Civil Rights? What rights?

One might have thought it wouldn't happen in the USA, of all places. But, mention the word "terrorism" in the context of 9/11, and the Americans, especially its Federal legislators, lose all perspective. The latest in the more the gradual erosion of civil liberties occurred in the US Senate yesterday. Andy Worthington explains in "Deranged Senate Votes for Military Detention of All Terror Suspects and a Permanent Guantánamo" on CommonDreams.

"Yesterday the shameful dinosaurs of the Senate — hopelessly out of touch with reality, for the most part, and haunted by specters of their own making — approved, by 93 votes to 7, the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (PDF), which contains a number of astonishingly alarming provisions — Sections 1031 and 1032, designed to make mandatory the indefinite military detention of terror suspects until the end of hostilities in a “war on terror” that seems to have no end (if they are identified as a member of al-Qaeda or an alleged affiliate, or have planned or carried out an attack on the United States), ending a long and entirely appropriate tradition of trying terror suspects in federal court for their alleged crimes, and Sections 1033 and 1034, which seek to prevent the closure of Guantánamo by imposing onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners, and banning the use of funds to purchase an alternative prison anywhere else. I have previously remarked on these depressing developments in articles in July and October, as they have had a horribly long period of gestation, in which no one with a grip on reality — and admiration for the law — has been able to wipe them out."

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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