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