Georgetown Law School students staged a silent protest during an appearance by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was speaking in defense of the NSA's domestic spy programs. Approximately thirty students (out of how many, I wonder?) stood up, one by one, and turned their back on Gonzales during his speech. Five students, wearing Abu Ghraib-style hoods, unfurled a banner with a Ben Franklin quote: "Those who would sacrifice liberties in the name of security retain neither."
I applaud the actions of the Georgetown students and encourage them to retain their commitments to liberty when they become professional lawyers and Big Capital offers them big bucks to find ways to circumvent our civil liberties.
A friend of mine who attended Duke University Law School and has subsequently worked for various nonprofits once told me that something like 95% of students enter law school claiming to have aspirations to serve the public good. Perhaps their idealism is all show, empty rhetoric to fill applications essays, because for whatever reason, and money is the one most widely given ('We need to pay off our student loans), it turns out that something like 95% of them go on to take jobs working for corporations where the profits, not the public good, is the primary motive.
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3 comments:
Turn on Blogger's word verification, and you won't have spambots like that one before me filling your comments with advertising.
As for the banner...
Anyone who's making long distance phone calls to al-Qaeda after 9/11 deserves to be wiretapped. At the least.
SI: thanks for the tip about turning on word verification.
wiretapping suspected al-quaeda members is fine, and there is a procedure in place for officials from law-enforcement and intelligence agences to legally monitor terrorists, mobsters, criminals, etc. it requires getting a warrant, and the process, i understand, has been streamlined so that officials can act quickly.
however, i'm not prepared to accept unconstitutional government surveillance; it was unacceptable in east germany, the soviet union, etc. and it is just as unacceptable in the united states.
what concerns me are the reports of domestic spying that have surfaced. why do certain government officials feel justified spying on members of greenpeace, peace organizations, human rights groups, etc? the potential for political abuse should be clear.
check this link out: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012706A.shtml
the person who sent the link to me wrote: "I feel much safer knowing that the FBI is protecting HoneyBakedHams against marauding hordes of vegans."
can you imagine the outcry that the right would be making if john kerry was in office and it was revealed that the feds were secretly monitoring the conversations of, say, members of anti-abortion groups on the grounds that they could possibly be linked to abortion clinic bombings (the most common form of domestic terrorism in the 1990s, i believe)?
if someone is making a call to al-qaeda then surely it wouldn't be too difficult to get a warrant in fisa court (where gettin' a warrant is fast n' easy--they even grant warrants AFTER the wiretapping has started). on the other hand, if the fbi is busy photographing vegans and such, i wonder if wiretapping sans warrants is a very efficient way to go about catching terrorists. having to get a warrant means having to have probable cause, some evidence of a connection and that means you're much less likely to be wasting time. intelligence must be intelligent to be effective.
on the other hand, i've been reporting my mawma (a vegan) to the fbi for months and they've refused to wiretap our house in spite of my clear evidence that she has not baked me a HoneyBakedHam EVER. and my homeland is much less secure for it.
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