Nacht und Nebel

Nacht:

From Capitol Hill Blue

What Price Freedom?
Return of the Blacklist

By BOB KERR

Providence Journal
Nov 30, 2004, 06:42

Molly Little is a "Female Special."

"She didn't know. She didn't seek the title. She found out about it at the airport in Portland, Maine.

Little is from South Kingstown, R.I., a freshman at Colby College, and she doesn't like a lot of things her government is doing. So she demonstrates and asks questions and is drawn to people who share her outrage. Last year, she did an internship with the American Friends Service Committee, the organization founded by those peace-loving Quakers.

She made news with some friends last April when she took part in a symbolic washing of the United States flag at the Rhode Island State House.

"We're saying we're the future and we want to cleanse the United States of what it represents right now," she said at the time.

But she has found that speaking out and being very public in her opposition to government policies, while allegedly every citizen's right, can make her stand out in a crowd.

On Nov. 18, she was headed to Fort Benning, Ga., to take part in the annual nonviolent demonstration against The School of the Americas, that shadowy operation that is a training school for so many Latin American soldiers eager to learn the American way of keeping insurgencies in check. The school has been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, but that euphemistic turn has not stopped thousands of people from showing up every year to say the school is a very bad and un-American idea.

At the Portland airport, Little found that maybe, just maybe, a person can no longer speak out without getting his or her name on a list."

und Nebel:

U.S. lawyers assert broad right to detain
They argue for indefinite custody of enemy combatants at Guantanamo

The Associated Press
Thursday, December 2, 2004
WASHINGTON

"Under detailed questioning by a federal judge, government lawyers asserted yesterday that the U.S. military can hold foreigners indefinitely as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, even if they aided terrorists unintentionally and never fought the United States.

Could a "little old lady in Switzerland" who sent a check to an orphanage in Afghanistan be taken into custody if unbeknownst to her, some of her donation was passed to al-Qaida terrorists? asked U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green.

"She could," replied Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle. "Someone's intention is clearly not a factor that would disable detention." It would be up to a new military review panel to decide whether to believe her and release her."

How glorious for our beloved Homeland to have reached these years...

--WP