That being said, it's pretty amazing that the DNC poster children continue to bang away at the illusion of all civil liberties being yanked by White House Monarchy. What a lot of rubbish. I give you Max Boot from the Los Angeles Times; hardly the Haliburton house organ:
What right does that fascist in the White House have to imprison Michael Moore, wiretap Nancy Pelosi and blackmail Howard Dean? Wait. You mean he hasn't done those things? All he's done is intercept communications between terrorists abroad and their contacts in the U.S. without a court order? Talk about defining impeachable offenses downward.Read it all.
If the president's critics want that part of the nation that doesn't read the Nation to believe that he's a threat to our freedom, they'd better do more than turn up the level of vituperation. They'd better find some real victims - the Eugene Debses and Martin Luther Kings of the war on terror.
Civil libertarians thought they were in luck when a college student in Massachusetts claimed that two FBI agents had shown up to interview him after he had requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's Little Red Book. Ted Kennedy cited this incident to warn of the Patriot Act's "chilling effect on free speech and academic freedom." Relax, Senator. Free speech is safe. The student lied.
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Real victims? Well, let's see how this shakes out:
Two leading civil rights groups say they plan to file lawsuits Tuesday against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program to determine whether the operation was used to monitor 10 defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists and other Americans with ties to the Middle East.
The two lawsuits, which are being filed separately by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in Federal District Court in Manhattan, are the first major court challenges to the eavesdropping program.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/01/16/christopher-hitchens-team_n_13937.html?p=3
I welcome Hitchens' actions, even if he's in cahoots with the selectively-attentive ACLU. I have a fondness for the First Ammendment, professional journalism and acid wit, although I don't know how it'll proceed unless he (a British subject) can prove that . . . well I don't know what he hopes to prove. No one cut his phone line. No one cencored his work. No one put a hood over his head, stuffed him in a van and kept him taped to a chair for 3 days in some basement. It's likely Hitchens is making a victimization point, but still, I'll be interested to see where it goes.
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