Constitutional Abuses

Either we have Constitutionally protected rights, or we don't... this week's news looks like we don't.

Police assaulting citizens exercising their First Amendment rights of Assembly and Speech.

The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality - Salon.com

And the American Government putting to death one of it's own citizens without due process.

I personally was quite upset at the Bush administration for the warrant-less wire-tapping of American citizens - now, President Obama has his opportunity to trample the Constitution and does so.

Yes, I know, particularly the Anwar Al-Awlaki situation, are complex matters that involve balancing public security vs. individual rights, but there has to be a better way. As Americans we often talk about the "cost" of our Freedoms in referencing military service, but if we truly want to have some of those freedoms, one of the costs that we may have to bear is increased risk at home due to less "effective" methods of defending our country.

To illustrate this, Iran released some American hikers it had imprisoned for crossing into Iranian territory. Here's a paragraph from the article describing their release:

When they complained about conditions in Tehran's Evin Prison, Bauer said, their jailers would "immediately remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay. They would remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world."

When we fail to interact with the rest of the world in a way that is consistent with our values, we lose the expectation of receiving those values in return. Chicken or egg, this is one of the outgrowths of the war on terror.