Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength, than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

“People here in the U.S. don’t understand these things about constitutional rights”

That’s what a Jordan-born man says he was told by airport security personnel when they asked him to remove his T-shirt before boarding a flight to California at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. The man, whose name is Raed, says he was told “People are feeling offended because of your T-shirt.” Raed was wearing a shirt that said in both Arabic and English, We Will Not Be Silent. He was asked to put on another shirt instead, but all of his other shirts were in his checked baggage.

“Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?” was Raed’s question, to which one of the security people replied, “”People here in the U.S. don’t understand these things about constitutional rights” Raed’s answer: “I live in the U.S., and I understand it is my right to wear this T-shirt.”

“You can’t wear a T-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘I am a robber’ and going to a bank,” was the security man’s rejoinder.

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.

Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it.

Let’s see. A frightened mob selects a couple victims, accuses them of being would-be criminals without any evidence whatsoever, forcibly robs them of the cost of transcontinental airfare, and threatens anyone (pilots and airline personnel) that questions either their verdict or their right to exact “justice.”

There’s only one word for this. It’s vigilantism, pure and simple. It’s no different than any other kind of lynch mob. And it is beneath the dignity of a civilized society.

The reasons for and righteousness of the anger on display here are under furious discussion on both the left and right sides of the blogosphere. (See The Mahablog and Glenn Greenwald for two useful perspectives.)

But there’s far more at stake here than meets the eye. If these vigilante mobs are allowed to get their way on airplanes, what’s to stop them from taking their show on the road? Are we going to see subway mobs assaulting brown people on train platforms to “prevent” subway bombings? Are restauranteurs going to find themselves under pressure from upset diners not to hire — or seat — certain “frightening” classes of people? Will neighborhood groups press realtors to stop selling local homes to specific ethnic groups, for fear property values will drop? Or will they, perhaps, subject “undesirable” neighbors to harassment campaigns until they’re forced to move on?

This all sounds far-fetched — until you realize that we’re hardly forty years past an era when most of this was standard operating procedure in much of America. Vigilante justice, racial segregation in public accommodations, real estate redlining, and sundown towns are part of a past that we’ve worked hard to leave behind. It will be a disgrace to all of us if we allow a few irrational bullies on airplanes put us on the road to bringing it all back.

On Oct. 8, Greg Morris, 57, was found by his wife, Ginger, in their home in Chama, N.M., an old mining town of 1,250 in the Rocky Mountains. Lying at Morris’ side were a gun and his Purple Heart medal. For years, Morris had been receiving monthly V.A. benefits in compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder. Next to his gun and Purple Heart was a folder of information on how the V.A. planned to review veterans who received PTSD checks to make sure those veterans really deserved the money.

Last spring, the V.A. began to quietly draw up plans to take another look at nearly 72,000 veterans who from 1999 to 2004 had been classified as disabled and unemployable because of mental trauma from war. The V.A. plan, about which Salon was the first to report on Aug. 9, would review previous decisions to grant disability benefits to veterans incapacitated by PTSD.

Veterans advocacy groups are irate, charging the department with trying to save money at the expense of the men and women traumatized by war. They say mentally troubled veterans will be shocked, hurt and afraid of losing their monthly checks.

Nesler served in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971 and is coincidentally from New Mexico. His traumatic memories include a Claymore mine blasting a busload of civilians near his artillery base. He has been getting disability checks for PTSD for years.

On Aug. 11, he received a letter from the V.A. saying that his file was one of those in its review. He said the letter left him shocked, angry and afraid. The letter warns that “confirmation” of his mental wounds “had not been established” and that his file at the V.A. “does not establish that the event described by you occurred nor does the evidence in the file establish that you were present when a stressful event occurred.” (The V.A. recently determined, again, that Nesler’s claims are legitimate.)

The letters themselves generated considerable controversy. “It was like Russian roulette,” Garcia said. “You are dealing with lives. You don’t do that. You don’t just send out information to people who are suffering from some sort of mental stress saying, ‘We are going to take these benefits away.’”

We believe it is a disservice to veterans who served our country honorably to automatically treat them with suspicion when the issue may be merely proper agency documentation. We are also concerned that by requiring veterans to once again document the stressors responsible for their PTSD diagnosis, the VA investigation will reopen the psychological wounds of war for these veterans and result in further disability. Indeed, we have already heard reports of veterans whose symptoms have markedly increased as a result of the smaller scale review. Even in the smaller scale incomplete review, our government is putting at risk the health of veterans in order to obtain a more complete paper trail to support their diagnoses. A larger review is likely to put even greater numbers of veterans at risk of additional disabilities.

It just sends a terrible message to those who are serving in the military today for the VA to attack and question whether those who served before are entitled to receive the benefits the VA itself previously approved.

And when George W. Bush says that he accepts full responsibility for what happened, don’t forget this picture and that this is exactly what he and his clueless political hacks at FEMA are responsible for: The near lethal starvation over 16 agonizing days of a 74-year man in New Orleans.

Power crews diverted
Restoring pipeline came first

By Nikki Davis Maute

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina roared through South Mississippi knocking out electricity and communication systems, the White House ordered power restored to a pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast.

That order - to restart two power substations in Collins that serve Colonial Pipeline Co. - delayed efforts by at least 24 hours to restore power to two rural hospitals and a number of water systems in the Pine Belt.

At the time, gasoline was in short supply across the country because of Katrina. Prices increased dramatically and lines formed at pumps across the South.

“I considered it a presidential directive to get those pipelines operating,” said Jim Compton, general manager of the South Mississippi Electric Power Association - which distributes power that rural electric cooperatives sell to consumers and businesses.

“I reluctantly agreed to pull half our transmission line crews off other projects and made getting the transmission lines to the Collins substations a priority,” Compton said. “Our people were told to work until it was done.

[snip]

White House call

Dan Jordan, manager of Southern Pines Electric Power Association, said Vice President Dick Cheney’s office called and left voice mails twice shortly after the storm struck, saying the Collins substations needed power restored immediately.

Jordan dated the first call the night of Aug. 30 and the second call the morning of Aug. 31. Southern Pines supplies electricity to the substation that powers the Colonial pipeline.

Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Mike Callahan said the U.S. Department of Energy called him on Aug. 31. Callahan said department officials said opening the fuel line was a national priority.

[snip]

Compton said workers who were trying to restore substations that power two rural hospitals - Stone County Hospital in Wiggins and George County Hospital in Lucedale - worked instead on the Colonial Pipeline project.

The move caused power to be restored at least 24 hours later than planned.

Mindy Osborn, emergency room coordinator at Stone County Hospital, said the power was not restored until six days after the storm on Sept. 4. She didn’t have the number of patients who were hospitalized during the week after the storm.

“Oh, yes, 24 hours earlier would have been a help,” Osborn said.

2:04 P.M. - (AP) Fights and trash fires broke out, rescue helicopters were shot at and anger mounted across New Orleans on Thursday, as National Guardsmen poured in to help restore order across this increasingly desperate and lawless city.

“We are out here like pure animals. We don’t have help,” the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, where corpses lay in the open and he and other evacuees complained that they were dropped off and given nothing — no food, no water, no medicine.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the government is sending in 1,400 National Guardsmen to help stop looting and other lawlessnes in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Each terror alert, too, triggers a wave of often unjustified fear. Anthrax infected 22 people through the U.S. mail in the fall of 2001, killing five. Yet 30,000 people began taking the powerful antibiotic Cipro, many indiscriminately and without a doctor’s prescription.

[snip]

It used to be that a person could die from a scratch. Now we take effective antibiotics at the first sign of trouble. Public health measures dictate standards for drinkable water and breathable air. Our garbage is removed quickly. We live temperature-controlled, largely disease-controlled lives.

And yet, we worry more than ever before. The natural dangers are no longer there, but the response mechanisms are turned on much of the time. We implode, turning our adaptive fear mechanism into a maladaptive panicked response.

The irony is, by worrying so much about our health we jeopardize our well-being, increasing our risk for conditions including heart disease, cancer, stroke and depression.

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or “high” risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.

do false terror warnings in themselves constitute acts of terrorism?

[Read the entire letter: Page 1 | Page 2]

Notably, at no time has the FBI used its authority to request records from libraries or bookstores.

FBI Uses Patriot Act to Demand Information with No Judicial Approval From Organization with Library Records

ACLU Seeks Emergency Court Order to Lift Gag As Congress Prepares to Make Patriot Act Permanent

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today disclosed that the FBI has used a controversial Patriot Act power to demand records from an organization that possesses “a wide array of sensitive information about library patrons, including information about the reading materials borrowed by library patrons and about Internet usage by library patrons.” The FBI demand was disclosed in a new lawsuit filed in Connecticut, which remains under a heavy FBI gag order.

The ACLU is seeking an emergency court order to lift the gag so that its client can participate in the public debate about the Patriot Act as Congress prepares to reauthorize or amend it in September.

“Our client wants to tell the American public about the dangers of allowing the FBI to demand library records without court approval,” said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson, the lead lawyer in the case. “If our client could speak, he could explain why Congress should adopt additional safeguards that would limit Patriot Act powers.”

Papers reveal that the client, whose identity must remain a secret under the gag, “strictly guards the confidentiality and privacy of its library and Internet records.” The client is a member of the American Library Association.

The lawsuit challenges the National Security Letter (NSL) provision of the Patriot Act, which authorizes the FBI to demand a range of personal records without court approval, such as the identity of a person who has visited a particular Web site on a library computer, or who has engaged in anonymous speech on the Internet. The Patriot Act dramatically expands the NSL power by permitting the FBI to demand records of people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.

The lawsuit, ACLU v. Gonzales, was filed on August 9, and is pending before Judge Janet Hall of the U.S. District Court in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It names as defendants Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and an FBI official whose identity remains under seal. Both the national ACLU and its Connecticut branch said they were forced to file the lawsuit initially under seal to avoid penalties for violating the gag provision, which they are challenging on First Amendment grounds.

The court has set an emergency hearing for Wednesday, August 31, 2005 on the ACLU’s request to lift the gag.

Whether the Patriot Act has been used to obtain information about library patrons has been a flashpoint in the Patriot Act debate. The government has repeatedly dismissed the concerns of librarians that the act could force them to violate their ethical responsibility to protect the privacy of library users. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft even called these concerns about the Patriot Act “baseless hysteria.”