{"id":139312,"date":"2014-09-15T19:28:49","date_gmt":"2014-09-15T19:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=139312"},"modified":"2014-09-15T19:28:49","modified_gmt":"2014-09-15T19:28:49","slug":"unbearable-choking-hell-loss-freedoms-wake-911","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/unbearable-choking-hell-loss-freedoms-wake-911\/","title":{"rendered":"An Unbearable and Choking Hell: The Loss of Our Freedoms in the Wake of 9\/11"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201c<em>I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in \u2013 and the West in general \u2013 into an unbearable hell and a choking life<\/em>.\u201d\u2013Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2002\/US\/01\/31\/gen.binladen.interview\">CNN<\/a><\/p>\n<p>What a strange and harrowing road we\u2019ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.<\/p>\n<p>What began with the passage of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.justice.gov\/archive\/ll\/highlights.htm\">USA Patriot Act<\/a> in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.<\/p>\n<p>Since then, we have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance. The bogeyman\u2019s names and faces change over time\u2013<a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/pages\/frontline\/shows\/binladen\/who\/bio.html\">Osama bin Laden<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.biography.com\/people\/saddam-hussein-9347918\">Saddam Hussein<\/a> and now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2014\/08\/08\/world\/isis-fast-facts\">ISIS<\/a>\u2013but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/the-fix\/wp\/2014\/09\/11\/welcome-to-the-post-edward-snowden-era\/?wpisrc=nl-fix&amp;amp;wpmm=1\">phantom promise of safety and security<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Ironically, just a short week after the 13<sup>th<\/sup> anniversary of the 9\/11 attacks, we find ourselves commemorating the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.constitutionday.com\/\">227<sup>th<\/sup>anniversary<\/a> of the ratification of our Constitution. Yet while there is much to mourn about the loss of our freedoms in the years since 9\/11, there has been little to celebrate.<\/p>\n<p>The Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights\u2013the first ten amendments to the Constitution\u2013which historically served as the bulwark from government abuse.<\/p>\n<p>Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, roving VIPR raids and the like\u2013all sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts\u2013a recitation of the Bill of Rights would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/agovernmentofwolves.com\/2014\/09\/15\/an-unbearable-and-choking-hell-the-loss-of-our-freedoms-in-the-wake-of-911\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in \u2013 and the West in general \u2013 into an unbearable hell and a choking life.\u201d\u2013Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by\u00a0CNN What a strange and harrowing road we\u2019ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":139313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-139312","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-war-terrorism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}