnt you say? Those checks on the Government are there for a damn good reason, removing them is about as bad as ideas get imo. Lets not be idealistic, the American Gov, and the Agencies which carry out its biddings, are just as fallable as any other human institutions out there. Removing constraints designed to protect a country from itself has never just been about efficiency.

[ichi]

The difference between America and Nazi Germany is that people who are not criminals need not fear the intrusion.

There's a long history of abuses that denies this.

The difference between America and Nazi Germany is that we haven't condoned shoving jews into ovens, but IMHO its pretty naive to think that a law as powerful as the Patriot Act isn't without it's dangers.

It seems that some Republicans have come to their senses, and realized that we don't need to have the ability to pry into people's lives, even innocent hard-working non-criminal lives, without a few checks and balances.

I pay my taxes, don't blow people up, and generally am law-abiding, and the Patriot Act makes me nervous. If someone else doesn't mind it, that's OK, but I'm glad the House has come to its senses and stepped back from a slippery edge.

ichi :bow:

[Gawain of Orkeny]

The answer to most of your questions is that the Patriot Act removes the Judicary, the one branch of the government that is independent of the Legislators and the Executive (at least its meant to be...) from this process.

It does not remove it. You still have to see a judge, just a special one. Also it may have slipped by you all but even this has never been used. Once more our drug laws are far more invasive of our privacy as is the tax return the government requires us to file every year. The Patriot act as its wriiten now doesnt threaten me at all. Without security there is no freedom.

[Xiahou]

Once more our drug laws are far more invasive of our privacy as is the tax return the government requires us to file every year.Very true, as are many of the laws created to fight organized crime. There is a bunch of spin taking place on this subject- the most upsetting part of this I know of are the sneak and peek searches, but these have been possible in non-terrorism cases for a long time. I also understand that Feds want the ability to write their own 'national security' warrants, but I think that was a proposed expansion of the PATRIOT Act- one which is unlikely to be passed, nor would I want it to be.

So far, I really haven't heard anything but scare tactics and fear mongering from opponents of the Act. Can someone point out something 'new and terrible' under the PATRIOT Act that wasnt already possible elsewhere? If someone wants to work themselves into a lather over something, why not look into the RICO Act?

[bmolsson]

Ive been living under the patriot act for a few years now and - big surprise - nothing has changed. That might have to do with the fact Im a law abiding citizen though. ~;)

Interesting, that is what the most Chinese says under the communist rule as well..... ~;)

[Al Khalifah]

The seatbelt law actually affects me. The Patriot Act does not in any way, shape or form. Is that so hard to understand?

Sorry to keep going back to the pre-war Germany references, especially given the nationality of the person under-fire here. I don't like digging up this period from the past but I think this poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller is especially relevant for this quoute:

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.

The poem isn't Nazi specific. If you tolerate unfair or extreme measures because they don't affect you, then don't be surprised when one day extreme measures are introduced that do affect you and nobody stands up for you.

[doc_bean]

Very true, as are many of the laws created to fight organized crime.

Probably true, I think it's a good thing that people are standing up for their rights again. This is a good first step. The war on terrorism and the war on drugs can (and have) been used against law-abiding citizens of the US. The patriot act probably less so. Although, apparently, you can get arrested for trying to translate/publish an Arab book.

The point is that the powers of government should be limited, surely every republican can agree with that ? Otherwise, why have the Bill of Rights, you could just trust your government and surely nothing bad will happen to you ? The Patriot Act was a clear attack on the separation between the private and the public, the basis of the first amendment, and if you check the Federalist papers, one of the founding principles of the US democracy.

And let's face it, it's a waste of money. Checking kids that want to read about Islam ? Monitoring debate groups that talk about how we should have world peace ? You can never have perfect security in a free country. You'll just have the learn to live with that. A terrorist can always find a way. That, of course, doesn't mean you can't try to stop them, but you have to focus your efforts, and you have to make sure no innocents get hurt along the way.

The Patriot act gives too much room for possible abuse.

[Al Khalifah]

Monitoring debate groups that talk about how we should have world peace ?
Let's hope they don't read the org then otherwise we're all doomed apart from PanzerJager.

[PanzerJaeger]

Sorry to keep going back to the pre-war Germany references, especially given the nationality of the person under-fire here. I don't like digging up this period from the past but I think this poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller is especially relevant for this quoute:

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.

The poem isn't Nazi specific. If you tolerate unfair or extreme measures because they don't affect you, then don't be surprised when one day extreme measures are introduced that do affect you and nobody stands up for you.

Youve made my point for me. The patriot act hasnt "come for" anybody.

Its funny to see certain people so opposed to the patriot act, after not making a sound during the Reno dictatorship.

[_Martyr_]

Reno, Reno... That was either 1993 or 1996 was it not. Either way I was either 7 or 10 years old at the time. Forgive me for not being more vocal! ~;)

Anyway, didnt the ACLU successfully battle some of its implementation in court? Seems pretty consistant to me, not just against something Bush-backed.

[PanzerJaeger]

Im talking about Janet Reno and the true infringement of rights during the Clinton administration.

If you really want an example of the government bursting into a place and shooting it up - look at Waco. ~:eek:

[_Martyr_]

Ok, I thought you were talking about the Communications Decency Act or whatever it was called... I know well who Reno was, I just assumed you were reffering to a specific Act, not the period of her office in general.

And again, should I have been more vocal as 5 - 10 year old about the civil liberty encroachments in another country?? Surely I can only protest and speak against what is happening in my time? And wasnt the ACLU up in arms about this stuff?

[Al Khalifah]

The patriot act hasnt "come for" anybody.
On the contrary. Many people have been detained on grounds made lawful under the Patriot Act.

[Xiahou]

And let's face it, it's a waste of money. Checking kids that want to read about Islam ? Monitoring debate groups that talk about how we should have world peace ? You can never have perfect security in a free country. You'll just have the learn to live with that. A terrorist can always find a way. That, of course, doesn't mean you can't try to stop them, but you have to focus your efforts, and you have to make sure no innocents get hurt along the way.

The Patriot act gives too much room for possible abuse.Can someone show me where this is delineated in the PATRIOT Act? As far as I know, monitoring library records and debate groups is already allowable with court approval. How has this changed?

[PanzerJaeger]

On the contrary. Many people have been detained on grounds made lawful under the Patriot Act.

Who?

[PanzerJaeger]

And again, should I have been more vocal as 5 - 10 year old about the civil liberty encroachments in another country?? Surely I can only protest and speak against what is happening in my time? And wasnt the ACLU up in arms about this stuff?

The point was: people who have a problem with the Patriot Act didnt seem to have a problem with the much greater infringements of previous years. The supposed outrage is very political in nature.

[doc_bean]

Can someone show me where this is delineated in the PATRIOT Act? As far as I know, monitoring library records and debate groups is already allowable with court approval. How has this changed?

Well, it's what the original post was about.

I think the 'court approval' part got changed, or at least that's what the leftist media leads me to believe.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

I think the 'court approval' part got changed, or at least that's what the leftist media leads me to believe.

They do their job well dont they? Again its just what judge you have to go in front of that has changed.

[Xiahou]

Right, my understanding is that approval by a federal judge is still required. The difference is that it allows the hearings to be fast tracked to an intelligence court that will handle such requests in a more timely manner- still federal judges though.

[Tribesman]

Well Panzer since you havn't changed you mind over the Patriot Act like you said you would if you had heard of anyone who had been affected by it I shall assume that was a bluff . I mean surely you had heard of Ted kennedy his family have been in American politics for a long time , one of them even achieved the highest office in the country .

So onto a different track .
The patriot act hasnt "come for" anybody.
Yes the 1200+ people detained in the early life of the legislation were nobody really , there were tentative links established between 10-15 of them and Al-Qaida , but none were linked to 9/11 in any way and none were charged with any terrorism related offences . Then you have the second batch of 800+ people followed by a third batch of 1000+ , and it goes on and on .

Who?
Very good question , who indeed ?
Well there is a a little thing in the act (section 201) that means that the government does not have to identify who they have detained under the act indefinately , until they have criminal charges filed against them , even if those persons are American ctizens .
So far out of the thousands detained how many have been charged with anything ? Less than 200 , of those few how many were charged with terrorist related offences ? 39 !!!! of those 39 how many were charged in connection to middle eastern terrorism (not just Al-qaida) ? Less than a third .
And one of those is being charged with falsely claiming that he had links to Al-Qaida and knew of bomb plots against 5 American cities .
So despite the all encompassing powers of this act what has it achieved ?
Practically bugger all .
One example of a really dangerous individual who was detained under the act was Farouk Abdel-Muhti . Two years in detention without legal counsel or any recourse to justice . Then he is just released with no apology or anything , they coundn't even get him on immigration violations .
His supposed "crime" which led to his loss of Liberty ?
He campaigned politically against the Israeli occupation of Palestine . ~:confused:

Since the American German and the Irish German have bought up the Riechstag fire and the similarities between the laws passed then and the Patriot Act maybe it is an idea to compare the "Verordnung des Reichsprasidenten zum Shutz von Volk und Staat" of 1933 with the American version . One difference is that the German version was written and passed within 24 hours of the "attack" , congress took slightly longer ~;)

[Taffy_is_a_Taff]

I like to think that Ted Kennedy was detained by some ordinary working guy who was fed up with the everybody's favourite gangster family's alcoholic bloated idiot (or Ted as we like to call him).

[Xiahou]

Who?
Very good question , who indeed ?
Well there is a a little thing in the act (section 201) that means that the government does not have to identify who they have detained under the act indefinately , until they have criminal charges filed against them , even if those persons are American ctizens .

Sec. 201. Authority to intercept wire, oral, and electronic communications relating to terrorism.
Huh? Where's the part about 'ghosting' US citizens?

Do you have any credible links to support any of those claims?

[Spetulhu]

The point was: people who have a problem with the Patriot Act didnt seem to have a problem with the much greater infringements of previous years. The supposed outrage is very political in nature.

It may have something to do with publicity. Having the WTC towers knocked down made people pay attention to the laws being passed. The organized crime laws open for abuse just didn't gather as much public interest.

[PanzerJaeger]

Well Panzer since you havn't changed you mind over the Patriot Act like you said you would if you had heard of anyone who had been affected by it I shall assume that was a bluff . I mean surely you had heard of Ted kennedy his family have been in American politics for a long time , one of them even achieved the highest office in the country .

LoL Ted Kennedy seems to be just fine, and not cowwed at all - same with Cat Stephens, or Islam Dumbass, or whatever he changed his name to. What am I not getting, these guys arent in jail and still blowing plenty of hot air.



So onto a different track .
The patriot act hasnt "come for" anybody.
Yes the 1200+ people detained in the early life of the legislation were nobody really , there were tentative links established between 10-15 of them and Al-Qaida , but none were linked to 9/11 in any way and none were charged with any terrorism related offences . Then you have the second batch of 800+ people followed by a third batch of 1000+ , and it goes on and on .

Who?
Very good question , who indeed ?
Well there is a a little thing in the act (section 201) that means that the government does not have to identify who they have detained under the act indefinately , until they have criminal charges filed against them , even if those persons are American ctizens .
So far out of the thousands detained how many have been charged with anything ? Less than 200 , of those few how many were charged with terrorist related offences ? 39 !!!! of those 39 how many were charged in connection to middle eastern terrorism (not just Al-qaida) ? Less than a third .
And one of those is being charged with falsely claiming that he had links to Al-Qaida and knew of bomb plots against 5 American cities .
So despite the all encompassing powers of this act what has it achieved ?
Practically bugger all .
One example of a really dangerous individual who was detained under the act was Farouk Abdel-Muhti . Two years in detention without legal counsel or any recourse to justice . Then he is just released with no apology or anything , they coundn't even get him on immigration violations .
His supposed "crime" which led to his loss of Liberty ?
He campaigned politically against the Israeli occupation of Palestine .

I see that the law is working quite well. People with links to Al Q are picked up and kept until they are determined to be a threat or not.

I can come up with plenty of people in prison who didnt commit the crime they were accused of, that doesnt mean we should disband the court system does it?

Your numbers only show around 2000 people picked up, and many released - is this what the big fuss is about?

Do you want to take a guess at what percentage had ties to terrorist groups.. id say that number would be high.



I just dont see what the big deal is. In a nation of 300 million, 2000 people - many if not most with tangible ties to terror organizations - are picked up and released once deemed not a threat. Id say the law is doing just what its supposed to and not any more.

If you want to get angry about something, get angry about the organized crime laws.. thats where this whole thing got started - and under which president. ~;)

[Red Harvest]

"The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either."
Benjamin Franklin


Says it all really.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

"The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either."
Benjamin Franklin

You cannot have freedom without having security first. If this quote were true then Franklin Roosevelt deserved neither.

[bmolsson]

Im talking about Janet Reno and the true infringement of rights during the Clinton administration.


So that is your argument for Patriot Act ??? Interesting.... :balloon2:

[Xiahou]

"The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either."
Benjamin Franklin


Says it all really.
And yet, no one has of yet come up with anything specific against the PATRIOT Act. It's all been nothing but fear mongering so far. Again, I invite anyone to delineate anything in the Act that strips away our rights or freedoms that werent already stripped away by other acts.

Surely, for people to be so outraged and upset about it, they must at least have some idea of what new infringements on our freedom that it allows for.. right?

[Red Harvest]

And yet, no one has of yet come up with anything specific against the PATRIOT Act. It's all been nothing but fear mongering so far. Again, I invite anyone to delineate anything in the Act that strips away our rights or freedoms that werent already stripped away by other acts.

Surely, for people to be so outraged and upset about it, they must at least have some idea of what new infringements on our freedom that it allows for.. right?

There have been plenty of abuses already. You, of course, will ignore and excuse them all. ...yawn...

[Tribesman]

What am I not getting, these guys arent in jail and still blowing plenty of hot air.
But Panzer you said affected not imprisoned .
Your numbers only show around 2000 people picked up, and many released - is this what the big fuss is about?
You must have missed this part and it goes on and on . but they have stopped releasing the figures a long time ago .
People with links to Al Q are picked up and kept until they are determined to be a threat or not.
People without links to Al-Qaida are being picked up and detained , do you not have a problem with detaining innocent people , I thought you said no one has to worry unless they are a criminal or a terrorist . that is clearly not the case .

Do you have any credible links to support any of those claims?
Xiahou it was taken from numerous government and non governmental sites avoiding media sources . I must have made a mistake with the 201 section , I think that came from the Cato institute paper on the breaches of the constitution and the abuse of executive powers .
I invite anyone to delineate anything in the Act that strips away our rights or freedoms that werent already stripped away by other acts.
The thing is it extends the powers of earlier acts into areas where they were never intended to be used , the extention of the foriegn intelligence evidence thing that was brought in under Carter is one example of lowering the threshold of what is described as credible evidence and applying it to cases where it was not designed to be used . Even the special court that was formed in 1978 to deal with secret evidence and issue warrants and approvals condemned the act and the abuses that have taken place under the act . Previously that court had only ever turned down one request from the government or security services .

A rather good example of the abuse of the act and the powers it gives the authorities is that of Micheal Garadi . What the hell has a strip club and police and governmental corruption got to do with terrorism ?
Or Josh Connole , what has an environmentalist got to do with Al-qaida ?

[PanzerJaeger]

People without links to Al-Qaida are being picked up and detained , do you not have a problem with detaining innocent people , I thought you said no one has to worry unless they are a criminal or a terrorist . that is clearly not the case .

You have hardly shown that these people detained were innocent. Do you know why most people in Gitmo arent charged? Do you realize how long and drawn out the trials would be? This isnt a game, its war, and you have neglected to show me anything wrong with the Patriot Act. Its doing what it was designed to - help authorities fight terror. If you are so concerned about people being detained speak out about drug laws or mafia laws.. they can take people and scare the shit out of them just to get information.

[Tribesman]

Do you realize how long and drawn out the trials would be?
Yes it is a bit of a bugger when your courts keep on telling the government that they cannot do things isn't it , abolish the judiciary ~D
Oh dear oh dear what has the world come to , they must be guilty because they were detained , they can't be charged or have a trial because it is too much hassle , they were released not because they were innocent but because the authorities felt like it . Yes I can see the beacon of justice shining brightly :dizzy2:
If you are so concerned about people being detained speak out about drug laws or mafia laws.. they can take people and scare the shit out of them just to get information.
And the connection there is ? oh yes , these specific laws have been expanded into the new catch all act of patriotism .

[doc_bean]

You have hardly shown that these people detained were innocent. Do you know why most people in Gitmo arent charged? Do you realize how long and drawn out the trials would be?

You don't have to prove innocence, you have to prove guilt, and that it would take long is just the prize you pay. You can hold 'em until the trial, then hold them after the trial. The point is, there should be a trial ~D

The Bill of Rights doesn't refer to citizens, it specifically says no person. IIRC the Supreme Court also said that it was unconstitutional, and they are hardly bleeding heart liberals.

[PanzerJaeger]

How many of the Japanese were given trials during ww2 when America detained them?

We need to sit down as a nation and figure out if we want to conduct a real war or if we're just playing a game.

[doc_bean]

How many of the Japanese were given trials during ww2 when America detained them?

We need to sit down as a nation and figure out if we want to conduct a real war or if we're just playing a game.

It's an ideological war, so stay true to your ideas !

The term 'war' is used way to often these days, in regard to things that are nothing like a war. A war has clear enemies, a war is fought against other nations, a war is fought with military means.

The war on terror is not a war, you can't identify a terrorist as you could identify a nazi, they don't walk around in uniforms. There is no war against other nations (Iraq was not part of the actual war on terror, it was a side project to get rid of Saddam, someone who didn't like terrorists much). The terrorist also don't have an army, there are no battles in this war. The terrorists are also not one organisation, you can stop Al Qaida (possibly) but another organization will take its place in time. There is no chance of military victory, or victory in any traditional sense.

The war on drugs was/is even worse though. Much more than the war on terror it is a 'war' against the people of the US.

The problem of the term 'war' isn't so much that they use the word, but that some people feel like there is an actual 'war' going on. There simply isn't. You can't win this by applying war tactics, unless you kill everyone outside the US, even then, McVeigh (or whatever he was called) was an American !

[Xiahou]

There have been plenty of abuses already. You, of course, will ignore and excuse them all. ...yawn...
You'd have to post links to some before I can ignore and excuse them. Surely if there are "plenty", you could find a few documented cases. ~:handball:

I'm surprised that everyone is so upset about something without even knowing what's really written in it or not. Here (http://www.cato.org/events/patriot-overview.pdf) is a pdf from the Center for Democracy and Technology that basically outlines their concerns about the USA PATRIOT Act. According to them, there are a few instances of surveillance being authorized without or with very limited judicial oversight. Also, they mention the sneak & peak searches which I've already said I don't care for. In theory, I could be ok with most of the provisions if they required more not less judicial oversight. Fortunately, some of the provisions are set to expire in December and some are already being adressed by congress. PATRIOT Act 2 or any of the "expansions" Bush supports have no chance of passing Congress.

Other things, like information sharing between the FBI and CIA do not concern me too much. And again, the amount of misinformation going around on this subject is frightening.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

The Bill of Rights doesn't refer to citizens,

It is the US bill of rights. It pertains only to citizens of the US and people who are in the country. Thats why these people arent allowed in the US. The bill of rights doesnt give say Frenchmen any rights unless their on US soil.

Lets look at the amendment that would seem to cover this matter.


Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

OK what state and district are these guys accused of commiting a crime in? They are not criminals their illegal combatants.

[doc_bean]

OK what state and district are these guys accused of commiting a crime in? They are not criminals their illegal combatants.

You're right, I got it confused with the wording of the 5th.

The point of the Bill of Rights was to get the rights in the Declaration of independence in the constitution though and these rights belong to all:


We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

[bmolsson]

They are not criminals their illegal combatants.


You mean like the gang members with a machine gun ??

[Red Harvest]

You'd have to post links to some before I can ignore and excuse them. Surely if there are "plenty", you could find a few documented cases. ~:handball:


I'm not interested in wasting the time discussing it with you, simple as that. Ben Franklin hit the nail on the head. There is plenty already documented. There are many examples of the administration holding people too, claiming all sorts of things, only to completely reverse themselves.



Other things, like information sharing between the FBI and CIA do not concern me too much. And again, the amount of misinformation going around on this subject is frightening.

Yes, and most of it is being put out by the current administration. :balloon2:
The Bush admin is a terrible abuser of power. They lie without remorse to get what they want. Exhibit A: Iraq. I actually didn't have a problem with going after Saddam and Iraq. The admin's justification was a problem...complete fabrication. And their execution scores a "D" at best. The Bush admin is a poster child for limiting the power of the president. He has shown clearly that he cannot wield it responsibly. We never should have given authorization for the Iraq war to such a man. I hope our liberty can survive his administration.

I could go into the long list of lies and misinformation, but as I've said, it isn't worth trying to discuss with you.

[Proletariat]

Yes, and most of it is being put out by the current administration. :balloon2:
The Bush admin is a terrible abuser of power. They lie without remorse to get what they want. Exhibit A: Iraq. I actually didn't have a problem with going after Saddam and Iraq. The admin's justification was a problem...complete fabrication. And their execution scores a "D" at best. The Bush admin is a poster child for limiting the power of the president. He has shown clearly that he cannot wield it responsibly. We never should have given authorization for the Iraq war to such a man. I hope our liberty can survive his administration.


What the hell does any of this have to do with the Patriot Act?

Oh yeah, you're here to not discuss that. Nice contribution.

[Red Harvest]

What the hell does any of this have to do with the Patriot Act?

Oh yeah, you're here to not discuss that. Nice contribution.


Abuse of power by this admin has EVERYTHING to do with the Patriot Act. I thought that was rather obvious...

[Gawain of Orkeny]

The point of the Bill of Rights was to get the rights in the Declaration of independence in the constitution though and these rights belong to all:

Quote:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Well its good to see that you are one of the few people who realize that the Declaration of independence is indeed the founding document of the USA and not the constitution. However the Declaration of Independence
declares our independence from Britain. It does not have any sway outside of the US. Or are you suggesting that everyone in the world is covered by that declaration and its the job of the US to make sure everyone enjoys these rights?


You mean like the gang members with a machine gun ??

If their on US soil their criminals. Is that so hard to comprehend?

[Proletariat]

Abuse of power by this admin has EVERYTHING to do with the Patriot Act. I thought that was rather obvious...

It's an obvious attack ad hominem.

So you are deigning to speak about the Patriot Act?

[doc_bean]

Well its good to see that you are one of the few people who realize that the Declaration of independence is indeed the founding document of the USA and not the constitution. However the Declaration of Independence
declares our independence from Britain. It does not have any sway outside of the US.

I disagree, the declaration is, in part, a philosophical essay that details the rights of men, and then goes on to blame the King for violating those rights. then goes on to say that they declare their independence. These rights of men are universal, the independence was a way of guarding them.



Or are you suggesting that everyone in the world is covered by that declaration

The first parts tells of universal truths, see my original quote. It applies to all .


and its the job of the US to make sure everyone enjoys these rights?

No, but they shouldn't deny others those rights.



If their on US soil their criminals. Is that so hard to comprehend?

It feels like a bit of an arbitrary measure.

[PanzerJaeger]

Yes, and most of it is being put out by the current administration.
The Bush admin is a terrible abuser of power. They lie without remorse to get what they want. Exhibit A: Iraq. I actually didn't have a problem with going after Saddam and Iraq. The admin's justification was a problem...complete fabrication. And their execution scores a "D" at best. The Bush admin is a poster child for limiting the power of the president. He has shown clearly that he cannot wield it responsibly. We never should have given authorization for the Iraq war to such a man. I hope our liberty can survive his administration.

Hahaa that was hilarious. You should really give Al Franken a run for his money. Youve got the theatrics, hysterics, and a better vocabulary. You should call up Rolling Stone and make some money off your vitriol.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

I disagree, the declaration is, in part, a philosophical essay that details the rights of men, and then goes on to blame the King for violating those rights. then goes on to say that they declare their independence. These rights of men are universal, the independence was a way of guarding them.

Yes it is inpart. But it still pertains only as the reason that we have the right to independence from Britain. It is used as the basis that givesthe constitution its authority. If you look you see we became the United States in 1776 with the Decalration of Independence. The Constitution came along much later and we dont celebrate our nationhood on the day it was signed. I believe we are discussing law here and not philosophy.

[BDC]

Hahaa that was hilarious. You should really give Al Franken a run for his money. Youve got the theatrics, hysterics, and a better vocabulary. You should call up Rolling Stone and make some money off your vitriol.
Well it's true. There was a complete absence of WMDs that can be launched in 45 mins against invading forces and it's just turned into a big mess.

Don't think liberty will exactly vanish, but hopefully Americans will show more cynacism after this.

[doc_bean]

Yes it is inpart. But it still pertains only as the reason that we have the right to independence from Britain. It is used as the basis that givesthe constitution its authority. If you look you see we became the United States in 1776 with the Decalration of Independence. The Constitution came along much later and we dont celebrate our nationhood on the day it was signed. I believe we are discussing law here and not philosophy.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3867067.stm

If we're just talking law here, the Supreme Court has ruled they are entitled to a trial.

Don't you Americans have something like 'spirit of the law' ? I was arguing that if you view the declaration and the Bill of Rights together, they should be entitled to a trial.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

If we're just talking law here, the Supreme Court has ruled they are entitled to a trial.

No it didnt, it said this


The overall ruling of the court was: "United States courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay."

The court then described how this should happen. It accepted the argument from lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights that the Federal District Court in Washington DC (to which the case was first brought) does have jurisdiction to hear the prisoners' petition, under the "habeas corpus" law, that they are held "in custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States." "

It said the court could consider the matter. Also the supreme court is wrong as often as it is right. Their not infalable.

[Tribesman]

Also the supreme court is wrong as often as it is right
Abolish the Judiciary .... we don't need anyone to tell us what is legal or illegal . :help:

[doc_bean]

It said the court could consider the matter. Also the supreme court is wrong as often as it is right. Their not infalable.

Well, thanks to judical review, their word is law.

I've been trying to find what the DC court's ruling was but I'm not able to find it. :furious3:

[Red Harvest]

It's an obvious attack ad hominem.

So you are deigning to speak about the Patriot Act?

I could go into specifics, but it is a waste of time, so I won't. The Franklin quote does a better job of summing my objections than any other I could make. The Patriot Act should be considered item by item. Anything that is not absolutely necessary should be removed. It was an emergency act, that's why it was given an expiration. Emergency acts rarely make good law.