Pay attention!

Here are some interesting laws in the making.

S.1047 – Department of Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by Senate). Section 1037 allows the use of "unmanned aerial vehicles for support of Homeland Security missions. That is the "predator drones being used in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The bill allows them to operate over population centers inside the US.

S.1050 – National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 (Placed on Calendar in Senate). Sections 3131 and 3132 authorize restarting the nuclear weapon development program and underground testing of nuclear weapons.

Public Law 108-177 – Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 from S.1025 Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004. Exempts the Department of Defense from the constraints of the Freedom of Information Act (Section 503, item 5 D).

"There has been an ongoing erosion of the line between various branches of government. Under the auspices of the "war on drugs," there has been an increasing blurring of the line between the military and the police. This legal line is blurring to invisibility in the aftermath of 9/11. In the 6/21/04 Newsweek article Intelligence: The Pentagon? Spying in America? by Michael Isikioff, we learn that the Senate Intelligence Committee has eliminated the restriction that the Department of Defense no longer has to comply with the Privacy Act (the CIA is also exempt from this restriction). What is frightening here is that both the CIA and the military are only tasked to operate outside the United States, that is, until the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, and the merging of departments and agencies under the Homeland Security Act, and the various intelligence reorganization policies. Now both of the non-domestic tasked agencies can (and do) operate inside the US." — from "Creeping Fascism," S. Rowan Wolf, Ph.D. in The Progressive Review

In the the name of security and the war of terrorism we are accomplices in a form of anti-Americanism that does bear striking resemblences to the rise of the Nazis in Germany (despite its hackneyed overuse as our primary metaphor for evil) who did the same thing for a "greater Germany," the Homeland, the Fatherland, the police state.

It is a creeping, soft totalitarianism. Not American, not patriotic at all. Yes, it can happen again. Yes, it is happening here.