I'd be willing to qualify my statement by saying that "liberals -- excepting 'ACLU liberals' -- don't defend civil liberties -- or any other component of liberal democracy -- in a time of crisis," as "ACLU liberals" are a minority of liberals. Defenders of political liberalism above all other political ideologies are normally ready to sacrifice universal suffrage, free elections, and civil rights and liberties if unrestrained exercise of them appear to put Communists and the like into power. "I don't see why we should have to stand by and let a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." Some political liberals may disagree with Henry Kissinger as to means of preventing Communists and the like from coming to power or deposing them from power, but they don't disagree with him in principle. That's why we still have such things as the embargo on Cuba, even though it infringes upon Americans' right and liberty to travel; if political liberals had really fought hard against abridgement of American liberty, at least this absurd legacy of the Cold War could have been cast into the dustbin of history a decade ago.
Some of the issues on the ACLU's plate are fundamentally linked to the question of the Empire -- at the very least, Criminal Justice, Cyber-Liberties, Drug Policy, Free Speech, Immigrants Rights, Int'l Civil Liberties, National Security, Police Practices, Racial Equality, and Religious Liberty.
At 8:44 AM -0800 2/21/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>Maybe you are right about the future of the organization
Even before the "war on terrorism," we had some remarkable cases that clearly linked the expansion of the Empire to questions of liberties: e.g., conducting warrantless searches of a Mexican home of a Mexican drug-smuggling suspect residing in the USA (United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 US 259 [1990], <http://www.guncite.com/court/fed/sc/494us259.html>), kidnapping a suspect (suspected of involvement in the kidnapping and murder of a DEA agent and his pilot) from Mexico to try him in the USA (United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655 [1992], <http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/91-712.ZS.html>), invading Panama to kidnap Manuel Noriega to try him in the USA (an especially ridiculous case), etc. An exponential rise in cases of this nature is to be expected in the "war on terrorism." The ACLU will have a bigger role to play in our efforts to roll back the Empire, I hope. Courts won't allow the ACLU liberals to reverse the trend, though. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>