Jim Henley, writing about the Pernicious Effects of National Security Gag Orders that I blogged about earlier, under which the FBI (probably failing to follow the statutory requirements) serves a man with an order that gags him from even mentioning the order to his family or his Congressman,
The government has taken the most intimate aspects of this man’s life from his own control. There is no part of his waking day untwisted by the injunctions of the Patriot Act, and probably little enough of his sleep. The man has been accused or convicted of no crime. This is tyranny. Not “the threat of” tyranny, not “practically” tyranny – the thing itself. It hasn’t directly touched me yet and it may not have touched you, but if it has already ensnared your neighbor you won’t even know.
A nice message of hope against the tyranny can be found in Bill Moyers’ latest.
This is the thought police of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, plain and simple. As some astute observer pointed out, Orwell wrote that novel as a warning. The neocons are using it as a manual of operations.