Defiantone.com

Six months ago I sat in a theater and watched in amazement as I saw a movie based upon a comic book come to life. In the movie, the government controlled the masses and ruled them with an iron fist powered by fear. The masses, over the years, gave the government the authority to take away their rights for the illusion of safety and security. In the end, it was discovered that the fear created was a ruse of the government. Thousands were illegally imprisoned and executed without due process of law.

Yesterday, the President signed legislation that allowed the president or the SECDEF to bypass Habeas Corpus and declare anyone an enemy combatant. This power allows them to lock them up without a trial, without due process, and without anyone knowing about it.

Olbermann had something to say about it with some video goodness. Here is a quick quote from Jonathan Turley.

Turley: “People have no idea how significant this is. Really a time of shame this is for the American system.—The strange thing is that we have become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. The Congress just gave the President despotic powers and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to Dancing With the Stars. It’s otherworldly..People clearly don’t realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country. What happened today changed us. And I’m not too sure we’re gonna change back anytime soon.”

The President said

“Over the past few months, the debate over this bill has been heated and the questions raised can seem complex,” he said. “Yet, with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few. Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously? And did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?”

in defense of the new legislation

Read more details of the situation here

Needless to say, this was a poor decision by our government. This legislation and others like it, read: patriot act, should be repealed and new legislation should be written that allows anyone to have due process regardless of whether they are American or not. We have three seperate branches of government and we should use them to the greatest possible extent. If one branch isn’t moving fast enough or is grossly inneficient we need to modernize it without changing its original intent and purpose.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 11:31 am and is filed under I was too lazy to organize these. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.