“Congress cans the Constitution, as Chicago police abduct activists” @ BORDC

Posted on May 24, 2012

Shahid Buttar — May 18, 2012: “In the wake of this week’s House votes on the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act — which left the NDAA’s domestic military detention provisions even more noxious than they were before — one might legitimately wonder what country we live in.

Once again, our nation has demonstrated that the ”land of the free” is an empty slogan, a vestigial nod to a constitutional vision that has long inspired the world yet seems wasted on our own shores. For what purpose, exactly, did the United States squander decades, trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives during the Cold War?

FDR was right: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  More so than any terror threat, it is the fear mongering about national security that presents the greatest danger to our Republic’s future.  No “home of the brave” would be brow-beaten by fears of “giving rights to terrorists” into resigning its own rights, inviting repression upon itself by allowing government powers long used to define  authoritarianism.

Welcome to the U.S. House of Representatives!  Is it too generous to say that democracy in America hangs by a thread?…………………………….”

Read more at Defending Rights and Dissent.