DON'T GET SAD: GET MAD!!! WE *DO* HAVE POWER!

Using our tax dollars to fund our own abuse? And the abuse of others? Are they out of their minds??? Or is it we, the people who are just plain nuts for lying down and playing victim while actually paying taxes to fund the abuse of ourselves and others? NO, I most emphatically am not suggesting that we stop paying taxes, illegally. But I also want to make a point that we have the obligation to direct how our money is used.

We wouldn’t pay Charles Manson and his gang to do their thing, would we? Absolutely never!

Yet look at what we are doing with our tax dollars, all in the name of the war on terror:

~Many Guantanamo detainees held (and only a few released) “without so much as being charged with a single crime” according to the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights.

~The Military Commissions Act (torture bill) defines torture as invoking pain levels equal to “Severe organ failure and death”. Without any right to challenge the legal grounds for their detention/torture and no access to any attorney to prove either innocence or guilt. Violent crime with no legal recourse, on OUR tax dollars? No thanks.

~Former FBI agent/now ACLU counsel Mike German wrote that only ONE terrorist has been caught since 9-11 as the result of National Security Letters (FBI subpoenas for private phone, internet and medical records). 53% of the 143,000 NSL’s issued between 2003-2005 (that’s 993 per week) were for Americans!

~The ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights and Electronic Frontier Foundation’s websites are crowded with examples of innocent people (most of them activists) on no-fly lists, and those abducted from airports for torture are usually cases of mistaken identity if not just plain innocent, sum total.

~The ACLU’s website is busting out the seams with examples of the invocation of “state secrets” every time a civil liberties violation is threatening to be exposed, or every time an innocent person has been tortured.

~The Patriot Act is such that the FBI can arrest YOU without warrant or probable cause and without judicial involvement. Just like that. They can enter your home, take your records, your computer and yes, even your car and you yourself. They only have to SAY that it was a case of “terrorism” and get a warrant AFTER they have come and gone. Nice “security” , eh?

~A colleague of mine on the ACLU Board (in our local County Chapter) was arrested without warrant or probable cause, from her own home.

~Someone I know has a tapped phone since participating in an Iraq War rally.

~A particularly ethical and nice policeman in my home town is on a no-fly list, as is the sweetest bank teller who was accused of carrying a bomb in her purse (yet the Transportation Security Administration, TSA, which puts people on no-fly lists, also refused to search her purse to confirm their allegations. Yet they wouldn’t let her fly home. She ended up taking a train cross-country).

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