For Our Own Good

YOU ARE BEING WATCHED






Didja see this? I know YDG did.
Seems this 14-year old girl posted a "death threat" on the Preznit's life on her myspace blog , but removed it nearly 18 months ago, after finding out that making such threats is illegal.

It took the Secret Service nearly a year and a half to track this girl down, eventually nabbing her in her secret terror lab, er, high school biology class.
What took them so long to find her?
Paperwork.
No kidding- until today, the Government had to follow certain procedures and protocols when questioning U.S. citizens, you had a right known as habeas corpus,which prevented the Government from arbitrarily imprisoning you without showing cause and providing due process. In this girl's case, it's likely that her website was reported by a third party and given a suitably low assignment priority by the Service... eventually someone's caseload queue was due for review-and the law does require the SS to investigate any reported threats- so they had to send a couple goons to intimidate the kid- now they can get their paperwork signed and move on. They were probably not terribly happy about having to waste time hassling a kid, but the paperwork needed to be done.

The girl didn't really have much to worry about, she had the Constitution to protect her from unlawful imprisonment and it's parasitic twin, torture.

In Brown v. Vasquez, 952 F.2d 1164, 1166 (9th Cir. 1991), cert. denied, 112 S.Ct. 1778 (1992), the court observed that the Supreme Court has "recognized the fact that`[t]he writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.'

Now that BushCo has removed that safeguard, the Service doesn't need to follow any sort of procedure, there is no check on what they can do. If Bush says that girl is an enemy combatant, he is within his rights to order her imprisoned and questioned, for as long as he wants, without giving her so much as a reason for doing it. He doesn't need to tell her parents.
A lawyer or right to counsel? Forget it!
One phone call? Ha!
The right to question why you are being held?
Fair trial?
Har! That's so 1787.
So pre-9/11.
Now that the bill has been signed, how long will it be before the first person is abducted and imprisoned without cause or counsel?
It may have already happened. How would we know?
There's no accountabilty, there's no power for the detainee to appeal to.

In theory, Bush could have his critics whisked away to secret CIA fun camps, just for speaking against him- or his opponents held for voting against his policies.

Will it come to that? Eventually it will, if not by Bush, then by someone else.
Anybody remember Dick Nixon? He sure as hell would have started rounding people up if he could have. Man, he'd have loved this new bill...
This new power will either get revoked or it will get abused.
Power always gets abused unless checked.
Always.

Or should I say 'further abused'?