Yup..... I have creeping respiratory crud again. The back of my throat's been scratchy for several days, and I'm waking up with my nose and sinuses feeling like they're stuffed with Silly Putty. I'm getting awful tired of this. The constant oppressive humidity of eastern North Carolina is not healthy for me.
August 29th, 2004
[Credit: Various]
In its ongoing legal battle with the ACLU overthe Patriot Act, the Justice Department has seen fit to censor a portion of a freely publicly-available 1972 Supreme Court ruling which calls into question the validity of stifling dissent under the vague justification of "national security".
The Justice Department tipped its hand in its ongoing legal war with the ACLU over the Patriot Act. Because the matter is so sensitive, the Justice Dept is allowed to black out those passages in the ACLU's court filings that it feels should not be publicly released.
Ostensibly, they would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations. But in reality, what did they do? They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:
"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."
The mind reels at such a blatant abuse of power (and at the sheer chutzpah of using national security as an excuse to censor a quotation about using national security as an excuse to stifle dissent).
The Memory Hole article includes links to many other documents in which the Justice Department has censored innocuous passages claiming the excuse of national security. All you liberals who insist that the Second Amendment is unimportant and irrelevant, and it's the First Amendment that really protects all our freedoms, and they could never take that away? Well, here's another salvo in that attack on the First Amendment that you keep saying could never happen.
Think hard about it, and do your dissenting while it's still legal to do so.
