Originally Posted by Wow Civic
An ACLU lawyer on Bill O'Reilly's show called the terrorist "martyrs" and then said that the terrorists are just doing what they believe in. He was practically saying that the terrorists are not wrong-- they are just dying for their faith. ACLU regularily defends terrorists kept in Guantamono Bay, Cuba, saying they are treated horrible... even though they are fed with better food than most of us are, given freedom of religion, speech, and shelter.
A martyr is defined as a person who dies for thier faith or for principle. Do radical Muslim terrorists fit that description? Actually they do. The word martyr doesn't imply any goodness; its just a way to describe why someone died.
The ACLU defends people whose rights are being denied to them. In a free society, even criminals have rights, including the right to a fair trial, the right not to be beaten, the right to practice their religion -- so long as it does no harm to anyone else.
It sounds like you would prefer that anyone arrested as a suspected terrorist was thrown into a pit, like in the Silence of the Lambs, and then left there to rot. A dictator was recently deposed, and the President of the invading nation has said that this was one of the reasons why. Sound familiar?
Originally Posted by Wow Civic
The ACLU compared the U.S. to the Soviet Union when Josef Stalin was in rule and when he killed millions. The ACLU compared our terrorist prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba to the prisons in USSR that tortured and killed millions of innocents in the early 1900s. ACLU makes this country a more dangerous place by demanding places like Bucs stadium and NYC subways cannot do random checks on people saying it violates privacy. The ACLU fights the Patriot Act, one of the biggest laws in the U.S. that allows law enforcement to fight terrorism. ETC. ETC.!
Amnesty International is the group that described Gitmo as "the gulag of our times." Not the ACLU. (Thats the Soviet comparison you referred to.)
There is evidence of torture in US terrorist prisons. I think torture is wrong. This is a separate issue from the ACLU (or Ramsey Clark, for that matter).
Random bag searches on the NYC subways are unconstitutional under the 4th amendment. If you don't understand why, I'll be more than happy to explain it, but we should probably start another thread for that. It gets a little bit complicated.
Anyway, the mission of the ACLU is to defend the rights of the individual from being abridged by the government. Thats really all they do, and I can't understand how Republicans -- who are allegedly the party that holds sacrosanct the rights of the individual over the state -- would be so angry about it.
And now the PATRIOT Act. It was rushed through Congress in a state of fear shortly after 9/11 and gives an unreasonable amount of power and discretion to specific federal agencies to gather information in secret. This is exactly the kind of "big brother" government that we should all be afraid of. The kind of government that is allowed to go into your house while you're not there and look through everything you own. They don't need a warrant and they don't need your permission. They don't need to even to suspect you of anything.
These powers are granted to the FBI under section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and this is the core of the ACLU's argument against the Act. The government already had the power to do those things *with a warrant issued by a court*. If the FBI really has a reason to search my apartment, then they should have no problem explaining it to a judge.
The ACLU protects our rights and our freedoms. Why would you be against that?