Ride the Lightning

TALKING TURKEY: GIVING THANKS FOR OUR CONSTITUTION

November 21, 2007

One of the nice things about being a blogger is that you can stand on your soapbox whenever you wish. So as we prepare for Thanksgiving, I received an e-mail from the ACLU reminding me that we need to give thanks for (and protect) our much beleaguered Constitution. There is a connection to electronic evidence here – the fact that, through warrantless searches which I believe are flatly unconstitutional, the U.S. government has a great deal of evidence about many of us. The U.S. telecommunications companies obviously bellied up and provided the government with a pipeline to all of our correspondence over the Internet, which is why all these companies are now pleading with Congress for immunity. Privacy is a distant memory. All we have now is privacy through obscurity – the simple fact that the government has more data than it could ever review gives a modicum of privacy – until, for whatever reason, we come to the government’s attention.

But quite beyond that, it infuriates me that we are discussing whether or not waterboarding is torture. Any moron (Dick Cheney apparently doesn’t rate even that highly) can plainly see that it IS torture and its defense demeans everything the United States has ever stood for. We were once the shining light of humane detention – the rest of the world looked up to us for our work in drafting international treaties and laws banning torture after World War II and our readiness to give refuge to victims of atrocities perpetrated by other governments. When did we become the enemy we beheld and why is there so little protest against the ethical nightmare that has become the current administration’s hallmark?

Not only does torture not work, because the victim will say anything to stop the torture, we are actually increasing the likelihood that our own soldiers will be tortured, because we have no ideals to answer to anymore. Our enemies can shrug and say, honestly, “You Americans torture too.”

Our Constitution is riddled with bullet holes and we are apparently all watching “Dancing with the Stars” and "American Idol" while the document that ensured our rights and our democracy is being eroded. You’ll see a lot of folks at Thanksgiving Day dinner – if current events come up, it’s a great time to raise the awareness of those around the dinner table. If we take no steps to protect our civil liberties, one day we will find ourselves in a country that bears no resemblance to the proud nation created by our founding fathers.

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