Bill of RightsTrump is already skirting due process. Now he’s musing about deporting citizens (4/13/2025)Why Trump’s brutal crackdown on free speech is unprecedented in the US (3/30/2025)The US right is coming for disabled people. Here’s why that threatens everyone (3/27/2025)Trump administration puts US civic freedoms under severe threat – CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist (3/11/2025)Powerful forces want to dismantle libel protections. History warns us why. (3/11/2025)Threaten campuses, shut down debate: that’s what free speech looks like under Trump (3/11/2025)"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” Benjamin Franklin 'Homeland security is a "one-way ratchet." It is relatively easy for governments to decide to increase security, particularly in response to specific threat intelligence. It is much harder for them to decrease it.' “The Trump administration seems to have separated itself from previous administrations in its upholding of human rights globally,” Zeid said. The administration’s failure to appoint an ambassador to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, before withdrawing from the council altogether, he added, was “illustrative of the lack of any deep commitment to the human rights”. Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein Human rights lawyers sue Trump administration for 'silencing' them (10/1/2020)"In the United States, the Senate report on torture in the context of counter-terrorism operations is courageous and commendable, but profoundly disturbing. For a country that believes so strongly in human rights to have swiftly abandoned their fundamentals at a time of crisis is as astonishing as it is deplorable... Under international law, the report’s recommendations must be followed through with real accountability. There is no prescription for torture, and torture cannot be amnestied. It should also lead to examination of the institutional and political causes that led the US to violate the absolute prohibition on torture, and measures to ensure this can never recur." U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. (3/5/2015) Institute For Research and Education on Human Rights Center For Constitutional Rights Bill of Rights Defense Committee Liberty -Promoting Human Rights Universal Declaration of Human Rights Amnesty International's Report on the US
Suppressing Petition on New Haven Green NCAC (National Coalition Against Censorship) Does Big Brother know what you're reading ? People's Campaign for the Constitution Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute Spying on the Homefront (watch this PBS video on line.)
Mike Pompeo’s Faith-Based Attempt to Narrowly Redefine Human Rights (7/10/2019)‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System (6/21/2019)I’ve Been to Guantanamo. It’s No Place for Kids. (5/13/2019)Our Concentration Camps (11/06/2018)Privacy International calls on the United States government to uphold its international human rights obligations (6/20/2018)UN: US Retreat from Rights Body Self-Defeating (6/19/2018)Trump, Making Atrocities Great Again (3/29/2018)Human Rights Watch lists Trump as threat to human rights (1/14/2017)Amnesty International Report 2017/18: The state of the world's human rights (2/22/2018) A pdf. See the US entry.
The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people's lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque. Either one of these outcomes would imperil democracy; together they not only injure the country but also cut off the avenues of repair. Elaine Scarry
“Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through the control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent, is totalitarian. The state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened." Wages of Rebellion, the Moral Imperative of Revolt: Chris Hedges pg 54 "Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Letter to an associate, 1849 "Despite the mystique that surrounds it, and the understandable impulse to treat it as aberrant behavior beyond politics, torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability when ever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks the consent needed to rule...Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain “indicator species” of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections. Naomi Klein from her book Shock Doctrine. All it takes is the signature of a low ranking NCO to send someone right around the world and have them locked up indefinitely but it takes the signature of the secretary of defense to let them go." --Torin Nelson, Private Intelligence Contractor ... prevailing dogma in this historic moment is escalating authoritarianism. This dogma is rooted in our understandable paranoia toward potential terrorists, our traditional fear of too many liberties, and our deep distrust of one another. The Patriot Act is but the peak of an iceberg that has widened the scope of the repression of our hard-earned rights and hard-fought liberties. The Supreme Court has helped lead the way with its support of the Patriot Act. There are, however, determined democrats on the Court who are deeply concerned, as expressed in a recent speech of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “On important issues,” she said, “like the balance between liberty and security, if the public doesn’t care, then the security side is going to overweigh the other.” The cowardly terrorist attacks of 9/11 have been cannon fodder for the tightening of surveillance. The loosening of legal protection and slow closing of meaningful access to the oversight of governmental activities—measures deemed necessary in the myopic view of many—are justified by the notion that safety trumps liberty and security dictates the perimeters of freedom. Cornel West: Democracy Matters "The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live,” FDR Second Bill of Rights.
Virtually all constitutionally protected civil liberties have been undermined by the drug war. The Court has been busy in recent years approving mandatory drug testing of employees and students, upholding random searches and sweeps of public schools and students, permitting police to obtain search warrants based on an an anonymous informant's tip, expanding the government's wiretapping authority, legitimating the use of paid, unidentified informants by police and prosecutors, approving the use of helicopter surveillance of homes without a warrant, and allowing the forfeiture of cash, homes, and other property based on unproven allegations of illegal drug activity. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow page 61. "...the Second Amendment is not an important aspect of modern liberal democracy. It does not protect or defend the rights of citizens; to the contrary, it results in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths every year. One might even be tempted to conclude the opposite: that the Second Amendment presents a challenge to liberal democracy because it enables "lone wolf" terror, mobilizes counterterror agents, necessitates heavily armed police, and perpetrates a level of violence and murder not found in an other democracy ot the world" Democracy Betrayed : William W Keller Atlanta shooting part of alarming US crackdown on environmental defenders (2/2/2023)'Deeply Disturbing': New York Supreme Court Judge Rules Protesters Can Be Detained Indefinitely (6/5/2020)First Amendment's slippery slope: Why are civil liberties advocates joining forces with the right? (8/3/2018) Jim SleeperDonald
Trump’s surveillance state: All the tools to suppress dissent and kill
free speech are already in place (11/27/2016)
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