VIOLATING CIVIL LIBERTIES IN TIMES OF WAR (barf assessment needed)

local public high school curriculum ^ | unknown- hidden | Bryan Gunderson

[eyespysomething]

Yes it is absurd. I would be furious if my son brought this home. It is very one sided.

[Texas_Jarhead]

"He [the author] interned at the Center for Constitutional Rights. "

The Center for Constitutional Rights is a left-wing outfit.

[George from New England]

Any thoughts on the best way to go at the school or teacher for this.

A counter link maybe ?

[AZ_Cowboy]

Sorry to hear that this kind of stuff is happening to you. Yeah, it's junk, and it sure is not balanced.

If these people are going to talk about civil liberties, they really need to discuss other violations besides the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War and the Alien and Sedition Acts. You cannot have a balanced discussion of anything related to civil liberties without bringing up the Japanese Internment, Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Elian Gonzalez affair. All of these events involved some sort of violation of civil liberties.

Of course, we also note that at least in the cases of Waco, the Japanese Internment, and Gonzalez that the violations occurred during times when democrats were in power. Technically, during RR the dems ruled the congress if I recall (a bit before my time). For Waco, the particular problem is the suspension of the posse comitatus, which is a pretty severe step. To a lesser degree, you have a serious of what appear to be extremely coincidental IRS audits of high-profile Clinton critics (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly) and Conservative Interest Groups (Heritage, NRA) in the wake of the pre-impeachment allegations. This was detailed in a book called "High Crimes and Misdemeanors". Further details on Waco can be found in David Limbaugh's "Absolute Power".

The Partiot Act has stuff in it that could potentially be misused for sure. So far, it has not. I don't have a beef with going over those clashpoints, but I think you cannot go directly from the turning of the nineteenth century, skip forward to the Civil War, then leapfrog another century and a few score to current times. That's a huge glossing over, and even more importantly, history shows that most of these so-called abrigations of civil liberties tend to die out after a bit on their own anyway.

People get whacked out when you bring up Waco or Ruby Ridge because the people involved lived well outside the mainstream. Randy Weaver was affiliated with a variety of White Supremacist groups, and the Davidians were a religious cult. That does not mean that they deserved to die, particularly if nobody was killed by their actions. That in itself is an abrigation of the First Amendment, one would think.