Opinion

Maybe next time it’s Arab Americans who will be interned by U.S. gov’t — Rand Paul launches filibuster

I just watched an hour Rand Paul’s filibuster of the Patriot Act, and there have been some inspiring moments.

The senator said that democracies are no inherent safeguard against depredations on people’s rights. He alluded to Nazi Germany as a case where people had elevated fascists. He cited the case of the late Richard Jewell falsely accused of planting bombs at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 and said that if Jewell had been black, he would have been killed by a mob.

He said that the people had approved of the internment of the Japanese during World War II, and the denial of the right of habeas corpus to young people just because their grandparent was Japanese. And that could happen again, he said.

“Maybe next time it’s Arab Americans.”

“The Bill of Rights was not written for the Prom queen,” he went on. “The Bill of Rights is for minorities… it is for those with unpopular opinions.”

The massive collection of our private data is similar, he said, to “writs of assistance,” executed by British soldiers that were one cause of the Revolutionary War. These writs were served on American households without those households needing to be named. And warrants for meta-data also don’t name individuals. But the Bill of Rights was composed to protect individuals. And on the basis of meta-data people have been killed, so this should concern us all.

“This ought to scare you too,” he said: for the first five years the government obtained private records merely by presidential request, not even under the Patriot Act. “The government is not paying attention to the rule of law.”

Paul is speaking without notes but leafing through a briefcase jammed with papers and citing friends across the aisle including Ron Wyden and Bernie Sanders. I gather Wyden has now joined him to assist the filibuster. I urge you to watch and lend support to this valiant effort to preserve freedom and privacy.

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this guy is probably better than hillary

American citizens accepted Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Just saying.

Also-is the prejudice in the US really against Arabs-or is it more a fear of their ignorance of religion of Islam? (I actually don’t know) After all-I have to imagine most Americans were aware the Boston bomber was not an Arab.

and 3rd: Obama made a few great speeches in his run-up to election. I never trust a good speech even if I enjoy it. ‘Buy the seller not the product’

I imagine I don’t join Rand Paul in all his positions, but on these matters he is right on — and a hero of our times. “Writs of Assistance”. I read a whole book about them once, by Malcolm Freiberg, a Massachusetts historian.

Who’d have thought they would pop up in a Congressional speech today?

Today we have multiple guilty pleas, testifying to the accuracy of evidence presented in court by the DOJ that the biggest banks in the western world have been engaging in an ongoing CONSPIRACY. This particular CONSPIRACY has been to defraud their own clients.

In Matt Taibbi’s classic book “Griftopia” (2010) we have an in-depth analysis of Big Finance’s even more gigantic criminal CONSPIRACIES over the last several decades.

Wendall Potter, former VP of PR (including deceptions) for a large insurance company, has explained how Wall Street controls the business strategies of large corporations. The criminal CONSPIRACIES flow from the biggest banks to the big corporations. The war business is one of the most profitable corporate sectors, bringing in massive profits ($35 billion to Halliburton alone in the Iraq war).

The so-called “War on Terror” has been profitable in the extreme. Under its guise, these CONSPIRATORS have moved to establish thorough, “Patriotic” surveillance of everybody, including all possible dissenters. These CONSPIRATORS have established a thorough system of disinformation to keep the public as ignorant as possible. And they have established a thorough system of inciting ethnic conflicts to keep people confused, and to promote continuing war profits.

“War Profiteers and the Roots of the War on Terror” describes the historical events by which today’s religious conflicts were ignited in the Middle East. These conflicts were predicted by the U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, along with MANY other knowledgeable people. Their facts and rationality were crushed by the money of big banks. These banks undoubtedly also saw the wars coming, since they had been profiting from both sides of wars for several centuries.

Another set of Nuremberg Trials is needed to clean these vicious parasites out of the system.

Thank you for this amazing piece on Rand Paul. I’m very happily surprised that a US senator was making sense and appearing to stand up for US citizens. I wonder if there are any more treasures to be discovered?!