Imagine the worst and remember that it can happen here (Leonard Pitts)

[struggle4progress]

Web Posted: 01/04/2008 06:25 PM CST

Tribune Media Services

The authorities would just come into your home, grab your mother, your brother, your dad, and take them away. No warning, no warrant, no appeal.

Thirty thousand people disappeared that way, she told me ... Ruth Cox was describing her childhood in Argentina under military dictatorship. Cox, a teacher in Charleston, S.C., said families never learned what happened to their loved ones. Or why. People were taken and that was it. The government was not accountable.

My first response was a vague pride that those kinds of things can't happen here.

My second response was to realize that my first response was naive. These last years have provided a jolting education in the sorts of things that can, indeed, happen here. Mass surveillance, detention without access to courts, no right to confront, or even know, the evidence against you, torture. And a government that is not accountable ...

http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/stories/MYSA010508.02O.Pitts.18b9cc8.html

[ixion]

1. It's already happening here, and it will get worse...

just look at how we behave in Iraq and elsewhere. Thanks to the suspension of Posse Comitatus, this crap may be coming to a home near you any time soon.