Reply #6: The issue is indefinite detention beyond the sentence arrived at by a jury trial

[Peace Patriot]

wherein the accused allegedly has rights (right to be confronted by accusers, right of habeas corpus, right to a defense, right to a public trial, etc.) The issue is NOT what (or who) the government considers "dangerous."

We, the people of the U.S., just lost the right to NOT be indefinitely detained by our government. Or rather, this abrogation of one of our most basic rights was just formalized and extended beyond military/security detention to CIVILIAN crimes, since we had lost that right already during the Bush Junta's savage assault on our Constitution called "the war on terror."

I have my guesses as to why. You know, if the U.S. government/political establishment really wanted to curtail sexual predation, they would shut down Congress. The Bush Junta positively recruited sexual predators, and also thieves, to be Diebolded into office, because such people are easier to control and also they help the corporate rulers degrade and discredit government. There is absolutely nothing more hypocritical in our establishment than their targeting of "sexual predators" for particular hatred and venom, in order to create the precedent that punishment for a crime is not enough, that "some people," when accused and convicted by the government, LOSE ALL THEIR RIGHTS.

But I think there is a deeper and even more corrupt motive for their wanting to create categories of crime for permanent detention. The far rightwing corporate establishment that actually rules the U.S. has, for decades, demonized drug offenders and filled the jails with drug users and small time drug entrepreneurs--most of them black men who are thus removed from their communities, lose the right to vote, are incarcerated in white rural regions and counted as "warm bodies" (though they can't vote) to pad the books of white rural populations, for purposes of OVER-REPRESENTING white rural areas in Congress and in federal boondoggle contracts. But sentiment about drug use and drug trading is changing very rapidly. Many Americans, even some in the police establishment, are fed up with the "war on drugs," deem it a failure and want to end the criminalization of drug problems. How, then, to keep the vast prison system in this country FUNDED--a prison system infested with private corporate interests? If drug use and trade is decriminalized, it will just about empty the prisons--since about 75% of the prison population is made up of non-violent offenders (or the innocent and wrongfully convicted), which almost always involves the drug laws.

Got to have a new "demon"--and they've been working on "sexual predators" for some time, as THE PEOPLE WITH NO RIGHTS. Add in "brown people" with a Spanish accent, and you're well on your way to filling the void that threatens to be created when the "war on drugs" finally goes the way of Prohibition, into the slime-pit of history.

As to social "dangerousness," it's interesting that the most dangerous people in the U.S.--and indeed in the world--Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and their cohorts--are still running around free. Criminy, they slaughtered ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND INNOCENT PEOPLE in the first weeks of bombing alone, in Iraq, to steal their oil. If ANYBODY should be "permanently detained" it is those monsters!

But along with banks that are "too big to fail," we have war criminals who are too powerful to even investigate, let alone prosecute.

Compare this situation to Cuba--where a JUSTIFIABLY fearful government of a tiny island off the Florida coast, forty years a target of the mighty U.S.--may overdo it a bit, in trying to keep CIA agents off the streets.

I just have to laugh. The U.S. government is SO HYPOCRITICAL! I mean, WHO has been torturing prisoners on the island of Cuba? WHO? WHO has a U.S. Navy prison that is the scandal of the world, where old men, boys and other random persons swept up in Afghanistan or sold to the U.S. military by war lord jerks, have for years been incarcerated and many of them tortured, without trial, with no recourse, with no access to their families or communities or ANYBODY. WHO has been hooding and shackling prisoners and flying them to torture dungeons around the world?

It is absolutely ludicrous and A FORM IN INSANITY that the U.S. dares to criticize and demonize Cuba's government for 'human rights' violations. It is A LIE of staggering proportions. The U.S. corporate rulers DON'T GIVE A CRAP ABOUT ANYBODY'S HUMAN RIGHTS! Not ours. Not the Cuban peoples'. Not the Iranians'. Not ANYBODY'S. They want POWER in order to LOOT AND PLUNDER and trample the poor into the dust, here and everywhere else.

I just heard that this humongous, CAPITALIST, BP oil spill--the result of corporate control of our government, vast corruption and de-regulation--may hit the island of Cuba--that spectacularly beautiful island unmarauded by corporate greed, whose people have survived so many natural disasters and so many venomous U.S. plots. If the ten mile blob of poisonous corporate greed rolling around the ocean floor off Florida hits Cuba, that will be a tragic demonstration of how much our corporate rulers and their puppets in government care about Cubans or anybody else. U.S. blather about "human rights" is HUMBUG.