i write letters

To Whom It May Concern:

Listening to the radio this morning, I heard something that cuts directly to the heart of why people are worried and angered by George Bush's extra-constitutional power grab. In reporting on the Virginia Senate race between incumbent Allen and former Navy Secretary Jim Webb, the NPR newsreader said "Allen accused Webb of wanting to allow terrorists to bring lawsuits against their captors".
That is a huge problem, and went unchallenged by NPR. They are ACCUSED TERRORISTS. That means the government says they are, and they say they are not. Or might be, if they were allowed to plead their case. Whether or not they are terrorists must be decided by a court, and the accused must be allowed to see the evidence presented against them in the presence of counsel, or we are nothing more than another tinpot dictatorship. These are not fancy, new ideas I'm espousing here. They've been around as long as man has had conception of justice. Since we stopped, or at least thought we'd stopped, torturing confessions out of people and burning them at the stake.
Without the right to trial by jury, habeus corpus, and the other hard-won civil protections, we are nothing, just a dictatorship. We all need to ask ourselves how we'd wish to be treated in that situation. This is the only way we can keep ourselves from falling into the slime pit of jingoism and ultimately Fascism.