What Naomi Wolf Sez!

There is no time to waste. We have to get it -- in a hurry -- that the assaults we are witnessing are unprecedented (by the Busheviks on the Constitution) and demand unprecedented responses from us.

There have been times of state repression in our nation before now; as others such as Joe Conason, author of It Can Happen Here, and Bruce Fein, a founder of the American Freedom Agenda, have pointed out, `the pendulum' has swung to extremes before now: President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in some areas during the civil war -- but it was restored after the war came to an end. 120,000 Japanese American citizens were interned in detention camps (the fear was that they would engage in `espionage' and `sabotage') during World War Two -- and when that hysteria subsided, the camps were closed and these innocent Americans released.

Both writers note that previous eras of repression had endpoints: the wars ended, the threat subsided -- but the War on Terror is defined as open-ended in time and in space: there will never be a day of victory, and the whole world is a battlefield. So we can't count on the pendulum to swing back as it always has -- that is, not without a citizen uprising in defense of liberty.