By Dave Lindorff
Homeland Security has bought 750 million bullets in a country of 330 million
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Back in the early 1980s, I had the extraordinary good fortune to get to meet one of my literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, up close and personal. We shared a police wagon, sitting next to each other for a ride to the station to be booked for blocking the door to the South African consulate in a demonstration against that country's then policy of white rule and apartheid.
I can't say I got to know the author very well, but he was quite friendly and interesting to talk to, and after our arrest and booking was over, and we were released, I shared a cab as far as his house.
I got to thinking that thanks to the latest outrageous 5-4 decision by the US Supreme Court (supported fully by the Obama White House and its Solicitor General), which says it is now perfectly okay for police to strip-search innocent people picked up for any crime -- even a traffic offense or a leash-law violation, or alleged failure to clear a warrant for a bald tire -- had Kurt and I been busted for the same kind of protest today, we'd "know" each other much more intimately. For example I'd probably know if Vonnegut had hemorrhoids, and he'd know about a patch of skin discoloration on my balls.
Is this a great country or what?
But seriously, we have really reached a pretty grim point when the court that is supposed to be protecting our rights under the Constitution, and the president, who is supposed to uphold and defend that document, collude in saying that once a person has been taken into custody by police, she or he really has no rights. The 4th Amendment about being "secure in your person"? Forget it. The cops can now strip you, grope you, check your butthole and humiliate you all they want, even if you are innocent of any charge. And by the way, they can lock you up with hardened convicts and hold you after they do that, until you get a lawyer or post bail. No "cruel and unusual punishment"? Well, I think most people would agree that getting stripped and intimately searched by some leering cop when you hadn't done anything would qualify as punishment, and it certainly is cruel, so the Eighth Amendment is in the toilet too. (We already knew the First Amendment -- the one about freedom of speech and assembly and the right to petition over grievances -- was toast.)...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1123
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