BIG BROTHER CAN DIG UP LOTS OF PERSONAL INFO—BUT SOME IS JUST HOGWASH.

by Nat Hentoff for HUSTLER Magazine

Among the Congressional Republican leadership, there has been no active concern about ever-increasing government spying on you, me and the rest of us. So too among the GOP’s leading contenders for the Presidency. However, a lone wolf emerged during the party’s 11th debate when Ron Paul almost roared: “Our founders were very clear. They said, ‘Don’t be willing to sacrifice liberty for security!’” All but one of Paul’s rivals made sharply clear they felt he was going too far with this personal liberty stuff.

As lackeys of our master spy, Barack Obama, Democratic lawmakers and highlevel officials no doubt concur. Even among Americans who were once taught that the Fourth Amendment guaranteed each of us freedom from “unreasonable search and seizure” by the government, how many know that in 1967 the Supreme Court went further? Its Katz v. United States decision assured that we citizens have an “expectation of privacy” in certain areas of our lives.

Can you think of anywhere that such an “expectation of privacy” now exists? Consider this October 14, 2011, banner in the Washington-based Daily Caller : “House subcommittee chair: Is Obama admin. already collecting private health information?”

This grim rumor did arouse, briefly, Representative Denny Rehberg (R-Montana), who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services, and Education. Rehberg demanded that he be told whether the health-collecting information was true: “If so, it would represent an egregious violation of the privacy rights that the American public rightfully demands.”

The Obama team denies, robotically of course, that such private information is being collected. But if the President is reelected, despite whatever the Supreme Court decides about Obamacare, his passion for health rationing will grow, and the government will insist on knowing those elements of our healthcare that are too costly for him to maintain.

A few members of the minority Republican Party in the next Congress may be upset, but I’m not aware if there is likely to be anyone in the GOP leadership with anything to say about this invasion of your inner privacy.

Keep in mind that when Obama extended the tenure of FBI Director Robert Mueller— who, with far more intrusive technology than J. Edgar Hoover ever imagined, regularly grinds down the Fourth Amendment—the confirming vote was unanimous. Not a whisper about our “expectation of privacy.”

As long as the First Amendment is still robustly alive, I and other insistent protectors of privacy will keep to the task: trying to inform the citizenry that although we are not already subjects of a “police state,” living in a world that is increasingly adding police states means we are not absolutely immune from making security the ultimate priority of this nation. All the more so because murderous terrorism, under whatever nomenclature, continues to breed new generations of assassins while citizens become more conditioned to privacy being as anachronistic as traditional matrimony.

Have you heard any criticism of Mueller’s fully implementing the FBI domestic security rules that give his agents free rein to start a “threat assessment” (i.e., an investigation) of any of us without going to a judge and without any evidence of a crime having been committed?

And did you know that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are now testing ways to determine if someone is only thinking about or imagining some deep danger to our safety? This pre-crime detection by Big Brother is called “FAST.” I’ll be reporting on it soon.

Dig this additional Robert Mueller contribution for our next Fourth of July celebrations: Under the header “Is the American Way of Life Over as We Know It?” a WorldNetDaily article warned, “Next time you call a talk radio station, beware: The FBI may be listening.”

The story mentioned this ominous news from WMAL.com: “The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet. … The FBI says it is not playing Big Brother by policing the airwaves but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.”

Huh? This databasing also includes callers. On many such programs, listeners given an opportunity to express themselves on-air can be even more fiercely opinionated than the hosts. And, as I’ve already reported in HUSTLER, the FBI is now after your garbage.

On what basis? In the Boston Herald, Dan K. Thomasson explained that “[the FBI’s scrutinizing of trash] would be particularly [vital] if you have had any contact, knowingly or unknowingly, socially or otherwise, with someone the bureau finds suspicious.”

Maybe someone who called in complaining that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Michael Savage was being too mild. Hey, I was a guest of both Limbaugh and Savage and also of Mark Levin. Now what did I say that might be suspicious? Isn’t it about time I taped my call-ins to protect myself?

A friend of mine’s grandchild is seven years old. He’s already quite outspoken and has been reading voraciously. Would the FBI pay attention to a little boy? Well, the kid is so verbal and rambunctious, he just might call in to a radio station. Maybe a listening Robert Mueller agent would be curious about the patriotism of his parents or grandparents. I’m only joking, right?

My first job, when I was a 12-year-old during the Great Depression, was in a Boston haberdashery. I couldn’t remember the store’s name when I was writing my first memoir, Boston Boy: Growing Up With Jazz and Other Rebellious Passions (Paul Dry Books). But there it was in my FBI file along with my having attended, years ago, a meeting of radicals in North Africa. I’ve never been to Africa—North or South.
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Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This Still America?

BIG BROTHER GETS EVEN BIGGER WITH THE NEXT GENERATION IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM.

by Nat Hentoff for HUSTLER Magazine

I keep learning never to underestimate the FBI’s endless passion for finding new ways to track us. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is a frequent source of mine on Constitutional issues, and two of its attorneys— Sunita Patel and Scott Paltrowitz—have now jolted me with a CommonDreams.org report titled “How Far Will the Government Go in Collecting and Storing All Our Personal Data?” Patel and Paltrowitz focus on “the FBI’s everexpanding Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which collects and stores all aspects of our personal physical characteristics—our biometric data.” This is the first time I’ve heard of NGI. Have you?

I’ve often written about my FBI file, started by the late J. Edgar Hoover because he had become irritated by my criticisms of him. The fanciful surmises in it are chump change compared to what is being collected these days (unknown to me) in—as attorneys Patel and Paltrowitz point out—the FBI’s “massive database program that collects and stores personal identifying information such as fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, scars, marks, tattoos, facial characteristics and voice recognition” and who knows what else.

The Center for Constitutional Rights began to find out about this operation as a result of a lawsuit it filed under the Freedom of Information Act. (NGI makes George Orwell look like a true visionary with his Big Brother-is-watching novel 1984.) If this makes any of you a little uneasy, dig this: Patel and Paltrowitz warn that “when NGI becomes fully operational in 2014, other federal agencies will gain access to the bio-data without your knowledge or consent.”

By now,many of us have a general and vague sense of living in a surveillance society. But many young Americans of the next generation have yet to realize—as the CCR attorneys caution—that this country is getting ever closer to becoming an “inescapable surveillance state where we blindly place our hands on electronic devices that capture our digital prints, stare into iris scanning devices that record the details of our eyes and have pictures taken of different angles of our faces so that the FBI and other federal agencies can store and use such information.”

Not just the feds will be busily involved in this endless tracking. In the March 21, 2011, online edition of the Charleston Gazette, Eric Eyre reported on the scope of the FBI’s $1-billion NGI project:“Under the system, state and local police officers will eventually use hand-held devices to scan suspects’ fingerprints [and other physical characteristics] and send the images electronically to the FBI center.” That’s the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg,West Virginia.

Stephen Morris, a deputy assistant director at the FBI’s information center, proudly states, “It increases capacity and accuracy.” According to Morris, the Next Generation Identification system has another supposed benefit: “It’s a quick scan to let police officers know if they should let the person go or take him into custody.”

At least if you’re busted thanks to NGI, you will know why. ArsTechnica.com posted an article by Joel Hruska that noted a major shortcoming with the FBI’s database. It stated,“At this point, the FBI’s proposed [and now partially functioning] biometric identification system contains no recourse for citizens who are misidentified, no formal method for the update and correction of biometric information, and no indication that citizens would even be allowed to view their own biometric profiles.”

Hruska also chillingly revealed that “in 2003, the FBI exempted its National Crime Information Center, the Central Records System, and the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime from subsection [552a](e)(5) of the 1974 Privacy Act. That particular subsection mandates that each agency that maintains a system of records shall ‘maintain all records which are used by the agency in making any determination about any individual with such accuracy, relevance, timeliness and completeness as is reasonably necessary to assure fairness to the individual in the determination.’”

But even if the FBI had not exempted itself from the Privacy Act—without, of course, ever telling us—how can any citizen be assured “fairness” under this insatiably omnivorous New Generation Identification system if we are forbidden from actually seeing what information has been collected and stored?

I’ve been covering all the debates among Republican aspirants for the Presidency, and not once have I heard anything about We the People being meshed covertly into the Next Generation Identification system’s massive database. One of the debaters did say something that affects every one of us—not to mention future generations, but Ron Paul only focused on the executive orders by which President Obama has ignored Congress, the courts and the U.S. Constitution. As the Daily Caller reported on November 2, 2011, Paul accused the Obama Administration of becoming “dangerously close to an elective dictatorship.”

Wake up, Ron! Move on to organize against NGI’s destruction of what little is left of our right to privacy. If, as you say, executive orders are “dictatorial,” what do you call the federal government’s creation of a biometric database?

I’m sure it would have rankled George Washington, who proclaimed that “arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.” And 14 years after Washington’s death, Thomas Jefferson recalled how our first President had confided to him that he considered America’s new Constitution to be “an experiment…with what dose of liberty man could be trusted for his own good.” No matter who is elected President in 2012, how many of our personal liberties will remain?

Did Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis write America’s obituary? “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people. Public discussion is a public duty.”

Never before have we had so many ways to conduct public discussion while our personal liberties are being extinguished by our “elective” leader.

THE SLY APPOINTMENT OF A HEARTLESS MEDICAL CZAR HAS LAWMAKERS AND CITIZENS SEETHING.

By Nat Hentoff
From HUSTLER MAGAZINE September 2011

I’ve never forgotten U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, in his chambers, firmly instructing me, “From the First Amendment, all our liberties flow.” This fundamental freedom includes objecting to government dictates.

A powerful example is the storm of nonpartisan protests against President Obama’s appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which is responsible for the healthcare of one in three Americans.

For years, Berwick has been a fervent admirer of how the British nationalized healthcare system decides the costs of treatment and medications. If these costs are deemed too expensive for patients near the end of life or with little prospect of improvement, healthcare is denied.

Here in this country, with the federal government determined to slash staggering budget deficits, cost-benefit healthcare is a primary goal of Obamacare. As it is for Berwick, who infamously made his intentions clear even before being named CMS head honcho. “It’s not a question of whether we will ration care, ”he said during an interview with Biotechnology Healthcare magazine. “It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

Fearful that Congressional confirmation hearings would be too controversial prior to the 2010 midterm elections, Obama first sneaked Berwick into a recess appointment. Earlier this year, Berwick did appear at such hearings and—what do you know?—backtracked from his previous declaration of “love”(his word) for the British system.

But what Berwick does truly believe is fully documented in his pre-Obama articles and interviews. Even though anger and fear of Obamacare is mounting nationwide, he still holds his crucial position because the President renominated him in January 2011. But without confirmation, Berwick’s tenure will last only until the end of this year.

On March 5, 2011, Berwick’s doomsday was predicted in a LifeNews.com report titled “Senate Democrats Abandon Rationing Czar Donald Berwick.” The Democratic leadership had received an ominous letter from 42 Republicans. If Berwick’s nomination is sent to the floor, it spelled out, they threatened a filibuster—thanks to having enough numbers, plus some errant Democrats—to cut off Berwick’s budding career as the ultimate decider of how long some of us dependent on government healthcare can live.

Considering the number of Americans 90 years old and over requiring medical attention, not to mention hospital stays, Berwick’s presence as head of Medicare and Medicaid Services could have terminal consequences for some octogenarians as well.

But rationing would go beyond that. Many of us younger Americans may well get diagnoses requiring fast and expensive medical care. In a May 2010 DailyCaller.com article, Michael Tanner—like myself, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute— addressed Berwick’s long public love affair with British healthcare. Tanner pointed out that “750, 000 patients are awaiting admission to British NHS [National Health System] hospitals…. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30% to 50% of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20%.”

And dig this: “Overall, ”Tanner continued, “more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year 50, 000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. The one thing the NHS is good at is saving money. After all, it is far cheaper to let the sick die than to provide care.”

How could Obama have resisted appointing Berwick, an ardent admirer of the NHS—except when testifying before Congress—to run the cost-efficient core of Obamacare? Whatever ruse the President may devise to keep Berwick in charge of reducing part of the national budget deficits, persistent public use of the First Amendment to oust him will only mean the appointment by Obama of yet another healthcare czar. Meanwhile, even if Berwick is removed, he may unobtrusively remain as an adviser to our doctor in chief.

That’s what happened when former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota)—a key Obama adviser on how to bring the British system to these shores— withdrew his nomination as secretary of Health and Human Services because of what were euphemistically called tax difficulties. Yet Daschle remained a frequent visitor to the Oval Office to counsel Obama on healthcare efficiency.

As long as Barack Obama is President, many of us will be confronted by what Bruce Chapman wrote on DiscoveryNews.org: “We all face the end-of-life-treatment choices, either because of someone we love, or ourselves. Families, doctors, hospitals all do the best they can and situations vary.

“But when the government is involved and has built-in cost-cutting incentives, there is a tremendous incentive to warp the decision-making process and make it a financial triage issue. That is what President Obama was hinting at in several of the comments he has made in the past about end-of-life care. He thinks that the government cannot afford to take care of all the old and terminally ill and still give full care to the young and fit.”

Whatever your age, it would be reasonable—in self-defense—to keep the ultimate cold-hearted creator of Obamacare in mind when you go to the polls in November 2012.
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Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom:The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America; Living the Bill of Rights; and the forthcoming Is This America?

WITH OBAMA’S BLESSINGS, OUTSPOKEN U.S. CITIZENS ARE BEING TARGETED FOR AN INQUISITION BEFITTING A DICTATORSHIP.

by Nat Hentoff
from HUSTLER Magazine July 2011

Since the twilight of George W. Bush’s regime, the FBI has become, like the CIA, a force that doesn’t have to pay any attention to the Constitution. While the CIA operates in secrecy, it is public knowledge that the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide—now also fully supported by President Obama and his lapdog, Attorney General Eric Holder—gives the bureau the power to open “threat assessment” investigations of any American without any factual basis, suspicion of wrongdoing or connection to any foreign entity. J. Edgar Hoover would be so envious of the present FBI director, Robert Mueller.

Mike German, a former FBI antiterrorism agent now on the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union, points out that these FBI home and office invasions scoop up “address books, computer records, literature and advocacy materials—First Amendment sort of materials.”

On September 24, 2010, in one of its continuous “assessment” raids, the FBI barged into the homes and offices of nonviolent dissenters— antiwar, human rights, labor and other activists—in Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere in the Midwest.

These privacy and First Amendment invaders served grand jury subpoenas as they left. One of those summoned, Maureen Murphy (a journalist and advocate of Palestinian solidarity), issued a patriotic defiance of the FBI on CommonDreams.org: “Activism Is Not a Crime: Why I Will Not Testify Before This Federal Grand Jury.”

Murphy notes that she was targeted “as part of an investigation into ‘material support for foreign terrorist organizations.’ No crime has been identified. No arrests have been made. And…the FBI acknowledged that there is no immediate threat to the American public. So what is this investigation really about?”

It could only be a synchronized intent by the Obama Administration—like its predecessor— to tamp down dissent of national security policies so that Obama will stay in office. Recovering somewhat from the Democrats’ defeats in the midterm elections, this commander in chief clearly plans to preside over a second term.

Speaking like a reincarnation of Tom Paine, Murphy refuses to be intimidated: “The U.S. government doesn’t need to call me before a grand jury to learn my activities and my beliefs. I have often appealed to my elected representatives to take a principled stand on foreign-policy issues, protested outside federal buildings and have written countless articles over the years that can be easily found through a Google search.”

Along with Maureen Murphy, 22 other targets of those particular FBI raids were issued grand jury subpoenas last September, and, so far, they too have refused to testify.

Their assertion of quintessential Constitutional Americanism has to be understood by the rest of us in the context of a deep December 10, 2010, Washington Post investigative report. “Monitoring America” by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dana Priest, along with William Arkin, has received far too little attention—and no Congressional action!

I write about this report as masses of courageous Egyptian protesters celebrate their removal of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak by welcoming the arrival of longdreamed- of democracy.

Consider, however, the state of our own democracy as documented in “Monitoring America”: “The United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state Homeland Security offices and military criminal investigators.

“The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation’s history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. The government’s goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.” The Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights has been extrajudicially suspended.

Would Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and the other Founders recognize this as the United States? Do you? And did you know what Maureen Murphy eagerly discloses: “Witnesses called to testify to a grand jury have no right to have a lawyer in the room, and the jury is handpicked by government prosecutors with no screening for bias. It is the ultimate abuse of power for a citizen to be forced to account to the government for no other reason than her exercise of Constitutionally protected freedoms of speech and association.”

This unintimidated American pledges that “even though it means I risk being jailed for the life of the grand jury, I will not be appearing before it.”

Will the President, now seeking reelection in 2012, award Murphy— and her fellow resisters to grand jury subpoenas—the Presidential Liberty Medal? You can be sure that Barack Obama will not. Egyptians went out to the streets in waves of historic numbers to be free. How free of government spying on us are we citizens of the United States of America? Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black warned us: “We must not be afraid to be free.”

At the conclusion of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a newly minted American, “What have you given us?”

“A republic,” Franklin answered, “if you can keep it.” We are fast losing our grip.

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

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by Nat Hentoff
from HUSTLER Magazine January 2011

OUR NEWEST SUPREME COURT JUSTICE MAY BE A WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING.

As soon as a President nominates anybody to the Supreme Court, I start my research into that person hard and deep. I wholly agree with the late Chief Justice Earl Warren that “the preservation of our [individual] civil liberties [is] the most fundamental and important of all our governmental problems. … If we ever permit those liberties to be destroyed, there will be nothing left in our system worthy of preservation.”

Elena Kagan, former dean of Harvard Law School, is now one of the nine potentates whose decisions—or refusal to review Constitutional rulings by lower courts—will affect millions of us for years to come.The common synonym for the John Roberts Court she joins is “conservative.” So, as has often occurred, when there’s a 5-4 decision, will Elena Kagan be a champion of the Bill of Rights or a soul sister of Antonin Scalia?

How much do you know about the Court’s newest member? Kagan’s Senate confirmation hearings were customarily shallow, and the press in all its forms did very little digging of its own. Worse yet, as weekly national columnist and radio commentator John Whitehead accurately observed: “The average American…lacks even a rudimentary knowledge of the Constitution or Bill of Rights. … Martial law…may be one terrorist attack away.”

Think of what remnants of the Bill of Rights would have been blown to bits if the would-be Times Square car bomber had been successful.

In 2009, arguing on a case before the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan actually said:“Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of speech against its societal costs.” In all the writings of James Madison, the Father of the First Amendment, you’ll never find such broad and vague censorship of free speech. Who has this power to cripple free speech? The High Court on which Kagan now sits!

And dig this Kagan disemboweling of our rule of law. It never came up in the confirmation hearings or in the press—except from Harvey Silverglate in the Boston Phoenix. A Constitutional lawyer I’ve been learning from for years, Silverglate is coauthor of The Shadow University, the book that first exposed collegiate administrators’ ruthless attacks on the free speech of free-thinking students and professors on campuses nationwide. These “speech codes” have since been regularly exposed and shamed by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), which Silverglate cofounded. (I’m on its Advisory Committee.)

Silverglate tells of two black men in Iowa who were caged for 25 years before they learned that the key testimony against them had been beaten out of the so-called witnesses. And to make sure the defendants would be convicted, the prosecution had lawlessly withheld exculpatory evidence favorable to them.

At long last the case reached the Iowa Supreme Court, which threw out one defendant’s conviction and cut the other’s sentence to time served. Naturally, citing the rawly clear violations of their Constitutional rights and the government’s theft of all those years of their lives, these Americans betrayed by our legal system sued for damages.

Their case ultimately reached the Supreme Court of the United States, where a crucial question focused on the accountability of the prosecutors who so cruelly violated the defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. In a friend-of-the-court brief, Elena Kagan—then Obama’s Solicitor General (the President’s representative in matters before the Supreme Court)—insisted that there be “absolute immunity” for those lawless prosecutors!

Kagan told the Justices, who are now her colleagues, that making those Iowa prosecutors accountable for this blatant false imprisonment (my words, not hers) would result in “untold social costs.” Like what? Preventing the conviction of the innocent?

Our new Supreme Court Justice claimed there should be no penalty for so callously violating the Bill of Rights. There wasn’t a peep of disagreement from her boss—then and now. It’s getting harder and harder to believe that Barack Obama once taught Constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

I’m not surprised. In April 2010 the New York Times reported that during a chat with reporters on Air Force One, Obama had imperiously criticized the Earl Warren Supreme Court for going out of its proper way by decisions that overruled elected officials. This was the Supreme Court that decided to exclude from trials any evidence illegally obtained by investigators (Mapp v. Ohio) and also established the Miranda right of any American arrested to remain silent. And to keep the core of the Constitution functioning, the Warren Court— in New York Times v.Sullivan —nailed down the First Amendment right to criticize public officials.

That is the Supreme Court Obama says went too far. Now he’s comfortable with Elena Kagan on the Roberts Court. He’s also delighted, I expect, that his choice for the Court, during her confirmation hearings, agreed with Obama (as the New York Times reported) that “people suspected of helping to provide material support to terrorists” should be subject to battlefield law— including detention without trial—even if they were not captured in a battle zone.

“Material support”? Talk about a model of broadness and vagueness of incriminating language!

This President has also been insistently advocating his power to imprison terrorism suspects indefinitely if he can’t put them on trial before military commissions or in our federal courts because the evidence against them was extracted by our having tortured them. It’s called “permanent detention.”

If Obama gets the legislation to do that— thereby showing the world again how distorted our rule of law has become under Bush, Cheney and Obama—the President will have a cheerleader on the Roberts Court for his mocking the Declaration of Independence’s insistence that “we have a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” And a decent respect for ourselves.

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?
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by Nat Hentoff
from HUSTLER Magazine December 2010

OUR PRESIDENT SEEMS INTENT ON TELLING
US WHAT TO EAT AND WHEN TO DIE!

Some of our President’s critics say he is “cold,” but he is so concerned with our cost-efficient well-being that on June 10, 2010, he issued an executive order (not requiring Congressional approval) that inserts into the Obamacare law yet another regulatory committee. Never before has there been anything like this governmental shaping of our lifestyles. As Bob Unruh of WorldNetDaily reported, the new committee will “make recommendations about and establish rules for everything from how people exercise to whether they smoke to the food they eat and the medicines they use. And it specifically requires the committee list the priorities for lifestyle behavior modification that the government will pursue.”

On White House stationery, Obama’s historic executive order is listed as “Establishing the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council.” Among the behavior deciders on this advisory board—a brain trust that 1984 author George Orwell never thought of in his futuristic novel—are the chiefs of the Agriculture, Labor, Health & Human Services, Transportation and Homeland Security departments. Oh, yes, also the director of the National Drug Control Policy.

To indicate how seriously the Obama Administration intends to control how you take care of yourself, Bob Unruh earlier reported a Department of Justice brief to dismiss a lawsuit by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which was opposing the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on the interstate sale of raw milk.

Here is the unequivocal statement by our government that the claim by the plaintiffs in this lawsuit “of a ‘fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families’ is…unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.” You have been warned by your government.

The Obama regime will tell you what’s good or what’s bad for you to eat and drink. How come the Founders never thought of that? Some of them were not very careful of what they ate or drank.

Are any of us going to be punished for not obeying this unprecedently benevolent government? An answer comes from Constitutional lawyer and former law professor Herb Titus, the 1996 Vice Presidential candidate on the Constitution Party (a/k/a the U.S. Taxpayers Party) ticket: “It’ll be criminalized. Ultimately that’s where it’s headed. That’s what this is designed to do. Ultimately bring everything under the federal umbrella. The only way they can accomplish that is through force.”

Depending, of course, on whether this administration stays in office. The vital list of reasons for voting in the midterm elections— let alone on the 2012 decision for a second Obama term—keeps getting longer and longer.

Consider the Behavior Modification Executive Order’s Section 3G, which basically mandates that the council in charge of our lifestyles will “carry out such other activities as are determined appropriate by the President.” There are no limitations on how our maximum leader can intervene, all by himself, in our personal lives.

And keep in mind this future date, as underlined by WorldNetDaily columnist David Limbaugh (Rush’s quieter younger brother). The “Advisory Group” in this executive order “in consultation with the council, must submit, by March 23, 2011, a ‘national strategy’ to ‘set specific goals and objectives for improving the health of the United States through federally supported prevention.’ ” Who knows what they, or the President alone, will come up with?

Meanwhile, we’re learning a lot more about how the Obamacare law will decide how long some of us—whose continued health, and therefore lives, are too costly for the government to sustain—will live. Not only the elderly are imperiled.

We already know that Obama has appointed Dr. Donald Berwick to the single most powerful healthcare position, the head of Medicare and Medicaid. Dr. Berwick has publicly declared his “love” for Britain’s National Health Service and its rationing of British healthcare and lives. But now the New York Times’ preeminent reporter on all of this, Robert Pear, has discovered that “Dr. Berwick has championed efforts to ‘reduce the total supply of high-technology medical and surgical care.’” They’re too damn expensive to be permitted by a President committed to reduce our deficits.

I am alive to write this because quadruple bypasses were invented and perfected in time for me to have one 16 years ago, when my cardiologist said that my life was “hanging by a thread.” Many of us, of all ages, are still here because of continually invented high-technology medical and surgical care. And many more lives can be saved in the years ahead, unless Obama and Dr. Berwick manage to cut off more and more of the expensive research these advances require.

As for those of us who may need intervention at what could be the final chapter of our lives, Dr. Berwick wants to “reduce the use of unwanted and ineffective medical procedures at the end of life.” Your own doctor will not decide if they’re unwanted or ineffective; Dr. Berwick and his regulators will. Neither he nor they will have actually seen you.

Remember the fiery debate on whether Obamacare would result in “death panels”? They won’t be called that, but in addition to Dr. Berwick, there will be scores of bureaucrats on Obama’s regulatory commissions to rule on which American lives are no longer worth living. An accurate Obama campaign promise should have been “Death you can believe in!”

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

by Nat Hentoff
from HUSTLER Magazine November 2010

AS BIG BROTHER GETS BIGGER AND BOLDER, AMERICANS ARE ONCE AGAIN LIVING IN “TIMES THAT TRY MEN’S SOULS.”

Many years ago I went to a conference on privacy at Harvard University. The keynote speaker, a high-level assistant to then- FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, was unusually frank for an FBI official. He bellowed, “Privacy? It’s gone.” Even Hoover himself had no idea of how deep and continuing that loss would become. Last year the Electronic Privacy Foundation—the premier defender of our digital civil liberties—accused the U.S. government of engaging “in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001.”

Our home and business phones and e-mails are, of course, porous. But federal eyes and ears have moved on to cell phones, texting, Twitter and their ever-more-sophisticated progeny, while also increasing experimentation with methods of mind control through behavioral modification techniques and beyond. (For details, see “Obama Interrogation Official Linked to U.S. Mind Control Research” at PubRecord.org, May 25, 2010.)

James Bamford, the most informed investigator of our cavernous Big Brother—the National Security Agency, known for its limitless databases—reveals in his 2008 book The Shadow Factory : “NSA is also developing another tool that Orwell’s Thought Police might have found useful—an artificial intelligence system designed to know what people are thinking.”

I’ve written about our vanishing privacy in this column and in my books, but never with such penetratingly profound awareness as the Wall Street Journal ’s Peggy Noonan in her article “Our Lives Laid Bare”: “When we lose our privacy, we lose some of our humanity; we lose the things that are particular to us, that make us separate and distinctive as souls, as actually children of God.”

Actually, I’m an atheist, but I do have a secular soul with what once were secret compartments that may now be in “persons of interest” files at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Also, as an unremitting critic of Bush and Cheney and now Obama—the continuer of their anti- Constitutional legacy—I’m not unmindful that were there another 9/11 or worse, I might have a compulsory change of address. So far I’ve not been able to get my actual current FBI files; but the one I saw years ago had me at a North Africa meeting of purportedly dangerous radicals.

I have never been to Africa, North or South. I did meet Che Guevara once, at New York’s Cuban Mission to the United Nations, and I had the irreverent nerve to ask him if Cuba would ever have free elections. He laughed sardonically, obviously not regarding me as a dependable revolutionary.

But there are millions of Americans without a tinge of radicalism or libertarianism (my core belief) in their past who are disquieted at being part of a society under ceaseless surveillance. They hear about current cases like that of Bruce Shore, who caught Kentucky Republican Senator Jim Bunning on C-SPAN complaining about having missed a basketball game to vote on unemployment benefits and then delaying the vote. Shore, a 51-year-old unemployed resident of Philadelphia, sent critical e-mails about Bunning to members of the senator’s staff, including “No checks equal no food for me. DO YOU GET IT?”

This citizen, supposedly protected by the First Amendment, was soon visited by United States marshals, who presented him with a grand jury indictment for violating the Communications Decency Act. His alleged crime? Shore, as this law spells out, “did use a telecommunications device, that is, a computer, whether or not communication ensued, without disclosing his identity, to annoy, abuse, threaten and harass any person who received the communication.”

Whether or not Shore is eventually found guilty, he is now in a stream of government databases, where he will probably remain for the rest of his life—unless we get a President whose bible, whatever his religion, or none, is the Constitution. If Shore is convicted, he faces up to two years in the slammer and a $250,000 fine.

As for many of the rest of us who could be ensnared in this federal dragnet, Peggy Noonan writes that “Americans, as a people, are not really suited to the age of surveillance, the age of no privacy. There is no hiding place now, not here.”

Can we ever get our privacy back? Not unless we fight for it. A movement has begun. According to the Wall Street Journal, such abusers of our privacy as Microsoft, Google, Intel and AT&T “are pushing for more stringent regulations on government ability to access electronic communications.”

They are seeking a basic reform and updating of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which “extended restrictions on government wiretaps to data transmissions as well as phone calls” and “regulated privacy in stored data.” But these so-called restrictions have gone with the Presidential winds and whims. Therefore, this coalition—whose ultimate aim is to restore personal privacy—calls itself Digital Due Process.

Congressman John Conyers Jr. (DMichigan), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, says he will lead these attempts to rescue privacy. I know that Conyers is deeply into our American music of individual liberty— jazz—but he needs help. Although it may take some courage after what happened to Bruce Shore, notify your representatives in the House and Senate that you demand your privacy back. Peggy Noonan reminds us: “There are cameras all over. No terrorist can escape them, but none of the rest of us can either.”

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

by Nat Hentoff
from HUSTLER Magazine August 2010

OUR LEADER AND WE THE PEOPLE SHOULD HEED THE ADVICE OF HIS PREDECESSORS AND THE FOUNDING FATHERS.

Between standing ovations at the University of Michigan on May 1, the President denounced those around the country who denigrate government as “inherently bad” and then lash his administration as “socialist,” among other epithets. Sending the graduates out into the dangerous universe, he reminded them that in a democracy “government is us.” But since his is the most secretive administration in our history, how much do We the People know about what he’s doing in our name?

Obama did speak abstractly of preserving “individual freedom.” As he solemnly intoned, “The question for your generation is this: How will you keep our democracy going and vibrant…at a moment when our challenges seem so big and politics seem so small?”

On the very night of Obama’s commencement address, our democracy was frighteningly challenged when a naturalized American citizen, Pakistani-born and earner of two Connecticut college degrees, came close to murdering thousands in New York’s Times Square. Faisal Shahzad is one of a growing breed of terrorists whom you would never know as a terrorist if you met them at their jobs or at a bar.

As former New York and then Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton warned, the lethal jihadists’ focus “has shifted from the large-scale 9/11 type assault” with al-Qaeda now “leaning on its loose networks of affiliates…to do any attack, large or small, that will hit [the] U.S. at home.” Bratton underlined, “That will not stop.”

I live in Greenwich Village,halfway between the horror of 9/11 and the near-bloodbath this May at Times Square.I am not without fear,particularly now that more aspiring suicide bombers look and talk like me. If the next Faisal Shahzad succeeds, Obama will finally have a bipartisan Congress eager to pass a new USA PATRIOT Act with even more electronic handcuffs on our individual liberties. Already, as head of “us,” as he puts it, Barack Obama has exceeded even Bush and Cheney in making our privacy obsolete while diminishing other individual liberties in the Bill of Rights, including a continuation, as I’ve reported in HUSTLER, of his predecessors’ torture policy that al-Qaeda and jihad affiliates welcome as a robustly effective recruiting tool.

With this nation in greater fear of actual instant terrorism than at any time since 9/11, Commander in Chief Obama would enthusiastically structure the next liberty-reducing PATRIOT Act tribute to George Orwell.

Obama did say one thing to the University of Michigan graduates with which I agree: “The practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship. … If you’re a regular Glenn Beck listener [on Fox News], then check out the Huffington Post sometimes.” Similarly, when I used to teach at New York University, on the first day of class I would insist: “If you read The Nation or The New Republic, you must also read The National Review or The Weekly Standard.”

I also always gave my students a pocket edition of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, telling them: “That’s how you’ll judge whatever local, state and federal government is in power.” But, in counseling active citizenship to University of Michigan students, Obama left out the Constitution, an apparently bowdlerized version of which he used to teach at the University of Chicago.

As future suicide bombers doubling as U.S. citizens emerge, my advice to HUSTLER readers is that they confront their Congressional representatives and the White House with certain views opposing Obama’s from our history. Said Ronald Reagan: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same.”

And from Dwight D. Eisenhower, if you’re old enough to remember who he was: “I read where members of the so-called intelligentsia…urge a strong President. They are deluding themselves… with the idea of an all-powerful Chief Executive. In this democracy a [truly] strong President is one who will be concerned about doing things in a Constitutional way, respecting the Legislature and the Judiciary”—and especially “us,” whom all of those in office purportedly represent.

Indeed, we may yet be sucked by fear into a time like when the Bolsheviks taking over Russia resulted in a “Red Scare” here. In 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up thousands of purported Communist aliens—among them American citizens with no connection to communism— for what Palmer called “a disease of evil thinking.” Many of the prisoners were summarily deported without any judicial intervention. One of the planners of Palmer’s raids on the radicals was Justice Department staffer J. Edgar Hoover, who later, as head of the FBI, increasingly shelved individual civil liberties as an obstacle to national security—a roundup term increasingly in use by Bush-Cheney-Obama.

Far too many Americans are just plain ignorant of their liberties and rights against government in the Constitution and will fearfully vote for pledges of national security rather than the Constitution. Our survival as a free people will depend on more of us taking heart and will from Samuel Adams, called by Thomas Jefferson the Father of the Revolution: “It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires in people’s minds.”

And you ought not to forget Thomas Jefferson’s message to all Americans to come: “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

Even if you’re not of what some would consider good conscience, but regard yourself as an independent American, keep Samuel Adams in mind as you vote in the midterm elections and thereafter. As Jefferson also kept repeating, only you can protect your liberties!

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

by Nat Hentoff
from HUSTLER Magazine August 2010

THE WAR ON TERROR CONTINUES TO GIVE THE PRESIDENT UNBRIDLED POWERS THAT TURN THE RULE OF LAW UPSIDE DOWN.

Authored by John Yoo in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002, the infamous “torture memos” gave the Bush-Cheney Administration precisely what it demanded: legal cover for the unbounded “coercive interrogation” of suspected terrorists at Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s secret prisons (“black sites”), as well as for “renditions,” whereby other such suspects were whisked off to countries known for torturing their prisoners.

This shameful U.S. “torture policy” led to deep resentment from our allies and a unanimous, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2008, which declared that these “coercive interrogations” provided al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups a powerful recruiting tool.

Accordingly, there was keen anticipation in this country and abroad when the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility embarked on a four-year investigation of the possible lawlessness of John Yoo and his accomplice in the Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee.

Before the final version of the OPR report was released, leaks revealed that the investigation initially found that then-Deputy Attorney General Yoo had “committed intentional professional misconduct when he violated his duty to exercise independent legal judgment and render thorough, objective and candid legal advice.” (Bybee was similarly censured.)

This ruling, once issued and sent to the bar associations in the states where Yoo and Bybee were licensed, could have led to their disbarment and possible prosecution. But suddenly both were spared punishment by an edict from David Margolis, a longtime high-level associate deputy attorney general. He is a Justice Department expert in—I kid you not—“legal ethics.”

Margolis countermanded the OPR investigators, concluding that Yoo and Bybee (the latter promoted in 2003 to a federal judgeship) had used just “poor judgment.” Naughty, naughty. Then and now, Yoo’s go-ahead on torture was based on his conviction that the President— commander in chief in the war against terrorism— had limitless power to keep us safe. For instance, when an OPR investigator asked Yoo if the President could order the extermination of “a village of civilians,” his answer was “Sure.”

There is much more in this extensive Office of Professional Responsibility report than references to Yoo and Bybee. It makes, in detail, a powerful case for a necessary Congressional— or independent—investigation on the highest accountability for the torture policy all the way up the chain of command to the White House.
Dick Cheney, the proponent as Vice President of what he called “the dark side” of our survival battle against terrorism, actually said to an ABC News interviewer on February 14 of this year— as he defended John Yoo—“I thought it was important…to stand up and defend those people who’d done what we asked them to do.”

Yoo and Bybee were indeed acting on orders from on high. OPR investigators were told by John Bellinger—who was a lawyer at the National Security Council while Yoo was at the Justice Department—that Yoo was under tremendous pressure to come up with an answer that would justify continuing the interrogation program.
As I’ve previously reported, the CIA was very worried that its interrogators might be in danger of being prosecuted, and Yoo had urgently asked for an Office of Legal Counsel get-out-of-jail pass. Great pressures on Yoo had also come from Dick Cheney’s insistently hardline legal counsel, David Addington. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in 2008, Addington—defending Yoo—said significantly, “This is what his client asked him to do.”

Yoo’s client was George W. Bush, along with those he commanded in the executive branch, including then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. Now that we and the world know who was ultimately responsible for violating our own Torture Act, the international Covenant Against Torture, the Geneva Conventions, etc., shouldn’t we know whether any of them will be investigated to show that we are indeed a nation of laws, not men? As of this writing, there have been pledges of investigations by chairmen of the Democratically controlled House and Senate Judiciary Committees, but nothing has started. And President Obama, who has continued some of the Bush-Cheney practices, is opposed to looking back lest he be tracked.

As for the Republicans, the influential Senator John Cornyn of Texas, an active member of the Judiciary Committee, said that Yoo and Bybee deserve “the thanks of a grateful nation for their service.” Huh? Cornyn is only angry at “the irreparable damage to their reputations.” How about our reputations? The triumphant John Yoo, in a prominent Wall Street Journal article titled “My Gift to President Obama,” exulted: “Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his Presidency. How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe. … I did not do this to win any popularity contests. … I did it to help our President—President Obama, not Bush.” I expect President Obama is grateful.

After leaving the Oval Office, Richard Nixon said: “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Nixon ultimately had to resign for what he did. But if Obama and future Presidents continue to operate under the Bush- Cheney-Yoo doctrine that there are no boundaries to what our commanders in chief can unilaterally do to preserve our safety and our values, Nixon’s assurances that future Presidents are impregnably above the law will be validated as long as there are threats from terrorism. With the Constitution’s separation of powers discarded as obsolete, our individual liberties are being imperiled, not only due to terrorists but also at the hands of our own leaders. Will this still be America?

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

THE SENATE’S NEWEST MEMBER WILL FIT RIGHT IN AS PRESIDENT OBAMA RETAINS “LEGAL” TORTURE AND ESCALATES THE WAR ON THE CONSTITUTION.

by Nat Hentoff
for HUSTLER Magazine – July 2010

When barely known Republican Scott Brown took the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, it was front-page news that shook the White House. The Democrats had lost their 60-vote hammer to stop Republican filibusters. Also, the new senator had the “common man “aura, campaigning across Massachusetts in his pickup truck. And Brown won a strong majority of the state’s large bloc of independent voters.

But how independent of the Bush-Cheney legacy—now vigorously continued by Obama—of bypassing the Constitution is this guy? Right after Brown’s victory I discovered that he supports water boarding. This form of torture—making an interrogated prisoner believe he is about to be drowned—is illegal under the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, the Torture Act of 2000and the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. signed and ratified.

In his acceptance speech, moreover, Senator Brown showed multidimensional ignorance by proclaiming that our Constitution does “not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime.” But the Supreme Court’s 2008 Boumedienev. Bush decision granted Guantanamo prisoners the right, under our Constitution, to file habeas corpus petitions to make the government justify their imprisonment. And then the shining new senator also harrumphed that “in dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them—not lawyers to defend them.”

But how do we know, under our rule of law, that individuals taken into custody are actually terrorists until there are lawyers to represent them? And where did Senator Brown get the notion that our tax dollars are going to such defenders of accused terrorists as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights and various lawyers in Washington firms who volunteer to represent them?

Also, Brown is emphatically against “giving new rights to terrorists.” Again, shouldn’t we first find out if they are terrorists, and which “new rights” does he have in his cluttered mind?

So far the media has been Scott Brown’s cheerleader. However, I have a grave question that I hope the elite Washington press corps asks the gladiator senator: Does he believe that a President of the United States has the legal authority to order, without going to any judge, the targeted assassination of an American citizen considered to be involved with al-Qaeda or other direct terrorist threats to our country?

On February 3, 2010, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair declared that President Barack Obama does have the authority to assassinate such Americans. Admiral Blair was reacting to a January 27, 2010, front-page Washington Post report by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dana Priest that in Yemen, in a hunt for terrorists, forces involved in joint operations with Yemeni troops conducted targeted assassinations—approved by President Obama—that have killed six top leaders of al-Qaeda affiliates among scores of other people, including civilians.

Priest added significantly that these operations include “a short list of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC[the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command—Army Rangers, Delta Forces, Green Berets, et al.].”

Yemen isn’t the only country where Presidentially authorized hit lists are being implemented. The CIA’s pilotless Predator drones, guided thousands of miles away by agents at CIA headquarters in Virginia, are being deployed elsewhere. As William Fisher reported in TruthOut.org: “The Obama Administration is ramping up its use of drone unmanned aircraft to execute targeted killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and perhaps other locations—and in the process, killing [innocent] civilians along with insurgents.”

These assassinations are being conducted in our name as Americans. Accordingly, in a Freedom of Information Act request to the President, the ACLU wants to know, as do I, the geographical scope of these deadly missions, the civilian casualty toll and how many fatalities in Afghanistan were al-Qaeda or Taliban. Also, of course, on what legal basis are these assassinations being conducted?

As for any Americans on any of these hit lists, former Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald, a dauntless exposer of Bush-Cheney and Obama lawlessness, has emphasized atCommonDreams.org that without any judicial approval or specific oversight by Congress, these executions are “basically giving the President the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial.”

And what about the innocent civilians killed as “collateral” damage” during these assassinations? Said Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions: “We need the United States to be more upfront and say, ‘Okay, we’re willing to discuss some aspects of this program.’ Otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people, and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.”

I haven’t heard or seen any deeply troubled member of Congress seconding that urgent request to the President. I have also heard nothing about these extrajudicial assassinations from Senator Scott Brown. Now that the news is out, where are the demands from protesters, however small in number, in our streets?

As Obama continues to increase drone annihilations, there will be even more successful recruiting by our terrorist enemies than happened after the release of photos depicting what U.S. troops were doing to Abu Ghraib prisoners.

Is this America?

Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; Living the Bill of Rights; and the forthcoming Is This America?
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