I was just reading a “post on Slashdot regarding Total Information Awareness”:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/25/1413241 and was impressed with a number of interesting comments. “One person”:http://slashdot.org/~jasonditz made some “very insightful commentary”:http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178514&cid=14800332 regarding the Bush administration’s track record of ignoring (read: “reinterpreting”) the law. Every day there’s something new to piss me off so it is easy to forget just what has occurred in the past. Here’s a rundown (with links if you’re in denial):

# “They’ve seized American citizens and imprisoned them in foreign countries without charging them, incommunicado, for indefinite terms, without a court order or judicial review.”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Padilla
# “They’ve been wiretapping American citizens without a warrant, without judicial oversight, and without public debate or review.”:http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/02232006/news/89202.htm
# “They’ve risked national security by leaking classified information in order to discredit/attack dissenters.”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020902117.html
# “They’ve been torturing people _suspected_ of terrorism-related crimes via international flights.”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6
# “They don’t believe that the law banning torture applies to them.”:http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0126-06.htm
# “They’ve been kidnapping foreign citizens in their home countries without notifying their respective governments (Italy). They then purposefully appropriated misinformation (lied) to mislead the local authorities… Creating an certain amount of distrust among U.S. allies and lowering the United States reputation globally.”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/04/AR2005120400885.html
# “They’ve been spying on peaceful protesters (also without a warrant) because they were critical of the administration’s policies”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/
# “The Senate ordered the largest (illegal) domestic spying program in the history of the world shut down (Total Information Awareness) in 2003… The Bush administration didn’t shut it down and possibly used it to spy on John Kerry and his campaign staff before the election.”:http://thinkprogress.org/2006/02/11/tia-lives/
# “They may have wiretapped a CNN reporter who leaked the story on Bush’s wiretapping (it doesn’t get much more ironic than that)”:http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/06/nsa.amanpour/index.html

Last time I checked, the President wasn’t above the law. So why hasn’t he been impeached? Can the Republican party really be that partisan? Are they just “corrupt”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060220/blumenthal? Do they fear retribution from a president that very likely could have been spying on them and collecting every one of their dirty little secrets?

Where did our freedom go?