America's New Freedoms

After watching a portion of one of President Bush's latest speeches, I suffered from a surfeit of freedom. In almost every speech since 9/11, we are told that the terrorists hate us because of our "Freedom." In fact, President Bush has given us some new freedoms Americans to call our own. As these new "freedoms" didn't exist even two years ago and therefore can't be found in any of our schools' Civics texts, it is important that they be acknowledged as part of what makes our country what it is today. I have tried to place them into this lengthy, but far from comprehensive list.

New American freedoms include:

The freedom to be detained without charge:

Hundreds, if not thousands (the Justice Dept. won't even tell us how many) of innocent Arabs are now free to sit in cells in America, without even being charged with a crime.

The freedom to be tortured:

Many of those are free to reside in cells under 24/7 bright lights with music blaring, in an effort to present them with both "sleep deprivation" and "sensory overload." From Time magazine: "A captive might be subjected to extreme heat or cold, deprived of light or dark, made to squat in painful positions, questioned and fed at irregular intervals, kept awake for hours on end. Most important is confinement in isolation, divorced from all that is familiar."

The freedom to be constantly interrogated:

From the Independent: "Privately, the Americans admit that torture, or something very like it, is going on at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, where they are holding an unknown number of suspected terrorists. Al-Qa'ida and Taliban prisoners are kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles. They are bound in awkward, painful positions. They are deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights. They are sometimes beaten on capture, and painkillers are withheld. The interrogators call these "stress and duress" techniques, which one former US intelligence officer has dubbed "torture-lite". More covertly, other terrorist suspects have been "rendered" into the hands of various foreign intelligence services known to have less fastidious records on the use of torture.

The freedom to be left entirely alone:

Amnesty International USA reported that about one-third of all children in the custody of U.S. immigration authorities spend at least some time in jail-like facilities designed to hold young offenders, where they may be subjected to shackling, strip searches, solitary confinement, and verbal abuse from guards and other detainees. The Amnesty report also cited cases in which child detainees have been transferred to adult facilities on the basis of a dental exam. "The next morning, they told me I was going a better place, but they were lying," said one girl identified as Fantis S., a former child detainee from West Africa, who spoke at Wednesday's press conference. "They chained and handcuffed me and took me to the adult prison in York, Pennsylvania. There, they strip-searched me, made me put on an orange jump suit and cut off all my hair, just like a criminal." In fact, Fantis was 16 years old at the time, as reflected in the documentation she carried with her when she was detained.

The freedom of information:

Choose one:

The names of those prisoners can't be obtained, even by our nation's news media or human rights groups using our Freedom of Information Act, as long as the Justice Dept.:

1) proves to the satisfaction of a court that the detainee is the perpetrator of a crime.

2) proves to a court that the detainee is a member of Al Queda.

3) proves to a court that the detainee has given material support to Al Queda.

4) Says no!

If you chose anything other than #4, you are so pre-9/11!

The freedom to assassinate:

The U.S.government has granted the freedom to assassinate to our CIA and military personnel oversees. Thus far, the attempts to assassinate Saddam have led to other people's death, but as they were Arabs anyway, we don't consider the assassinations to be troubling.