"There's just the lag time, which is so dangerous, when people still think it's a democracy, even while the martial law steps have begun"

don hazen at alternet interviews naomi wolf...

If the president can say, Well, "Don is an enemy combatant," there is nothing you can do. It's like "Tag, you're it!" To that extent we can not be innocent. And then someone is in jail for three years without being able to see their families or have easy access to a phone.

If they can do that, the pendulum can't swing, because after the first arrest, it generally goes in one direction, and according to the blueprint, the time has come for those first arrests. We're having this conversation now, before these arrests. But if tomorrow you read in the New York Times or the Washington Post that New York Times editor Bill Keller has been arrested, the staff will all be scared, others will get scared. And people don't understand that that's how democracy closes down. And when that happens first, it's the tipping point at which we think it's still a democracy.

... [P]eople need to believe and realize that that kind of negotiation is pretty much over. And there's just the lag time, which is so dangerous, when people still think it's a democracy, even while the martial law steps have begun. And that's where we are at, unless we get it.

Because you know, Congress keeps saying, "Hello, we're Congress." You have to answer us when we ask for information. The president's like, "Sorry, I'm ignoring you!" It starts becoming thinking like an abused woman, like: "Surely he's going to do it right this time, surely he's not going to do it again." And he does.

there is literally nothing we can do as american citizens that is more important than waking up to this possibility, and i will keep plaintively bleating about it until i see that the danger has passed, that i am snatched away from my keyboard for inciting "dissent", or that i fall, face-first, on that same keyboard in the final stages of senile dementia... the very LAST thing i want to do is to sit here and type the dreaded words, "i told you so..."

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