Tuesday, February 11, 2003
I never really intended farkleberries to be a politblog, but something I read this morning profoundly disturbed me. It's from Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country web journal, and pertains to a proposed bill called the Domestic Security Enchancement Act. Here's a quote excerpted from Whitley's journal dated Feb. 10th:
Among many other things, this new bill enables the Attorney General by fiat to revoke the citizenship of anybody found to have ever contributed money to or participated in any organization the Justice Department deems to be a terrorist group. This means that the Attorney General can simply take away your citizenship if it decides that some group you once gave fifty dollars to was, even though unknown to you, a terrorist organization. The bill does not require any particular definition of that term. It’s up to the Attorney General to decide...Above quoted from Whitley Strieber, emphasis mine.
...The bill also authorizes secret arrests. Never in the history of our country has such a thing been countenanced...
...Making arrest secret removes due process from the equation. More terrifyingly, people may be held under secret arrest without access to any outside contacts—and if their citizenship has been revoked, presumably held indefinitely without trial...It gives the government the right to deport any foreign national whose presence it decides is damaging to our economic interests, without regard for his visa status at the time of deportation. It does not require the government to explain its action to anybody, and excludes any sort of effective due process.
You can view the DSEA document he's talking about on Incunabula.org; read at your own risk, and I won't make any claims about origin or provenance of this proposed bill. There are a lot of conspiracy theories being bandied about, and I don't subscribe to many of them, but in my opinion this one bears some watching.
Let's look into it. Is this for real? Why isn't anyone else talking about it? Certainly we've got enough going on in our country to distract us, but I certainly hope this isn't for real.
