Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Time to Give the Statue Back
TomDispatch kicks off the new year with some harsh reminders of just what the U.S. has become after seven years of Bush-Cheney rule:
Take, for instance, 20-year veteran of the National Guard Zakariya Muhammad Reed (born Edward Eugene Reed, Jr.), who, for the last 11 years, has worked as a firefighter in Toledo, Ohio. Regularly crossing the Canadian border to visit his wife's family, he has been stopped so many times -- "I was put up against the wall and thoroughly frisked, any more thoroughly and I would have asked for flowers…" -- that he is a connoisseur of detention. He's been stopped five times in the last seven months and now chooses his crossing place based on the size of the detention waiting room he knows he'll end up in. It took several such incidents, during which no explanations were offered, before he discovered that he was being stopped in part because of his name and in part because of a letter he wrote to the Toledo Blade criticizing Bush administration policies on Israel and Iraq.Read the rest. Between stories like these and the recent revelation that the U.S. is right up there with China and the former Soviet Union as an "endemic surveillance society," remind me again: who exactly won the Cold War?
