Welcome to the new America: Stay inside, don’t question police, and you probably won’t get hurt…
…It is argued by government officials and an eager-to-cooperate corporate media that the bombing was an extraordinary event requiring special measures. Sure, an allegedly dangerous man was on the loose. Yet many an armed and dangerous man has been on the loose before, and we have never before seen fit to jettison constitutional rights during the capture process. (Only recently a far more dangerous man, a rogue LAPD cop and military veteran trained in the use of dangerous weapons, had announced his intention to murder many police and political figures and was on the loose, but there was no martial law declared during that manhunt.)
Now that the second Boston bombing suspect has been captured, we are told that he was intentionally deprived of his Miranda rights to remain silent and have an attorney present before he was questioned — for 16 hours — by a crack FBI interrogation team while under sedation and in serious condition locked to a hospital bed.
This wholesale violation of his basic Constitutional right against self-incrimination was based on an already flimsy “national security” executive order signed in secret in 2010 by Obama — an order which unconstitutionally permits ignoring the Miranda warning if society is deemed to be in imminent danger. Legality of that order aside, in the Boston case, however, the very fact that authorities waited patiently for the suspect to regain consciousness and some level of coherence gives the lie to the notion that anything other than a constitutional breach occurred, even assuming the executive order were valid.
Video and eyewitness evidence has already given prosecutors a mountain of evidence that should be sufficient to pursue a case against the alleged bomber. If they simply wanted to get information from him to protect the public regarding possible confederates or other planned bombings, they could have let him have a lawyer, pointed out him the strength of the case against him and offered him some limited immunity in terms of a reduced charge or a dropping of any capital charge, if he agreed to tell them all there was to learn.
So why the rush to suspend our constitutional rights? For that matter, why is this mass killing even being labeled an act of terrorism, while the Aurora Colorado mass killing, which also featured an apartment full of explosives and even more innocents killed, is still referred to only as a criminal act? Why is murder by bomb called terrorism, while murder by gun seems to be just an unfortunate aspect of America’s tradition of violent behavior? Is it the fact that the Boston bombers have an alleged Islamic association that brands them terrorists? If James Holmes (the Aurora shooter) were a Moslem, would he now be labeled a terrorist as well?
The shock of events in Boston may have made it easier for the public to acquiesce to the loss of their liberties for the moment, but the civil liberty erosions that ensued will not be a one-time event. History shows Boston will just be another step in the inevitable one-way slide that we are taking as a nation towards authoritarian government, where arbitrary decisions about our supposed welfare are made without the benefit of law, the Constitution or our own input…
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1724
With idiots like this one, it certainly will not be a one-time event.
How can he talk about a fact-based investigation when he is waxing eloquent about a video that he has not seen?
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