Yellow Dog

From American Poet, Walt Whitman, who was described by Thoreau as "the greatest democrat that ever lived":

To The States

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States
Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved
No nation, state, city, of this earth, ever
afterward resumes its liberty.

From Congressman John Conyers, Representative-Michigan

Today our nation stands on the verge of a civil liberties calamity.

If you would have told me four years ago, that our nation was not only condoning, but actually engaging in torture and inhuman treatment, both abroad and at home, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you would have told me that our own Justice Department had developed the legal justification for these acts, I would have found you to be not credible. If you would have told me that we had deported a Canadian Citizen to Syria for ten months of torture and imprisonment, I would have said you must be thinking of a repressive dictatorship, such as Iran or Iraq, not the United States.

But that is where we are today. In many respects, the threat to our liberties today is more grave than previous overreactions to foreign threats to our country.

We cannot lose our voice of dissent. As Martin Luther King once told us, “there comes a time when silence is betrayal.” We cannot be bullied and intimidated when people like John Ashcroft charge that those who would criticize this Administration are “aiding the terrorists” and “giving ammunition to America’s enemies,” or when Ari Fleisher says Americans “need to be careful what they say.”

Many of us remember a time when the powers of the FBI and the CIA were horribly abused. Many of us know what it means to face racial profiling and religious persecution. Many of us know that our nation has over-reacted to threats of violence in the past by clamping down on legitimate protests and law abiding immigrants.

We all want to fight terrorism, but we want to fight it the right way, consistent with our constitution, and in a manner that serves as a model for the rest of the world. Torture does not make us safer, it only makes the world more dangerous and degrades our commitment to freedom and liberty.

Denounce Torture