Police State

Some of my friends spent this morning being interrogated in one of the House office buildings. They had challenged President Bush's badly skewed AIDS program, which ordinarily wouldn't be cause for detention. However, as they did so during a congressional hearing, specifically the testimony of Randall Tobias, there was, as should be expected, some to do. Read about the issue here.

What wasn't expected was the manner in which the protesters, my friends, were treated after their removal from the committee room. I'll grant you that proper governance likely demands some level of decorum in legislative proceedings, and that freedom to express one's self is with reason more limited in a congressional office building than it is immediately outside of it. What isn't right is that the group of dissenters, whose protest extended only to a verbal and visual disturbance, should be threatened with jail time and other heavy penalties.

I know people who've done identical protests before and have been escorted from the chamber long enough to stop the protest, then allowed to reenter on the condition that they sit quietly. Todays dissidents were taken to a separate room where a friend who'd accompanied them was not permitted to enter. Capitol police officers were not responsive to questions about their arrest status, and instead attempted to interrogate the non-involved friend.

This is the kind of behavior our bill of rights is meant to prevent. Law enforcement is meant to be a transparent process, one in which the accused know their status, and others are able to verify this status. Without transparency, we have no defense against totalitarianism.