July 26, 3:31pm, somewhere outside of Sebree, KY

Oh, okay. Two more strident outside-world items.

1) Remember those tuna-net-like sweeps of suspicious Muslims that we conducted just after 9/11? The secret ones that the Bush Administration denied we were doing? Yeah, you remember them now.

Well, the United States has finally released the last guy we arrested! Hooray! C'mon cheer with me. It's okay, this guy, Benemar Benatta, is not a terrorist. How do we know he's not a terrorist?

Because the government concluded that in NOVEMBER OF 2001!!

2) In other news, a lawsuit brought against AT&T by Studs Terkel (an American treasure, to be sure) has been dismissed. They were suing to block AT&T from illegally disclosing any more customer information to the NSA, and to basically confirm or deny whether AT&T has done so in the past.

The court says that - while everybody knows that AT&T and other phone companies provided such information - if they confirm it or deny it in a court of law, then our enemies might get a better understanding of the government’s intelligence activities.

Some of you may be like, "Well, duh!", but others might not see the logic here. For the latter, here it is. The Executive branch usually relies on one of two arguments when they don’t want to reveal something. The first is the Mosaic theory, which says that confirmation or denial of a whole bunch of unclassified material can help people deduce classified material. The second is the State Secrets Privilege, which allows the government to dismiss otherwise sound legal cases when it believes that those cases could harm national security.

(It seems that the Bush Administration is relying on the SSP, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the MT made its way into their arguments somewhere along the line.)

You see, if we revealed what information the Federal Government illegally seized from her citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the FISA statutes, then our enemies might, just might, figure out how to evade eavesdropping.

If AT&T admits that they (in violation of the aforementioned Federal law, passed by the duly elected representatives of the American people) disclosed the private and privileged data of their customers to the NSA or other Executive organizations, THEY WOULD BE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE TERRORISTS (they’d also be following the established laws of American jurisprudence, but that’s really apples and oranges. Focus, people!)

What’s funny (but not “Ha ha!” funny) is that there is not a single thing that the government can do that doesn’t fall under either the Mosaic theory or the State Secrets Privilege. And that’s bad, very bad.

One of the most remarkable features of our Founding Fathers is that they chose to limit the power they were giving to the government – and since a lot of them were going to become part of the government, how they chose to limit their own power. They understood that all leaders, even those ruling through the consent of governed, will naturally try to amass more power.

Simply put, if you give people power, they will want more power. If you give somebody a hammer, everything looks like nails, and he’ll want a bigger, better hammer. Once he gets it, he sees how there are some things that even his bigger, better hammer can’t nail. So he needs More Power. A bigger hammer. Let’s call this the Tim Allen Theory of Government. The TATG is how despotism begins.

Their solution, to constrain the powers of the Government via the Bill of Rights, is really the only thing that has prevented this country from becoming completely Fascist. We need the Bill of Rights, and its limits on government power, to prevent us from getting totally hammered (or screwed, as the case may be).

The freedoms we cherish? We don’t have them because of any inborn characteristic of the American people. I wish we did, but we don’t. We have them because the Founding Fathers gave us a tool to constrain the government. We have our rights because we can hold the government accountable.

What else do we have?

We have a White House that decided it could snoop on us whenever it sees fit.

We have a white House that used illegally gotten material to order police investigations into tens of thousands of innocent civilians.

We have a White House that had the CIA kidnap, drug, and beat a guy, then fly him to a secret prison in Afghanistan and hold him there for months (even though they knew that he was innocent), and then, when they decided they were done with him, drop him off in Albania. Without ever filing a single criminal charge against the guy.

And all of this is okay, and unchallengeable in the courts, because this same White House says so.

The Founding Fathers had a name for this kind of thing – Tyranny.

Remember to vote.

7/26 Utica Volunteer Fire Department, Utica, KY ->10.5 hrs, 03808.3