Safer

Y'know, six years ago, this would have been the most outrageous story ever printed in an American newspaper. This story is from NYT, a reprise of this one from the San Francisco Chronicle:

"We haven't heard about this happening -- U.S. citizens being refused the right to return from abroad without any charges or any basis," said Mass, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

McGregor Scott, the U.S. attorney for California's eastern district, confirmed Friday that the men were on the no-fly list and were being kept out of the country until they agreed to talk to federal authorities.

"They've been given the opportunity to meet with the FBI over there and answer a few questions, and they've declined to do that," Scott said.

Mass said Jaber Ismail had answered questions during an FBI interrogation at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad soon after he was forced back to Pakistan. She said the teenager had run afoul of the FBI when he declined to be interviewed again without a lawyer and refused to take a lie-detector test.

So basically, the kid and his father -- American citizens -- are being told they can't come home until they give up their rights.

Of course, in the past six years we've had the Patriot Act, the unitary executive, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Plamegate, energy policy written by the oil industry, environmental policy written by the owners and operators of coal-burning powerplants, foreign policy written by Israel, displayed incompetence at every level and on every occasion, not to mention extra-constitutional, everyday run-of-the-mill corruption at record-breaking levels.

I know of people (and I regret to say that I actually know some specifically) who will automatically assume that the father and son in question in this article must be a threat to national security because otherwise, why would the government do that? Notwithstanding the fact that the president has repeatedly stated that he doesn't need a reason to do anything -- he's the president, and that's enough. These people are, of course, completely oblivious to the real meaning of this story: we live in a police state. It's not a possibility, it's not threatened, it's not something in our future.

We live in it. Right now.

Take that to bed with you tonight.

(Update: For some reason, when you click the link to the SF Chronicle article from here, you get a blank page, but when you click from Glenn Greenwald's post, you get the article. Same link. Honest. Go figure.)