Yeru,
I've read 1984 several times.
Remember the people in the movie theater Winston Smith wrote about? The ones who, when Emmaneul Goldstein, Enemy of the People, and later the Eastasian soldier appeared onscreen, went berserk, one even throwing a book at the screen? But when Big Brother appeared calm was restored. They remind me of Americans today who mindlessly chant the government's mantra in "why we need to surrender some of our rights in pursuit of terrorists."
When you said "Omar's treatment was the exception, not the rule," I don't read any condemnation of it, merely a statement that it's not common. Does that make it right? The plain intent was coercion and trying to break him psychologically. Strip-searched, body cavity search in front of people, no access to a phone or lawyer, no hot water, two weeks without a change of clothes. You, Yeru, should read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, especially the section where he details many of the nonviolent ways the KGB "leaned" on people. They wanted a confession to look good and bolster their case for these laws, nothing more. And grudgingly let him go when nothing turned up.
No wonder Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch criticize this country. For us to call China out on Tianemen Square, and then we do things like this, is us calling the kettle black.
This "if you're clean, what have you got to hide?" line spouted by some is balderdash. You're a terrorist if the government says you are, pal. If we have to stoop to measures like this to preserve our freedom, then perhaps the terrorists have already won.
Like TJ and Uzzah said, in a perfect world we could trust the government when it says the info collected will never be misused. Neither the Administration (any admin) nor our officials are perfect. It lives on secrecy (Dumya signed a bill allowing even currently living former Presidents to block release of Presidential papers--including his old man. Why? If they're clean, what've they got to hide?), power trips (this government says it's so "state's rights." Tell that to the voters in Florida when the Supreme Court blocked the Presidential vote recount in 2001; to the citizens of Oregon, where the Justice Department's fighting a citizen-backed "assisted suicide" law; in California, where the DEA (with nothing else to do, presumably) is fighting their citizen-backed "medical marijuana" law), and a "the end justifies the means" ethos.
The passage another poster mentioned about the gypsies sums it up. Martin Niemoeller was a Lutheran pastor in Hitler's Germany. He mentioned how when several groups of people were arrested he said nothing, not being a member of those groups (trade unionists, Communists, Catholics, Jews, etc.). "And when at last they came for me, there was no one left to speak up for me." He went to Dachau in 1938 and was freed in 1945 by Allied soldiers.
I don't know if my rights have been violated on an individual basis. If the FBI came in and searched my house while I was gone, they don't even have to leave a note behind telling anything about it. But must I wait until I suffer personally before speaking up?
BTW Yeru, you've had military training. What stops a government agent from wondering if you're an al-Queda "sleeper" agent and decide to lock you up? Maybe you rode in the same cab as a terrorist? Is the driver your "contact?" Have you been within the terrorist's sphere of influence in the past few years?
That last paragraph can be written off as sarcasm that's maybe over the top; but it's not far, imo, from the logic and mindset of today's "security" gurus.
