Web Posted: 01/04/2008 06:25 PM CST
Tribune Media Services
The authorities would just come into your home, grab your mother, your brother, your dad, and take them away. No warning, no warrant, no appeal.
Thirty thousand people disappeared that way, she told me ... Ruth Cox was describing her childhood in Argentina under military dictatorship. Cox, a teacher in Charleston, S.C., said families never learned what happened to their loved ones. Or why. People were taken and that was it. The government was not accountable.
My first response was a vague pride that those kinds of things can't happen here.
My second response was to realize that my first response was naive. These last years have provided a jolting education in the sorts of things that can, indeed, happen here. Mass surveillance, detention without access to courts, no right to confront, or even know, the evidence against you, torture. And a government that is not accountable ...
http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/stories/MYSA010508.02O.Pitts.18b9cc8.html