Erstellt am: 26. 6. 2012 - 12:13 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Tipping Point Democracy
I'm not really looking forward to this years presidential election in the U.S.
On the one hand you have a protector of the U.S. torture regime and human rights abuses. A man who has defended electronic wiretapping , waged a war on whistleblowers and created secret kill lists.
And on the other hand you have Mittens.
The anti-war movement has been stopped in it's tracks. Progressives and Liberals have come to support extensions of policies they decried under a republican president, and previously contentious issues have been graced with bipartisan support.
One area that has managed to awaken an equally bipartisan, and sometimes strange, resistance was a collection of paragraphs in a military spending bill. A few paragraphs that would have made the U.S. a battlefield, and indefinite millitary detention a real possibility for U.S. citizens. Or rather, I guess it would have meant that any U.S. citizen associated with a terrorist organisation would have had to give up the rights a citizen would have expected.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a supporter of the bill explains
In the end, it all gets down to how you define terrorist. And that is what had a few people in the U.S. and abroad very concerned. Just two years ago, U.S. politicians were looking for another group to be declared a terrorist organisation.
People who have functioning long-term memories put 2 and 2 together and decided something had to be done. Chris Hedges, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Elsberg, and other plaintiffs sued President Obama and the U.S. government.
I just came across a collection interviews with Chris Hedges and a few of the other people involved. One I thought some of you might be interested in.
The lawsuit was succesful, to a point, but the judge and the government have basically both said that the provisions cited in the suit were not that important anyway. The law has been put on hold, the government can appeal, and all that we know for sure is that the people behind the lawsuit are not on any lists. The story isn't over, but other than some RT articles I'm not finding a lot of media coverage.