President Bush on campaign for reelection likes to tell his audiences that, as Americans, “we refuse to live in fear,” and of all the tales told by the government’s faith healers and gun salesmen, I know of none so cowardly. Where else does the Bush administration ask the people to live except in fear? On what other grounds does it justify its destruction of the nation’s civil liberties? Why else does the FBI search large scale street demonstrations for “anarchists” and “extremist elements,” place under surveillance citizens known to have read the works of Leon Trotsky or the Rubbiyat of Omar Khayyam?
Ever since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, no week has passed in which the government has failed to issue warnings of a sequel. Sometimes it’s the director of the FBI, sometimes the attorney general or an unnamed source in the CIA or the Department of Homeland Security, but always it’s the same message—suspect your neighbor and watch the sky, buy duct tape, avoid the Washington Monument, hide the children. Let too many freedoms wander around loose in the streets, and who knows when somebody will turn up with a bread knife or a bomb? Let too many citizens begin to ask impertinent questions about the shambles of the federal budget or the ill-conceived occupation of Iraq, and the government sends another law-enforcement officer to a microphone with another story about a missing nuclear bomb or a newly discovered nerve gas, another Arab seen driving a suspicious truck north to New Jersey or west to Oklahoma.
Notwithstanding its habitual incompetence, the government doesn’t lightly relinquish the spoils of power seized under the pretexts of apocalypse. What the government grasps, the government seeks to keep and hold, and the National Lawyers Guild performs a necessary service by publishing its report on the American government’s attempt to preserve the American democracy by destroying it. The deal is as shabby as the one offered to the luckless villagers of Vietnam. For the sake of a vindictive policeman’s dream of a tranquil suburb, the country stands to lose the constitutional right to its own name. -Lewis Lapham
the National Lawyers Guild performs a necessary service by publishing its report on the American government’s attempt to preserve the American democracy by destroying it. The deal is as shabby as the one offered to the luckless villagers of Vietnam.
A lot of those "luckless villagers" might like to have a
few minutes with these jackasses. Let them know what
re-education really means.