We're all living in Guantanamo

What year was it? Around 1974? There was a prison riot at the New York state prison at Attica, NY, which state law enforcement officers ended by the very efficient means of killing all of the participants. John and Yoko recorded a simple little chant on their next, quickly produced album. If memory serves me, this was during their Elephant's Memory period when their art was all political and John was fighting deportation. Anyway, the words of that song sometimes echo in my time-warped mind:

Attica State, Attica State, we're all living in Attica State.

The point being that, just like the Enabling Act that the National Socialist Party pushed through the Reichstag in 1933, our own Patriot Act, with the blessing of the running-scared Congress, gives legal sanction to deviating from the Constitution and its protections from state power. Without citing chapter and verse, all I'm going to say is that police authority is now openly allowed to extend beyond the limits established by law and formerly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Let's observe how both military and civil personnel use this carte blanche permission to ignore the law on suspects arrested without being charged, held without access to an attorney, detained at Guantanamo or another part of the gulag archipelago, and tortured or coerced into giving information they may or may not have. Who was it that said we are only as free as the least free among us?

Guantanamo, Guantanamo, we're all living in Guantanamo.