Secret Arrests?

Did we hear that right? It seems that the Homeland Security Department (HSD) is about to become the KGB. The first PATRIOT Act already allows for people to be locked up indefinitely without a lawyer and without even being charged with a crime. If PATRIOT Act II passes, then arrests would also be secret. That means that dissenters (or anyone else, for that matter) could disappear without a trace, just as they did in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia, and in Pinochet's Chile.

PATRIOT Act II would grant even more immunity to Big Business. A corporation could pour toxins into your local river, for instance, and you wouldn't know about it until all the fish died and your neighbor’s kids were born with missing or extra limbs. And then when you went to court and demanded to know what the company was dumping into your river, the company could deny you that information on the grounds that it's a national security secret.

Jim Hightower puts it this way: “All a company has to do to shield anything it wants to keep from the public eye--say, an embarrassing chemical spill--is give the documents to the Homeland Security Department and call them ‘critical infrastructure information.’”