Courtesy of Atrios and Kevin Drum, I found this story this morning:

SAN FRANCISCO–A federal appeals court wrestled Thursday with what seems to be a straightforward question: Can Americans be required to show ID on a commercial airline flight?

John Gilmore, an early employee of Sun Microsystems and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the answer should be “no.” The libertarian millionaire sued the Bush administration, which claims that the ID requirement is necessary for security but has refused to identify any actual regulation requiring it.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed skeptical of the Bush administration’s defense of secret laws and regulations but stopped short of suggesting that such a rule would be necessarily unconstitutional.

“How do we know there’s an order?” Judge Thomas Nelson asked. “Because you said there was?”

Replied Joshua Waldman, a staff attorney for the Department of Justice: “We couldn’t confirm or deny the existence of an order.” Even though government regulations required his silence, Waldman said, the situation did seem a “bit peculiar.”

“This is America,” said James Harrison, a lawyer representing Gilmore. “We do not have secret laws. Period.”

A bit peculiar? Apparently not in George Bush’s America, where Oil Companies secretly set the nation’s energy policy, and where the Bush administrations has systematically and repeatedly sought to undermine laws that promote public access to government information

“. . . while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded.”

Now, I am not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination, but I salute John Gilmore for bringing this lawsuit. Not because I believe an ID check is necessarily a bad thing at airports these days, but because I don’t believe we need a “secret law” (in this case probably a federal regulation) to implement that policy.

What kind of country are we becoming? Jefferson’s or Kafka’s? And all you libertarian Republicans who are Bush supporters, how can you justify this assault on our liberties?

Just curious.

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