The Sting

His Government charged him with money laundering -- acting as a conduit for cash sent to terrorists that had attacked his country. As far as he knew, the charges cwere the result of a sting operation involving agents of his Government who pretended to be interested in sending money to terrorists.

Believing in his constitutional right to confront his accusers and review the evidence against him, and assuming that he would be afforded the opportunity for a fair trial, he hired a good lawyer to defend himself in his Government's Federal Courts.

Upon reading a story in the New York Times suggesting that his Government's case was based upon evidence obtained illegally by eavesdropping on his telephone calls, his lawyer asked the his Government's Federal Court to dismiss the charges if his Government had acted illegally.

And then things got really weird.

First his Government held a secret meeting with the Judge of his Government's Federal Court. His Government had evidence, it said, that had to be kept secret in order to protect the people from terrorists. Neither he nor his lawyer were allowed to attend the meeting between his Government and the Federal Judge, and they were prohibited from ever seeing the evidence his Government said it had.

As a result of the evidence that only his Government and the Federal Judge knew about, his motion to dismiss his Government's charges against him was denied and the Federal Judge ordered the trial to go forward. But even the order of the Federal Judge was sealed, preventing the man and his lawyer from ever knowing the reasons why the Federal Judge and his Government denied his request.

Is this America?

Judge Won't Drop Charges in Mosque Sting -- New York Times

Thoughtcrimes

In a crackdown "not seen since the Nixon years," the White House aggressively moves to prosecute journalists. (Nevermind that this is the same administration that exposed a CIA covert agent for its own purposes. They have no sense of irony at all.) The Bush Justice department dispatches agents all over the country to apprehend reporters and journalists suspected of, in Bush's words, "helping the enemy."

Meanwhile, thousands of Federal Court cases are kept secret. The number of Federal cases sealed by the Bush administration has doubled in the last two years. Secret indictments. Secret trials. Secret plea bargains and verdict. And when a journalist asks about the Bush Secret Courts the answer is, "It's a matter of nation security. What's your name."

In 1948 George Orwell wrote what some say was a commentary on post World War II Europe and others say was a remarkably prescient bit of science fiction:

He had committed -- would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper -- the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

1984, Chapter One

Thank goodness Orwell wasn't writing about the United States in 2006, right? Certainly we're a country that loves freedom far too much to allow something like that to ever happen, right?

Be very... thoughtful... in how you answer.

White House Trains Efforts on Media Leaks
Sources, Reporters Could Be Prosecuted - Washington Post

Thousands of federal defendants' cases kept secret - Grand Forks Herald

Religious Totalitarianism

Tony Blair joins George W. Bush in proclaiming that god told him to invade Iraq.

Violence continues weeks after it became widely known that a Danish newspaper solicited and then published cartoons blasphemous to another's god.

And then twelve internationally renown writers and intellectuals publish a manifesto calling for the rejection of "Islamist Totalitarianism."

At the risk of offending the international intelligentsia, the authors of the manifesto got it only about half right. We stand today at the brink of worldwide crisis brought on by a totalitarian movement, but it is religious totalitarianism of all sorts, not just Islamic totalitarianism, that threatens civilization.

And so, acknowledging the efforts of the wise men who wrote the manifesto and with apologies for presumptuousness, here follows an improved version:

Manifesto: Together facing the new totalitarianism

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: religious totalitarianism.

We, the free-thinking people of the planet earth, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, triggered by the Bush/Blair religious war on Iraq and exacerbated by the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilizations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, religious totalitarianism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. All religious totalitarianism, whether Islamist or Christian, is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the religious totalitarian's domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject cultural relativism, which consists in accepting that men and women of a particular religious culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of being "god-less," an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

Blair: 'God will be my judge on Iraq' - Independent (UK)

A Manifesto Against the New Totalitarianism - Jyllands-Posten (Denmark)