Do Americans care about Big Brother?

According to Time magazine, not really.

It appears that most Americans merely shrug at the idea that the Bush administration has exchanged our right to privacy, illegal search & seizure, right to habeus corpus, and other essential civil liberties for the promise of physical protection from supposed evil-doers.

Time magazine, I’m calling you out.

The article plays devil’s advocate and posits that in each case where Big Brother has illegally stretched out his arm to take our civil rights, that no harm or foul has come of it. Really? Why doesn’t the article mention the likes of Donald Vance? Or Jose Padilla? Both were American citizens who were plucked from the crowd and thrown into the slammer without being charged with a crime, both of which were denied their right to a writ of habeus corpus, and both were illegally tortured (while the Bush administration was vehemently denying that it tortured). In the case of Padilla, he was eventually given a trial, but only after a few years of incarceration and torture, to the point that his defense hinged upon insanity claims (due to the torture). [Incidentally, he was found guilty].

The article also mentions that America has ‘bought’ into Big Brother’s assault on civil liberties. Well, no, that’s not the case. In the case of the PATRIOT Act, the congress moved to pass it too quickly for anyone to analyze the nearly 1,000 page proposal in time to enable intelligent discourse on the matter. And the public had no understanding of it either (not that this matters in a representative republic – America is NOT a democracy). Essentially, the removal of certain civil liberties does not represent the American public’s endorsement of any of it. All it means is that the public hasn’t had ample opportunity to refute or remove it from the table. At best, the voters’ displeasure with Republican rubber-stamping and the turnover of the legislative branch to the Democrats ought to have been a beacon to the executive and legislative branches that we’re not only tired of things like the war, but we’re tired of the shenanigans that followed it, including the removal of key civil liberties.

Whether or not the government has or will abuse its new-found powers is irrelevant; the problem I have is that the door is open for it to do so. Furthermore, once these liberties are taken from us, you can bet the farm that they’ll never come back.