‘Homegrown’ Suppression of Dissent
Last month the U.S. House of Representatives flew a stealth mission under the mainstream media’s radar, passing startling legislation that targets constitutionally protected political speech and paves a path for the government’s suppression of dissent.
The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 would establish a ten-member National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism primarily comprised of Congress members. It would also give the Department of Homeland Security the power to create “a university-based Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism” to “study the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots” of U.S.-based radicalization and terrorism.
Despite its overwhelming support in the House–where it passed 404 to 6–this law is severely problematic in three main ways.
First of all, it’s superfluous. We don’t need more laws against “violent radicalization” and “homegrown terrorism.” We already have plenty of legislation outlawing murder, conspiracy, arson, and other crimes that the government often associates with terrorism, not to mention wide-reaching terrorism laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, and the Military Commissions Act, all of which can be applied to U.S. citizens.
As such, the bill is less an honest effort to combat actual terrorism than it is ideology-drenched window dressing designed to win political points and electoral votes.
Second, the measure takes aim at political speech that is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Groups and individuals trying to further “political or social objectives” are explicitly the focus of the act, which brings up questions around the freedom of assembly.
From a judicial perspective, this bill is a constitutional challenge waiting to happen.
Sure the bill claims, “Any measure taken to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence…should not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, or civil liberties of United States citizens or lawful permanent residents.”
But given the actual text of the bill and the Bush administration’s penchant to engage in warrantless surveillance, this flimsy caveat assuring that dissent will not be suppressed is tantamount to saying “I don’t do cocaine, I just like the way it smells.”
Third, too often the bill employs alarmingly over-broad definitions. The bill states that “ideologically based violence” is “the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.”
It doesn’t take the imagination of an avant-garde poet to envision scenarios in which radical political dissidents could get sucked into the wide-swirling vortex of “ideologically based violence.”
What if protesters use their bodies during a direct action to take over an intersection or to block traffic, as anti-war activists in Olympia, Washington have done recently? Can this seriously be dubbed “homegrown terrorism”?
What about an anarchist who hurls a brick through a corporate window to make a political statement? Is this vandalism really “violent radicalization” or “homegrown terrorism”?
The bill also defines “violent radicalization” in part as “adopting or promoting an extremist belief system,” but what exactly is “an extremist belief system”? Anti-capitalism? Socialism? Anarchism? Neo-conservatism?
Even a cursory look backward through U.S. history reveals heroic figures who could be dubbed “violent radicals” or “homegrown terrorists” under the proposed bill, from U.S. revolutionaries like Sam Adams to gun-toting slavery abolitionists like John Brown to militant civil-rights organizers like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Shortly after the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787, “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” The Senate, which is currently considering a virtually identical version of the bill, would do well to resurrect “the spirit of resistance” and finally say no to the Bush administration’s persistent whittling of our civil liberties.
The House roll call vote demonstrates that this is not a partisan issue. The bill’s supporters were obviously bi-partisan, but it’s important to note that opposition to the bill was also bi-partisan, with three Democrats and three Republicans voting against it.
Unlike the media–who have performed a mums-the-word blackout on the bill–concerned citizens from the left, right, and center must oppose this legislation before the Senate slots it into law. We need a nonpartisan groundswell to stand up to this newest onslaught against our civil liberties, before it’s too late.
Jules Boykoff is the author of Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press, 2007). He teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon.
It wasn’t “flew a stealth mission under the mainstream media’s radar”, but rather with their full collusion. MSM isn’t as clueless and innocent as purported by Mr. Boykoff.
The hope is that the premier source of information for concerned citizens, the Internet genie, is not bottled back causing a complete blackout.
Who wrote the name of this “Center of Excellence” anyway, Rush Limbaugh? Rushmo claims to work in or be the “Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies” (LIACS). The original name used “Republican” vs. “Conservative” but the acronym didn’t work out too well—LIARS.
Fear trumps reason.
There’s little enough spirit and less resistance, but better stamp out all of it in the name of the holy Christian homeland.
I know that I am censured when I write about this but…
The Government has THOUGHT READING TECHNOLOGY! Now they are trying to make having certain thoughts illegal!
The bill calls for heightened scrutiny of people who believe, or might come to believe, in a violent ideology.
They are legislating the legality of Thought Reading Technology before its existence is even known!
Please pay attention! This bill is giving the government the right to prosecute people based on their thoughts. According to George Loper, “Homegrown terrorism” and “violent radicalization,” as defined here, may encompass thoughts, ideas, and plans, not just acts or conduct.
From the text of the bill itself, ‘research in preventing violent radicalization’ shall ‘utilize theories, methods and data from the social and behavioral ‘In General- The Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to prevent ideologically based violence’.
Why is this important? This gives the government the right to legally use thought reading technology on citizens, and to manipulate them psychologically to change their minds. This gives them the cover they need to use the technology that has been used on me since 1994. Without disclosing their methods such as thought reading technology and dream manipulations, remote broadcasting and other methods of torture that those who write about a government Mind Control program state are fact.
The bill states that “ideologically based violence” is “the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.”
Doesn’t that sound like what we’re doing in the mid-east?
War=Peace hit the nail on the head.
The US government is not against terrorism.
The US government is only against terrorism other than that committed by itself (or its cronies).
Bohica
support our terrorists
what would hitler do?
The only thing I can figure is that its the end of the year fund raising campaign for the ACLU and other groups, and this is the best thing they could come up with to literally scare donations out of their marks.
Go find the bill and read the actual bill. Any article that doesn’t provide a direct link to that should be suspect to start with.
The actual bill does two things. It creates a commission that can hold some hearings. And it sets up a pork project where some lucky congresscritter gets to send pork funds to a university in their district.
Big freaking deal!
It doesn’t change the law a bit. The paragraph that implies that this is a law against violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism is misleading. I note the author did a very careful spin of his words to only imply that it is, but not to actually state that it is.
This whole thing is two things. A) It is a waste of taxpayer money. But its also B), a big overblown, overhyped scare campaign from the left.
Yeah, I’d like to see this bill die. But if it passes, it means almost nothing. Just some commission hearings and probably a report on Faux News about them. If the commission wants to change anything in the law, we can always fight that then.
When it passes 404 to 6, it’s toothless, AS LONG AS YOU HAVE A LIBERAL PRESIDENT ENFORCING IT (OR NOT), AND A NOT-ONE-MORE-STEP-TO-THE-RIGHT SUPREME COURT STANDING BY TO INTERPRET IT. (The Court we have, of course, is already pretty bad.)
If you lose the big boss and the next name on the Court, however, you do lose not only protected speech, but more, on every issue.
Tell me why it had to be put forward anyway.To do this you put the Constitution in limbo and promote fear.It is total bullshit and homeland security has asked that firemen search homes for anything suspicious,not related to fire,because they don’t need a search warrant while in a persons home or business.This was reported by Kieth Olbermann.It is another push in the direction of fascism. Tony
Everyone should be aware that Haliburton in 2006 won a 385 million dollar contract to build detention centers all over the US.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13554
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=eed74d9d44c30493706fe03f4c9b3a77
IMPEACH!
What really scares me is how this bill makes a specific reference to the internet, and how it is being used to facilitate homegrown terrorist groups. The internet is the only source of information that is not corrupted by the Main Stream Propaganda machine, and they are trying to take it away. Just imagine if you didn’t have anyplace to get information besides the Television, you would be completely clueless.
COMarc has it right. I became very alarmed when I first heard about this bill. I checked it out. I checked on my congress critters vote. And he happens to be one of the “good guys”. COMarc is right. This bill is not a good one, but it also is not something to get your knickers in a knot about. We have REAL things to be putting our energies toward. This one is just a distraction.
IMPEACH NOW!!!
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all
Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
Article continues
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security - remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” - didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens’ groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government - after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.
“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.
“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”
“That’ll do it,” the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.
COMARC, interesting YOU didn’t provide a link.
I had a link to the bill another post on this subject. ANyone can Google it.
Once you are considered a “terrorist” by their definitions, you can be charged under other laws already in place. This bill just expands the definition of a “terrorist” to include just about anyone with an IQ of 90+ who opens their mouth to express a thought.
People have to stop thinking along the lines of our usual two party system. There is no difference between Dem or Repb. They both serve the interests of corporate America and contribute to the decline of our country. They are part of the problem. If we truly had Democratic society in our country the voice of “WE THE PEOPLE” would have been answered by now. The fact that it hasn’t been answered means that the current D.C. politicians have a different agenda from their constituents. Their agenda requires that corporate and political interests now get the ear of our Congressmen. We the people have been sold-out. We can just sit and watch as Bush puts on a new pair of IRON HEELs, given to him buy our political whores in D.C.
Hoa binh
People need to realize that you would NOT have to be violent or threaten violence to be charged under this bill…..
“the use, planned use, or threatened use of FORCE OR violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.”
now for us non violent types…take out the violence and group/individual(=everyone) and this is what it states…..
———————————————————-
the use, planned use, or threatened use of FORCE to promote political, religious, or social beliefs.
———————————————————-
look up the word- FORCE and you will see that force can be a totally passive, non physical and non threatening act.
So, in effect the least aggressive expression of this could read like this….
——————————————–
promoting- political, religious, or social beliefs.
——————————————-
the words- political, religious,social beliefs cuts to the core of our personalities/beliefs. To not be able to express these differences/thoughts, in effect would turn us into non humans.
What this bill does is muzzle all US citizens or any that don’t back their way of thinking.
With its passage we will have become completely, the Soviet Union that they supposedly so much despised.
Start burning your books, erasing your hard drives and get ready to apply for political asylum refugee status in other countries.
The Bush-Cheney Administration could be quite precisely described as “violent radicalization.”
It represents a major right wing shift — far to the right of the public. Therefore, it is a radicalization. Second, it has been spectacular in unleashing violence upon the world.
By the definitions laid forth in this Act, the entire Executive Branch should be labeled as domestic terrorists.
So, maybe it is a bit flawed.
Authored by Jan Harmann DEM CA. While minlority chair on the House Intell committee she played lapdog with Bush and she wanted the two AIPAC employees who caught red handed spying for israel to set free.
When the dems. took over she did not get the chairmanship she wanted badly. Nancy P would not give it to her. Somthing about she wore the same dress to a party—–really, reason given by MSM.
I guess Nancy was covering her ass with AIPAC for the dress deal was a go.
I bet the Idiot in Chief or the Vice Idiot in Chief wrote the bill for her.
Jezz, where have you people been for the last decade? Harman’s “new” definition of “terrorist” is exactly the same as the FBI, DoD, New American Heritage Dictionary, DHS, State, et al.
Where were all of you whiners when the FBI pushed “ecoterrorists” to the top of the “homeland” security threat? What, y’all didn’t know the ETs are still number one, in spite of the fact that, since 1980, only one “civilian” has been slightly injured as a result of ET direct actions? That’s right - treesitters, GMO plant pullers, Greenpeace - most dangerous threat to the homeland, right now, today.
Followed by, if incarceration stats are a metric: non violent drug offenders - AKA, pot smokers mostly - at the tune of over 700K rotting away for rolling a joint.
Now y’all are gettin worried? Welcome to the party, pals. You’re way too late, but thanks for the gift…
jeez, frank
now your one of the whiners hows it feel?
Amnesty International was one of the sponsors/producers of the film, “Closetland” where a female writer is taken from her home at night by armed guards. Straight out of Kafka’s “The Trial” she is not apprised of her alleged crime, nor given a chance to consult with an attorney, etc. As the film evolves and she meets her accusers we learn that she’s a CHILDREN’S BOOK AUTHOR; however, the meaning extrapolated from her imaginative text is that her words were offered to incite resistance against the government. I saw this film at least 10 years ago and it struck a chord. Now it rings truer and quite close to home for this author.
When “Law and Order” which often takes subjects in the news and deals with them brilliantly ran a few episodes where “eco terrorists” were involved, it struck another chord with me.
One problem with our times is that to SPEAK of these TRUE events to average persons (those still under thrall to the MSM) warrants complete disbelief on their end. They immediately suspect the “messenger” of being slightly off-kilter to even suppose such atrocities would or could be happening in this sacred land of the free and home of the brave. You know the ORwellian media and its handlers are achieving their ends when Truth IS regarded as far-fetched fiction; but it sure helps those frogs to come to a slow boil when hot is hardly perceived as such.
I am thinking Bush, Cheney and other current and former executive officials should be removed from office by Congress, tried with full due process for violating the 1996 war crimes law (after Congress repeals the 2006 Military Commissions Act) and sentenced to the harshest appropriate penalty, which I believe includes death. Is that violently radical enough? Or how about extending narcotics laws to include tobacco, so sale of a quantity that leads to the customer’s death allows a death penalty against the seller? Mind you I don’t normally support the death penalty, but I am thinking violently radical thoughts so perhaps the Commission should study me.
What would Jesus think?
While I’m not at all sure what Jesus would think, I am sure that once any of those thoughts passed into words or actions (or even a reputation!) he’d get “nailed” again.
Given that the bill was passed end of October seems many of the blogs were a bit tardy in picking it up for some reason.
Mussolini was quoted as saying Fascism was more appropriately named Corporatism. Our Democracy is now just another form of Corporatism.
This has been evolving since 1913 and has led to almost 100 years of constant wars and financial crisis (followed by bubbles that then create the next crisis). The neo-cons have now pushed it to the tipping point from which Totalitarian rule in the US is a real possibility.
The Democrats and Republicans today represent only their Corporate critters. It is a Democracy, but one in which the Corporations vote for the candidates that we are allowed to choose from, their vote is with dollars and not ballots. It is similar to the controlled Theocratic “Democracy” in Iran. The Supreme leader and Guardian of Councils determine who is eligible to run and the people vote for one of those eligible for President.
The election debates and primaries, and general elections, etc, they give people the illusion of a Democracy, but it is long dead. How did this happen? Scott Ritter said in a recent interview that people have stopped being Citizens. What this means to me is that we have become spectators to events, and so long as we are well fed and can shop at the mall or on-line and live well, we are generally content to trust in our government. Those who don’t are content to abuse their keyboards. You can blame the politicians, but it is the critters who are to blame.
Our Founding Fathers knew that the greatest threat to the citizens was government, and only extreme vigilance would allow the Democracy they provided us to last, and that if defeated it would be defeated from within. They were right. The critters gave up being citizens. Corporate and personal greed filled the vacuum. And here we are today.
“It would also give the Department of Homeland Security the power to create “a university-based Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism” to “study the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots” of U.S.-based radicalization and terrorism.”
Yes, and while Homeland Security Funds are being diverted away from protecting our borders, nuclear power plants, and chemical plants from “real” terrorists, we can be sure they will do their job to stiffle dissent among “sovereign” citizens of this country whose tax contributions are funding the gradual shredding of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
That is corporate-controlled excellence at its finest!
I don’t know about government censorship, but has anyone been viewing the presidential debates on YouTube? I have a comcast e-mail account and it appears that comcast is rejecting e-mails to my account from YouTube. I couldn’t activate my YouTube account via my comcast e-mail! The e-mails just go into a black hole. No kidding.
I’m curious if anyone else has had this problem.
Paul Bramscher November 30th, 2007 8:48 pm
“I don’t know about government censorship, but….”
You’re funny, Paul!
John F. : Good one!
I also like The Wondering You’s “nailed”. Excellent!
You folks are all so creative. Glad to be along for the ride.
Thanks
Gail,
If only it were that funny. I read Jennifer Washburn’s “University, Inc.” and found one quote in it troublesome. The book discusses how non-disclosure agreements, patents, contracts, etc. have all served to silence open discourse of scholarship. But the observation which was most troublesome was that this is all “acceptable” since it is due to market forces. If it were all censorship conduced by the US government, people would be up in arms and dusting off the First Amendment.
It would seem that privatization may become the modern way of scuttling the Bill of Rights?
I should add, that shortly after posting here I noticed that there’s a headline over at Slashdot right now about some other censoring/filtering that Comcast is allegedly up to: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/01/0011253
This is off the subject, but I object to Boykoff’s use of the word “militant” in relation to the civil rights organizing of Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr. No, he was not a militant in the sense of being armed, but he certainly believed in the use of non-violent force and exercised it very effectively. You want force? Look at the Montgomery bus boycott. What a profound example of the immense power of the so-called powerless - when organized. And you can be sure that he captured the attention of the FBI. My guess is that very few of the bloggers on this site were around when MLK, Jr. If you’re not up to speed with MLK, Jr., I recommend you check him out. We’re very much in need of someone like him, someone like Dennis and Cindy, someone like you.
The first clue that the black shirts will be soon at your door, isn’t jack booted footsteps, but the loss of our internet service.
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world »
« There is enough to meet everybody’s need, but there is not enough to meet everybody’s greed »
The US really is a nation that is at war with itself and I think it will eventually tear itself apart.
By the end of the 1930s Germany had descended so deeply into the abyss that nothing could save her. The country’s democratic institutions had been corrupted and the vast majority of German citizens had been so blinded by fear and misinformation that they cheered as Hitler led them on to destruction. Can anyone seriously question the assertion that the United States is far down that same path? We torture, we kidnap, we drive people from their homes and wage wars of aggression to rob countries of their natural resources. Our Congressional representatives betray their oaths of office and refuse to stand up for the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The world united to stop Hitler and the Nazis. Must it do the same to stop Bush and neocons? Or will we?
May I remind you that King George’s relatives, his grandfather, made money with Hitler. Prescott Bush…
I was just reading about this guy who Bush told … Who cares what you think… apparently they care that we think period…
http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2004/03/19/bush_encounter/index.html
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004/10/shutting-them-up.html
http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/index1.htm
Jefferson also said, “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
It would seem obvious that a government that works to constantly erode our civil liberties would be cause enough!
“The Government has THOUGHT READING TECHNOLOGY! Now they are trying to make having certain thoughts illegal!
The bill calls for heightened scrutiny of people who believe, or might come to believe, in a violent ideology.”
Well, Good (they’ve then made much-progress since I was last ‘on the Inside, looking-out’!). It’s their Job#1 to suppress “violent ideology”, and you could just Wish them luck with such methods to squash-it prior to any ‘actualization’ for-same. [Or are you so ‘far gone’ that you fancy Violence as Solution for any of society’s-ills?]
The 404-6 passage should tell us ’something’, should it not? It’s a great-Bill, and should serve as bell-weather for the passage of many-more similar in Intent&Purpose.
Me Also Too…. baaaaaa baaaaa baaaaa little sheep…. enjoy the ovens… concentration camps…
or do you think that gw will save your ass? how about all of the VIOLENCE, TORTURE, MURDERS that the USA has committed around the world, IN YOUR NAME, including every day for the last five years in Iraq…
unbelievable…
“We torture, we kidnap, we drive people from their homes and wage wars of aggression to rob countries of their natural resources.”
And, ‘what of it’ — [eggs-for-omelet]?
What is it about Germany’s past, fine ‘liberal-democracy’, and/or culture/Traditions that led you to believe that what happened-there then was ‘home-grown Evil’, or that these referred-to events weren’t one-among-many such deliberate and manipulated outcomes, as planned for serving the “greater-purposes” they ultimately-did (albeit in ‘convoluted-fashion’)? The rise of Fascism was inherent-in and perfectly obvious-since the mass-manipulations and profit-reaping of WW-I and the Depressions — and they, in-turn, to the similar and much-preceding power-plays, Agreements, ‘Reparations’, Roles, plotting, and long-term machinations since and carried-forth from ‘Enlightenment’-days.
Germany was expediently-sacrificed (WW-II, itself, the Holocaust/”burnt-offering”), as is the US today, in its-turn…
So, too, America’s empowerment/directions, the ‘Tzar’s-fall’, the farce of both liberal-democracy and communism, nearly-all Wars/Depressions, one ‘Founding’ in-particular, and as-accelerating in most Events/genocides/strife/divisions-since&during&before WW-II and the contrived ‘Cold-War’, afterwards [morphing into today’s GWoT].
Quit looking for ’small answers’…
I think this bill was written anticipating the “violent radicalization” that is likely to take place following the coming economic collapse in the US. I have no doubt that there will be rioting in certain areas of the country as prices soar and the dollar continues to decline in value.
COMarc, you wrote: “Go find the bill and read the actual bill. Any article that doesn’t provide a direct link to that should be suspect to start with.”
Read this article again, COMarc; it DOES post a link to the actual bill; it’s in the second paragraph. The rest of your comment is filled with errors as well.
Yesterday, Randi Rhodes had on conservative author, counterterrorism expert, and former CIA agent Philip Giraldi who confirmed how dangerous this bill is — for example, he said one of these ‘national congressional commissions’ can basically try you in secret without an attorney and, if they find you guilty, freeze your assets, without appeal. Also, anyone trying to help you free your assets, or who merely criticizes the commission’s decision in your case, is putting themselves at risk of having their assets frozen as well.
If that isn’t scary and anti-American enough for you, consider that after 18 months these commissions will be outsourced entirely to private corporations. That’s right, there will be private contractors deciding whether your can access your assets and whether you should be detained as a potential ‘enemy of the state’ for expressing what the government, or Halliburton or Bechtel, determine is belief in an undefined ‘extremist political system.’ And, as the excerpt from Naomi Wolf’s article that Theytoldyouwhat posted above says, the definition of ‘terrorist’ is becoming increasingly elastic, now encompassing animal rights activists and environmentalists as well as antiwar demonstrators. Take it as a given that, these days, any group that’s strongly against global corporatism is being investigated by our government; in the future, that investigation could easily turn into detention, especially if the usual American legal processes are not an issue.
As Randi posted on her website: “Note Section 899A Homegrown Terrorism where it becomes a crime ‘to intimidate or coerce the US government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objective’. And Section 899B Paragraph 3 – The internet is a tool of terror!”
http://www.therandirhodesshow.com/live/
A peace march or an article such as this one on a website could be interpreted as a method of ‘coercing’ people into believing a political or social objective contrary to whatever ideas the government deems appropriate.
Along with the Military Commissions Act of 2006, this bill gives the government and private corporations the kind of unaccountable extra-constitutional authority that would make Stalin drool.
It’s likely this dumb bill won’t make it through the Senate or, if it does, that it will survive all the court challenges to it, both from the ACLU and conservative groups, but the fact that it passed the House by such a large margin shows either the Democrats are cravenly playing with our Constitutional rights because they think it will be a good election year issue proving them ‘tough’ on terrorism, or that they really don’t understand the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Either one is chilling and disgusting.
RSJ: Excellent posting, and I hope you’re right about ACLU and others blocking the deployment of this totalitarian measure aimed at intelligent folk who SEE what’s going on. Last night I got to watch Bill Moyers on PBS with the doctumentary, “BUYING WAR.” He calls it all what it is, the step by step charade by media in complicity with the Pentagon to make the Iraqi war happen regardless of the inconvenience of facts, or the lives intentionally squandered in an all-out plunder for oil. As a spiritual being, what mostly impacts me is the sure knowledge that karma is an equal opportunity employer and our nation will not, cannot be exempted from its egregious actions. What is becoming normalized is beyond what any sane, remotely just, or marginally moral society should tolerate. And we are there.
As Orwellian as the mere title of this bill is, one word in the portion Boykoff quoted screamed out at me: “Any measure taken to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence… SHOULD not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, or civil liberties of United States citizens or lawful permanent residents.”
Rather than use the term SHALL, which allows for no exceptions, the bill’s authors used SHOULD, which does permit exceptions in implementing the remainder of the sentence. It’s not as loose as the term MAY, but it does still permit the violation of our constitutional rights, civil rights, or civil liberties.
Also, did anyone else see the clear aim taken at undocumented folks who reside in the US?
I hardly recognize this country any longer!
Paul Bramscher November 30th, 2007 9:33 pm
Gail,
“It would seem that privatization may become the modern way of scuttling the Bill of Rights?”
Paul,
You are correct. “The WTO articles are not only in contradiction with pre-existing national and international laws; they are also at variance with “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.
“The Globalization of Poverty and the New Order” by Michel Chossudovsky is a must read. He clearly explains how the derogation of citizens rights are being expoloited by the WTO which grants “entrenched rights” to large global corporations while disempowering citizens within societies.
“We can have domocracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” - Justice Louis Brandeis
Another in a long line of legislation during the regime of Bu$h the inferior that the title contradicts the content of the legislation.
This bill is designed to cause the government to impose terrorism on the people.
There remains something ironic about it all, though. These bills, one my one, may — if some of you are correct — eventually lead to the “legalization of tyranny”. But isn’t that a moot point? Indeed, it ultimately all leads to an oxymoron. You can have tyranny, that’s for certain. But it’s never possible to really legalize it, nor would it assist the tyrant (who exists solely in a state of lawlessness). One would resist a genuine tyrant, necessarily, at his own peril.
But I don’t see any indication that these bills are going to diminish legally-protected speech, the blogging, the protesting, etc. Only a paranoid/coward or a person with genuine malevolent intent would run for cover in light of them.
Paul Bramscher December 1st, 2007 5:28 pm
“There remains something ironic about it all, though. These bills, one my one, may — if some of you are correct — eventually lead to the “legalization of tyranny”. You can have tyranny, that’s for certain. But it’s never possible to really legalize it, nor would it assist the tyrant (who exists solely in a state of lawlessness).”
If we are a nation living by the laws of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, tyranny cannot be considered legal. On the other hand, the majority can easily be deceived or deluded into believing that the loss of their liberties (friendly fascism) is perfectly acceptable when a congressional bill includes the threat of terrorism or the threat of national security; and with the proper legal wording of a document, our government officials will never be held responsible for “gradually” transforming a democracy into a fascist state.
It’s a strategy that has worked for decades. Most people have become so accustomed to hearing “national security” or “terrorists” that they haven’t even considered, let alone noticed that their freedoms are being usurped.
As far as they’re concerned, the protective Gods and Goddesses on Capitol Hill have become their saviors.
To be honest, I’m far more worried about my fellow countryman’s propensity to be ignorant, apathetic or swindled than I am wealthy power brokers, pompous asses, mobsters and sycophants in the beltway.
But at least this bill makes it clear that it is violence they’re concerned about. Yet if this were the ONLY intent, as others have indicated, there are already many laws on the books to nab people who are plotting nefarious deeds (whether treason, bribery, extortion, conspiracy, racketeering, etc.).
Certainly “personal gain” qualifies as an ideology in its own right. So how do they ultimately separate ideology from insanity, personal gain, capitalism/economics, random acts of violence, etc?
The intent of the act has been demonstrated in the House HSC Hearing:
Simon Wiesenthal Center presents 9/11 sites alongside radical Jihadist sites to House Hearing on “Terrorism and the Internet”
9/11 Blogger | November 13, 2007
On Tuesday, November 6, 2007, a House Homeland Security Subcommittee
had a hearing on “Terrorism and the Internet”.* The hearing featured
presentations from several groups, including a former employee of the
RAND Corporation, and Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The hearing was chaired by Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, and ranking
Republican, Rep. Dave Reichert.
Toward the end of the hearing, Weitzman rolls out a PowerPoint presentation that presents a few 9/11 truth sites sandwiched in between websites that offer training in terrorist tactics, and a website that glorified the attack of 9/11. Among the websites presented under the heading “Internet: Incubator of 9/11 Conpiracies and Disinformation”, are Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth , and other sites, such as Killtown’s, who brought this Hearing to our attention .
Now, we wouldn’t want anybody getting the wrong idea here. Here at 911blogger we are opposed to any and all terrorist activities, including STATE SPONSORED TERRORISM . Don’t really care who the state is either. It’s all bad.
Californians, if Harman is your representative , please set her straight. Washington state, if Reichert is your critter , don’t let him absorb this crap with no static .
CSPAN has been more than fair to 9/11 skeptics. Last year they broadcast Alex Jones’ American Scholars Symposium , in 2005, they broadcast David Ray Griffin , and they will probably listen to feedback regarding this broadcast.
View the hearing as a video stream here — the pertinent section begins at the 43:31 mark, but I recommend watching the entire program, because there is so much disinformation in the broadcast itself, it’s hard to know where to begin unraveling it.
Homeland Security - Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_…
Please ask the Simon Wiesthenthal Center (Mark Weitzman in particular) to stop conflating terrorist violence with 9/11 truth, and even though he has not extended the courtesy to us, be polite;
Siouxrose, karma is already visiting itself upon Bush and Cheney — Junior has led his life in the shadow of his father and his election as president was, according to those who know him, his chance to finally out-do Dad, but he’s failed miserably and Senior is even subtly sticking in the needle by hanging out with Bush nemesis Bill Clinton these days. Who would like to lead his life, knowing he’s a failure who’s going to be regarded as the worst president in history?
Dick Cheney is under so much stress that he had his first heart attack when he was 37. His lies are catching up to him, he is hated by most of America, he will live in bunkers for the rest of his life, and no amount of money can ever wash his conscience clean. (And don’t think for a minute that he doesn’t fully realize the hands that are slapping him on the back now will contain daggers if things go sour — his ‘friends’ are ruthless men just like himself.) Most of all, no amount of money and power will ever confer contentment. Would anyone trade places with him?
As far as what would Jesus think or, more precisely, what would people think about Jesus these days if he magically reappeared, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) had this answer:
“If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.”
And at the head of those laughing their heads off ridiculing Jesus would be Bush, Cheney, Rove and the other Republican elites.
BTW, this Carlyle has nothing to do with the notorious Carlyle Group.
RSJ — I appreciate you thoughts are agree wholeheartedly of the balance of karma remaking their lives as we watch.
At the core of the whirlwind of dis-ease, we have most if not all, saying to themselves “how despicable, criminal, and evil” these men became, saying aloud “I just cannot understand how that is possible”.
OK, maybe I’m standing just a bit into the future possibility of actual real civilization returning, to this once grand country.
Regardless, we have “meet the ENEMY” (Geo shrub + Darth Cheney), but Pogo withstanding, we’re completely unprepared to ever acknowledge our direct complicity in this world context having created them intrinsically (from within). Yes, the enemy is US, but we hardly ever look behind this veil, nor attempt to break into and through the humongous denial to find true peace and acceptance.
What is before us as true Americans to extinguish the context that re-creates these sociopaths so often, each generation?
If we fail to change this context, we are no different than those attempting to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, as it (the context) is still going down.
So Pogo was right,
we’re really screwed up inside, …
so what are _ you _ going to do about it?
Namaste … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … Mahatma Gandhi … … … … … … … … … …
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world »
« There is enough to meet everybody’s need, but there is not enough to meet everybody’s greed »
Sounds like this bill should have been called the “Lifetime Employment for David Horowitz Act.”
Good one, Jamienewman.
Nspire, I agree with you, but there are Americans out there every day doing the altruistic things that ‘balance out the karma’ — I know, I’ve met them.
Even the small act of posting your ideas here keeps the flow of information from drying up; I talked to one Iraq War vet who went over to the Middel East a gung-ho ‘Bush believer’; he changed his mind about the war and his conservative politics not because he read a ‘big name’ progressive author, but because he thought about some of the comments he saw in threads like this one and they made sense to him.
As Gandhi proved, small acts can sometimes make a big difference, and you never know which seed blown by the wind will become a tree.
RSJ — Thank you. I like your seed analogy better than this one: