PROGRESSIVES and libertarians need to unite to get out the vote on Election day. Together they can help to preserve our civil liberties in the face of renewed assaults on our natural rights by the Bush administration.The latest example of the growing threat is the Military Commissions Act of 2006, popularly called the detainees interrogation bill, signed last week by President Bush.

The new law legalizes the president’s ongoing practice of declaring any foreign national anywhere on earth as an “enemy combatant” and then detaining that person indefinitely without any trial and without any evidence the detention is warranted.

Far worse, the law now lets the government detain U.S citizens as enemy combatants. The language about lending “material support” to terrorism is so vague that it may apply to anyone who dares to peacefully protest administration policies.

Essentially, the new law voids all habeas corpus rights for detainees, who will not be able to challenge the legality of their arrests in open court. By merely declaring that someone is a terrorist or else a supporter, the Bush administration could toss that person into prison and throw away the key.

Further, the law allows all but the most extreme forms of torture when interrogating detainees, such as simulated drowning (called “waterboarding”), and it permits the use of their coerced testimony and hearsay evidence in military tribunals. The new law also attempts to immunize the president and others in his administration from prosecution for human rights abuses that under the Geneva Conventions are considered to be war crimes.

“Arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, the leading Federalist in the American Revolution. A darling of modern Republicans, Hamilton detested that King George III had declared the American colonies were not protected by England’s Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 (based on the Magna Carta of 1215), which banned the same arbitrary power by the English king now being abused by the U.S. president.

As I asked in my book, Global Sense, an update of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, “Does labeling any group as evil ‘bad guys’ give the government a right to treat them unfairly or to deny their natural rights?

“When our leaders promise to ‘hunt down the terrorists and kill them before they kill us,’ are we willing to forfeit the presumption of innocence and to negate the right to a fair trial in open court?

“When people are secretly detained and tortured, are we willing to forego warrants based upon probable cause? Are we willing to forego habeas corpus, to let governments imprison people for years without charges, without bail, without an attorney, and without any real trial?

“We are told that the new ‘homeland security laws’ are temporary, but nowhere in any of the legislation since 9/11, including the Patriot Act, is there any guarantee that our civil rights one day will be fully restored. Why not? Is this because any secret police powers, once obtained, however obtained, are never willingly surrendered by the police?”

This is why I’m now calling for progressives, libertarians and genuine conservatives to unite our considerable forces in common cause to publicly declare that we are no longer willing to sacrifice our natural rights on the alter of homeland security, especially when that security is an illusion. (A recent National Intelligence Estimate, compiled from research reports by 16 U.S. spy agencies, confirmed that the Bush administration’s self-chosen war in Iraq has produced a greater threat of terrorism than before the invasion.)

“Let all the kings wave their lies before the world like flags,” I wrote in Global Sense, paraphrasing Paine. “Now is the time for humanity to throw off reliance on them, so we can live in peace. The misery of war ought to warn us against trusting any tyrant, whether in government or in our own unconscious minds.”

And here we come down to the core issue. Too many of us tolerate abuses of power by Bush and others because of our culturally enshrined authority addiction. We dread accepting personal responsibility for making moral and ethical choices on our own. We dread standing up for what we know is right.

And yet a strong belief in our personal and social responsibility guides the activism of progressives and libertarians alike. Look at the loud outcry supporting habeas corpus, for example, from websites as diverse as TomPaine.com, DemocracyNow.org, CommonDreams.org, RationalReview.com, Reason.com, or Cato.org.

All lovers of liberty duly feel appalled by the current trends toward despotism in the United States.

To carry the point home, listen to Thomas Paine’s own words: “Bring the doctrine of reconciliation [with arbitrary power] to the touch-stone of nature, and then tell me, whether you can hereafter love, honor, and faithfully serve the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land?”

Paine added, “Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavored to subdue us, is of all others the most improper to defend us. Conquest may be effected under the pretense of friendship; and ourselves, after a long and brave resistance, be at last cheated into slavery.”

For world peace and real democracy, I contend, “government by the consent of the governed” must move from abstract theory to concrete reality.

The sooner we have enough global sense to see how we’re all inter-connected, the sooner we will govern ourselves sensibly, and the sooner we will let go of authority addiction as our path to security. The sooner we embrace the deeply liberating power of mindful self rule and personal democracy, the faster our highest and best human potential may be fulfilled on earth.

Paine concluded, “Like all other truths discovered by necessity, it will appear clearer and stronger every day. First. Because it will come to that, one time or other. Secondly. Because the longer it is delayed, the harder it will be to accomplish.”

Therefore, let progressives and libertarians unite now to save democracy!