Honduras' interim leaders have suspended key civil liberties, empowering police and soldiers to break up "unauthorised" public meetings, arrest people without warrants and restrict the news media.
The announcement came just hours after deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya called on supporters to stage mass marches today marking the three-month anniversary of the June 28 coup that ousted him. Mr Zelaya described the marches as "the final offensive" against the interim government.
Civil libertarians cheered the election of Barack Obama, and with good reason.
Bush and Cheney had trampled all over our rights and liberties.
And as someone who taught constitutional law, Obama denounced the Presidential power grabs and pledged to address them.
But he hasn't followed through on that pledge.
This week, the Senate is holding a hearing on the reauthorization of
some expiring-and troubling--sections of the Patriot Act. The Obama
Administration wants to reauthorize them nonetheless.
Civil libertarians cheered the election of Barack Obama, and with good reason.
Bush and Cheney had trampled all over our rights and liberties.
And as someone who taught constitutional law, Obama denounced the Presidential power grabs and pledged to address them.
But he hasn't followed through on that pledge.
This week, the Senate is holding a hearing on the reauthorization of
some expiring-and troubling--sections of the Patriot Act. The Obama
Administration wants to reauthorize them nonetheless.
LANCASTER, Pa. — Horses drawing buggies regularly clop down the roads approaching Lancaster, a peaceful city in the heart of Amish country that had only three murders last year and relatively low crime.
But if the community sounds reminiscent of the past, it also has some distinctly modern technology: 165 surveillance cameras that will keep watch over thousands of residents around the clock.
I’ve spent much of the past 20 years living in or reporting on the former
communist countries of Eastern Europe.
On
August 11, a man with a loaded firearm in a holster appeared outside a
town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where President Obama
was speaking. He carried a sign that said: "It is Time to Water the Tree of Liberty"—a reference to Thomas Jefferson's statement that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Neither the Secret Service
nor police ushered the man away from the area of the president's town
meeting.
Like Glenn, I write a lot about civil liberties, which have been at the heart of the national conversation since the beginning of the War On Terror and the expansion of the national security state. But my interest in civil liberties predates 9/11 and until then was usually pointed at the far more prosaic issues of police and prosecutorial misconduct (and the inevitable conclusions any study of those things brings to the issue of the death penalty).
It was an
odd little story, tucked well inside the front section of this past Sunday's New York Times.
An antiwar activist in the state of Washington had been exposed as an undercover informant for the US army, stationed at massive Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma. And in one of those Kafkaesque twists for which our government is renowned, the army is now investigating itself to determine how such an arrangement came to pass.
The son of a decorated Vietnam veteran,
Hector Veloz is a U.S. citizen, but in 2007 immigration officials
mistook him for an illegal immigrant and locked him in an Arizona
prison for 13 months.
Veloz had to prove his citizenship from behind bars. An aunt helped
him track down his father's birth certificate and his own, his parents'
marriage certificate, his father's school, military and Social Security
records.
NEW YORK - Immigration agents raiding homes for suspected illegal immigrants violated the U.S. Constitution by entering without proper consent and may have used racial profiling, a report analyzing arrest records found.
Latinos made up a disproportionate number of the people arrested who were not the stated targets of the raids, and many of their arrest reports gave no basis for why they were initially seized, said the report, which was based on data from raids in New York and New Jersey.
