How the US Became a Police State

[kpete]

How the US Became a Police State
By Andrew Kolin
From Informed Comment |

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By the time we reach the presidency of George W. Bush, the executive branch had become a branch that saw itself as above the law while making law. The state came to embody the will of. Bush and his inner circle. The spark that ignited the transition toward the final form of an American police state was the attacks on the World Trade Towers in 1993 and 2001. In response, the government acted outside the Constitution by passing the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and other measures, producing a direct assault on civil liberties.

The clearest indication of American police state practices is the use of preventive detention. In one example—extraordinary rendition—all the government has to do is accuse anyone of anything related to terrorism, sufficient reason to seize and ship individuals elsewhere to be tortured.

The twisted and extensive use of signing statements also indicates that an administration is functioning outside the law. In a distorted extension of the theory of a unitary executive, President Bush’s excessive use of signing statements resulted in dictatorial powers.

What is the future of the American police state? If history tells us anything about police states, it is that they all eventually crumble, in large part, because over time, they become dysfunctional. The same can be said of the police state of the Bush administration. During the second term, there were indications of a breakdown in how this police state functioned. Some of the clearest symptoms of this dysfunction were the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, and the large number of prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay. In addition, opposition mounted to the reauthorization of the Patriot Act and the Supreme Court ruling in the Boumediene case, which called into question the use of the Military Commissions Act. In the early days of the Obama administration, the trend seemed to point toward an American police state that will be modified, but not eliminated.
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the rest:
http://warisacrime.org/content/how-us-became-police-state

[Initech]

1. We became a police state the day after Columbine.

[notesdev]

2. We were there before that

I saw the militarization/penitentiarization (is that a word?) in schools at least 30 years ago, when they brought in metal detectors to many schools and put up high fences around many others.

[msongs]

3. what is more important is how America continues to be a police state nt

[Skip_In_Boulder]

4. And what has President Obama and the Democrats done about this?

[Denninmi]

5. Well, I'd say we've got the dysfunctional part down.

So, hopefully it's just a matter of time before the "crumbling" stage is reached.

[truedelphi]

6. The government doesn't even need to do more than to claim

That a person is a material witness whose testimony is needed for a court case, and they don't have to charge you, and they don't have to worry about your speedy trial -since you are not in jail awaiting your own case, but that of some other nebulous someone.