>If we're gonna talk citizenship, I'm gonna have to talk (gratifyingly
>basic) Habermas.
>
>I do think the word, and an explicit debate concerning its definition, are
>of great political significance. That critical idea of defining something
>(and the conditions necessary for that definition to be honoured in
>practice) in precisely the terms implicit in the legitimating norms du jour
>(eg. liberalism) is a beaut. It's all very well talking formal rights and
>obligations - but the point has to be made that citizenship is a
>*practice*, much of it necessarily communicative (not just an occasionally
>ignored vote, but actually exercising the right to information and voice -
>not one or the other, but a logically necessary coexistence of both).
I'm afraid we are more in need of the ACLU, the NLG, & the like than Habermas here.
***** Safe and Free in Times of Crisis
ACLU Calls New Senate Terrorism Bill Significantly Worse; Says Long-Term Impact on Freedom Cannot Be Justified
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, October 5, 2001
WASHINGTON -- The American Civil Liberties Union today urged the Senate to reject the newest version of proposed anti-terrorism legislation, saying that it poses significantly more danger to civil liberties than the measure adopted earlier this week by the House Judiciary Committee....
..."For immigrants," added Gregory T. Nojeim, Associate Director of the ACLU's Washington Office, "this bill is a dramatic setback. It is unconscionable to detain immigrants who prove in a court of law that they are not terrorists and who win their deportation cases."
Among the bill's most troubling provisions, the ACLU said, are measures that would:
* Allow for indefinite detention of non-citizens, even if they have successfully challenged a government effort to deport them.
* Minimize judicial supervision of federal telephone and Internet surveillance by law enforcement authorities.
* Expand the ability of the government to conduct secret searches.
* Give the Attorney General and the Secretary of State the power to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and block any non-citizen who belongs to them from entering the country. Under this provision, paying membership dues to such an organization would become a deportable offense.
* Grant the FBI broad access to sensitive business records about individuals without having to show evidence of a crime.
* Lead to large-scale investigations of American citizens for "intelligence" purposes....
<http://www.aclu.org/safeandfree/> *****
Yoshie