"State Your Re-Action to State Repression" Conference
April 24, 2005, Syracuse University
Free!
On September 11, 2001, the political landscape changed
dramatically. Instantaneously, it became unpatriotic to
criticize President Bush, the government, or US policy on
any front. Activist groups like the Sierra Club announced
that they were indefinitely suspending all criticism
against Bush’s pro-corporate agenda as the nation tried to
pull together.” (Best and Nocella, 2004, p. 9).
The
depletion of civil rights and freedoms are nowhere more
obvious than with the October 26, 2001 passage of the USA
PATRIOT Act, which gave the green light to the government
to have unlimited mobility of their powers of
surveillance, search and seizure, detention, and
suppression of dissent. The American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) believes,
Many parts of this sweeping legislation [PATRIOT Act]
take away checks on law enforcement and threaten the
very rights and freedoms that we are struggling to
protect. For example, without a warrant and without
probable cause, the FBI now has the power to access
your most private medical records, your library
records, and your student records... and can prevent
anyone from telling you it was done.
Neo-McCarthyism is upon us and the United States citizens
are dumbfounded.
