In order to participate in the GunBroker Member forums, you must be logged in with your GunBroker.com account. Click the sign-in button at the top right of the forums page to get connected.
Will a Police State Protect Your Liberty?
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Will a Police State Protect Your Liberty?
by Butler Shaffer
Whenever George Bush gives us that Alfred E. Neuman smirk and begins prattling about "freedom," I know that some member of his administration is about to announce the formation of another link in our chain of subjugation to the state. Like the heads of warring states who fill the media with words of their dedication to "peace" - all the while looking for bigger clubs with which to smash their enemies - "freedom," in the mouths of politicians, has a reverse meaning from the normal import of the word. Just as any piece of legislation that bears the word "fair" in its title conveys notice of an expanded governmental power over our lives, the meaning of freedom is always corrupted when uttered by politicians. Like the cynically cruel words "work shall make you free" over the gates at Nazi concentration camps, we must be ever vigilant in how government officials use language.
Americans are slowly beginning to discover the nature of the police state that the political establishment has been putting together in recent decades. In case you are foolish enough to believe that the "Department of Homeland Security" was but a response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, be advised that proposals for such an agency had been considered long before last September; that legislation for such a body was introduced at least as early as March 2001, and was being discussed at various symposia and "think tanks" at the time. You should also make yourself aware of the fact that the US government had plans in place, prior to 9/11, for an invasion of Afghanistan - to begin in October 2001 - reportedly for the purpose of removing from power Afghan officials who were not being cooperative in the creation of an oil pipeline across their landscape.
Since 9/11, we have witnessed such wholesale intrusions into our lives as the "Patriot Act," as well as the current holding of so-called combatants in isolated military camps pending secretly conducted military trials (if, indeed, the government should ever decide to hold such trials). More recently, we have heard proposals to have the US military begin policing American citizens, as well as a warning - from a member of the US Civil Rights Commission - that Arab-American citizens might be rounded up and sent to concentration camps in the event of future terrorist attacks. I suspect that most Americans - even many who, in prior years, posed as defenders of liberty - will rationalize such proposals as "practical necessities" in these days of international terrorism. It will likely discomfort such minds to be told that those constructing the current police state are only following blueprints designed by statist architects from the past.
I recall a bumper-sticker from twenty years ago that read: "There will never be concentration camps in America: they'll be called something else!" Those of us who warned of the truth of this proposition were scorned for our "conspiracy theories" and "paranoid delusions." Such disparaging remarks are usually made by those wishing to discourage factual inquiry into their political schemes. In this context at least, we can define as "paranoid" one who understands the nature of political systems.
It requires no great genius or years of scholarly study to understand how the future is implicit in the present. In July, 1987, the Miami Herald, along with some other newspapers, ran news stories about secret plans, in the Reagan White House, to suspend the Constitution, establish martial law, turn over the functioning of the US government to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and have military commanders running state and local governments, in the event of a national crisis. One of the architects of this plan was the conservative godling, Lt. Col. Oliver North. There were even rumors, in some circles, that government concentration camps were being readied for such a possibility.
While news of such a plan failed to arouse the attention of most legislators, there was one - Congressman Jack Brooks of Texas - who, during the Iran-Contra hearings then being conducted, sought to question North about such reports. Brooks was quickly cut off by the Committee chairman, Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye. In the New York Times report of July 14, 1987, Inouye told Brooks: "that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area," to which Brooks responded: "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency [NSC], a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American Constitution." Inouye concluded: "May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon, at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an executive session." In other words, Sen. Inouye was determined to live up to the pronunciation of his name: "in no way" are we going to let the public know what we have planned for them!
Those who denounce these actions have already been warned by the likes of White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer to "watch what they say," while Attorney General Ashcroft criticized those "who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty." For added measure, Ashcroft offered up the scarecrow that such critics "only aid terrorists." When one couples this remark with President Bush's earlier statement that "if you're not with us you're against us," the fear that dissenters might be treated as "terrorist supporters" becomes realistic.
I have neither heard nor read any significant questioning of the suggestion that internment camps might once again be established in America - as they were for Japanese-Americans during World War II - or that the US military might have the kind of presence in our daily lives that one sees in the banana-republics to the south. We like to pretend that we have learned much from history that can help us avoid problems experienced by our ancestors. I am more inclined to the view that our social systems, like the business cycle, have recurrent themes. How else do we explain the fact that civilizations seem to follow the same general patterns of growth and decline, with widespread militarism a common feature preceding the ultimate collapse?
Perhaps most of us have grown weary of the burden of constant awareness and responsibility that attend a condition of liberty, and are content to allow the state to do as it will with us. The "inquiring minds" of modern America seem more intent on exploring the scandals and sexual peccadilloes of celebrities than paying attention to the lessons that history, alone, can provide. As the 19th century historian, Jacob Burckhardt put it: "The barbarian and the creature of exclusively modern civilization both live without history."
In the television mini-series, Holocaust, there was a telling scene in which two elderly men - who had been among the main characters in the series - were being taken to the gas chambers. One asked the other: "they are marching us off to kill us, and we still obey them. Why?" My immediate response was: "because if we don't obey them, we will be in serious trouble!" Have we become so pathetic, that brutish louts can threaten our lives and liberties to degrees limited only by the range of their imaginations? Did we learn nothing from Pastor Niemoller about the need to come to one another's defense if such values are threatened?
One of the posthumous victories realized by Adolf Hitler after the Nuremburg trials was that most Americans came to think of police-state brutalities and other tyrannical practices solely in terms of oppression against minority groups. If white police officers brutalize a black suspect, the defenders of liberty are rightfully mobilized for weeks of protest. But if white police officers beat up a white suspect, only token criticisms are heard. A white regime in South Africa that tyrannized blacks was vigorously condemned, while black-run tyrannies in many parts of Africa receive little attention. If race, ethnicity, or other minority group classifications are not implicated in abusive state action, most of us fail to object. Should concentration camps come into being in America, the only hurdle that such a system would likely face in the minds of most Americans would be to make certain that such abusive confinements were not based upon race, religion, ethnicity, or gender.
We have thus left to our children the sorry spectacle of a view of history that condemns a Hitler for his vicious wrongs against Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and communists, but leaves, relatively unscathed, the far more butcherous records of Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and others. I would not even hazard a guess as to the number of books, motion pictures, and television programs depicting the horrors of Nazism. I am equally hard-pressed to identify more than a handful of such creations describing communist tyrannies. Hitler seems to have come in for greater criticism than Stalin because he tyrannized minority groups. Stalin, because he was an equal-opportunity tyrant who brutalized all without distinction, escapes the condemnation of most.
I have long held to the view that the institutionalized power of the state is incompatible with a condition of liberty, and must be opposed no matter who any given target might be. In what surely must seem a heresy in our modern Panglossian world, I regard neither Jews nor Palestinians, World Trade Center workers nor Afghan civilians, as having any superior claim to the inviolability of their respective lives or property. Liberty, if it is to exist at all, must be indivisible. It is grounded in a mutual respect for one another's claim to immunity from state coercion.
To subdivide liberty - wherein some are rounded up by the state while others enjoy immunity - is to destroy it, and to erect in its place a system grounded in state-defined privilege. This was the weakness of early America, in which "liberty" was extolled at the same time the federal government was eagerly protecting slavery and despoiling and slaughtering Indian tribes. Such contradictions created an entropy that has never fully worked its way out of the system.
Political systems flourish by separating us from one another; by creating inter-group conflicts they tell us they, alone, can resolve. Only you and I can end such divisions by becoming aware that, though we are varied in our attributes and interests, what we have in common is a need to come to the defense of one another's individual liberties. We need to understand - as we slowly sink into the quicksand of the Bush/Ashcroft despotism - that if the state can round up Arab-Americans and send them to concentration camps, they can round up any of us; if the US Army can be positioned to fire at Afghan and Iraqi civilians, its deployment in American cities can be just as deadly.
The extent of your liberty and mine can never rise any higher than what you and I insist upon for those we regard as the least among us. If you do not already understand this essential truth, our liberties have already been lost, and we have become little more than tin-cup beggars for special indulgences.
July 27, 2002
Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law.
Copyright c 2002 LewRockwell.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer24.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
by Butler Shaffer
Whenever George Bush gives us that Alfred E. Neuman smirk and begins prattling about "freedom," I know that some member of his administration is about to announce the formation of another link in our chain of subjugation to the state. Like the heads of warring states who fill the media with words of their dedication to "peace" - all the while looking for bigger clubs with which to smash their enemies - "freedom," in the mouths of politicians, has a reverse meaning from the normal import of the word. Just as any piece of legislation that bears the word "fair" in its title conveys notice of an expanded governmental power over our lives, the meaning of freedom is always corrupted when uttered by politicians. Like the cynically cruel words "work shall make you free" over the gates at Nazi concentration camps, we must be ever vigilant in how government officials use language.
Americans are slowly beginning to discover the nature of the police state that the political establishment has been putting together in recent decades. In case you are foolish enough to believe that the "Department of Homeland Security" was but a response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, be advised that proposals for such an agency had been considered long before last September; that legislation for such a body was introduced at least as early as March 2001, and was being discussed at various symposia and "think tanks" at the time. You should also make yourself aware of the fact that the US government had plans in place, prior to 9/11, for an invasion of Afghanistan - to begin in October 2001 - reportedly for the purpose of removing from power Afghan officials who were not being cooperative in the creation of an oil pipeline across their landscape.
Since 9/11, we have witnessed such wholesale intrusions into our lives as the "Patriot Act," as well as the current holding of so-called combatants in isolated military camps pending secretly conducted military trials (if, indeed, the government should ever decide to hold such trials). More recently, we have heard proposals to have the US military begin policing American citizens, as well as a warning - from a member of the US Civil Rights Commission - that Arab-American citizens might be rounded up and sent to concentration camps in the event of future terrorist attacks. I suspect that most Americans - even many who, in prior years, posed as defenders of liberty - will rationalize such proposals as "practical necessities" in these days of international terrorism. It will likely discomfort such minds to be told that those constructing the current police state are only following blueprints designed by statist architects from the past.
I recall a bumper-sticker from twenty years ago that read: "There will never be concentration camps in America: they'll be called something else!" Those of us who warned of the truth of this proposition were scorned for our "conspiracy theories" and "paranoid delusions." Such disparaging remarks are usually made by those wishing to discourage factual inquiry into their political schemes. In this context at least, we can define as "paranoid" one who understands the nature of political systems.
It requires no great genius or years of scholarly study to understand how the future is implicit in the present. In July, 1987, the Miami Herald, along with some other newspapers, ran news stories about secret plans, in the Reagan White House, to suspend the Constitution, establish martial law, turn over the functioning of the US government to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and have military commanders running state and local governments, in the event of a national crisis. One of the architects of this plan was the conservative godling, Lt. Col. Oliver North. There were even rumors, in some circles, that government concentration camps were being readied for such a possibility.
While news of such a plan failed to arouse the attention of most legislators, there was one - Congressman Jack Brooks of Texas - who, during the Iran-Contra hearings then being conducted, sought to question North about such reports. Brooks was quickly cut off by the Committee chairman, Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye. In the New York Times report of July 14, 1987, Inouye told Brooks: "that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area," to which Brooks responded: "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency [NSC], a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American Constitution." Inouye concluded: "May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon, at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an executive session." In other words, Sen. Inouye was determined to live up to the pronunciation of his name: "in no way" are we going to let the public know what we have planned for them!
Those who denounce these actions have already been warned by the likes of White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer to "watch what they say," while Attorney General Ashcroft criticized those "who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty." For added measure, Ashcroft offered up the scarecrow that such critics "only aid terrorists." When one couples this remark with President Bush's earlier statement that "if you're not with us you're against us," the fear that dissenters might be treated as "terrorist supporters" becomes realistic.
I have neither heard nor read any significant questioning of the suggestion that internment camps might once again be established in America - as they were for Japanese-Americans during World War II - or that the US military might have the kind of presence in our daily lives that one sees in the banana-republics to the south. We like to pretend that we have learned much from history that can help us avoid problems experienced by our ancestors. I am more inclined to the view that our social systems, like the business cycle, have recurrent themes. How else do we explain the fact that civilizations seem to follow the same general patterns of growth and decline, with widespread militarism a common feature preceding the ultimate collapse?
Perhaps most of us have grown weary of the burden of constant awareness and responsibility that attend a condition of liberty, and are content to allow the state to do as it will with us. The "inquiring minds" of modern America seem more intent on exploring the scandals and sexual peccadilloes of celebrities than paying attention to the lessons that history, alone, can provide. As the 19th century historian, Jacob Burckhardt put it: "The barbarian and the creature of exclusively modern civilization both live without history."
In the television mini-series, Holocaust, there was a telling scene in which two elderly men - who had been among the main characters in the series - were being taken to the gas chambers. One asked the other: "they are marching us off to kill us, and we still obey them. Why?" My immediate response was: "because if we don't obey them, we will be in serious trouble!" Have we become so pathetic, that brutish louts can threaten our lives and liberties to degrees limited only by the range of their imaginations? Did we learn nothing from Pastor Niemoller about the need to come to one another's defense if such values are threatened?
One of the posthumous victories realized by Adolf Hitler after the Nuremburg trials was that most Americans came to think of police-state brutalities and other tyrannical practices solely in terms of oppression against minority groups. If white police officers brutalize a black suspect, the defenders of liberty are rightfully mobilized for weeks of protest. But if white police officers beat up a white suspect, only token criticisms are heard. A white regime in South Africa that tyrannized blacks was vigorously condemned, while black-run tyrannies in many parts of Africa receive little attention. If race, ethnicity, or other minority group classifications are not implicated in abusive state action, most of us fail to object. Should concentration camps come into being in America, the only hurdle that such a system would likely face in the minds of most Americans would be to make certain that such abusive confinements were not based upon race, religion, ethnicity, or gender.
We have thus left to our children the sorry spectacle of a view of history that condemns a Hitler for his vicious wrongs against Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and communists, but leaves, relatively unscathed, the far more butcherous records of Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and others. I would not even hazard a guess as to the number of books, motion pictures, and television programs depicting the horrors of Nazism. I am equally hard-pressed to identify more than a handful of such creations describing communist tyrannies. Hitler seems to have come in for greater criticism than Stalin because he tyrannized minority groups. Stalin, because he was an equal-opportunity tyrant who brutalized all without distinction, escapes the condemnation of most.
I have long held to the view that the institutionalized power of the state is incompatible with a condition of liberty, and must be opposed no matter who any given target might be. In what surely must seem a heresy in our modern Panglossian world, I regard neither Jews nor Palestinians, World Trade Center workers nor Afghan civilians, as having any superior claim to the inviolability of their respective lives or property. Liberty, if it is to exist at all, must be indivisible. It is grounded in a mutual respect for one another's claim to immunity from state coercion.
To subdivide liberty - wherein some are rounded up by the state while others enjoy immunity - is to destroy it, and to erect in its place a system grounded in state-defined privilege. This was the weakness of early America, in which "liberty" was extolled at the same time the federal government was eagerly protecting slavery and despoiling and slaughtering Indian tribes. Such contradictions created an entropy that has never fully worked its way out of the system.
Political systems flourish by separating us from one another; by creating inter-group conflicts they tell us they, alone, can resolve. Only you and I can end such divisions by becoming aware that, though we are varied in our attributes and interests, what we have in common is a need to come to the defense of one another's individual liberties. We need to understand - as we slowly sink into the quicksand of the Bush/Ashcroft despotism - that if the state can round up Arab-Americans and send them to concentration camps, they can round up any of us; if the US Army can be positioned to fire at Afghan and Iraqi civilians, its deployment in American cities can be just as deadly.
The extent of your liberty and mine can never rise any higher than what you and I insist upon for those we regard as the least among us. If you do not already understand this essential truth, our liberties have already been lost, and we have become little more than tin-cup beggars for special indulgences.
July 27, 2002
Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law.
Copyright c 2002 LewRockwell.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer24.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Comments
Monday, July 29, 2002
WASHINGTON - A soldier's name, rank and serial number will no longer be enough for a Pentagon that is increasingly worried about security. Fingerprints and other physical characteristics will be encoded on future versions of military identification cards, Pentagon officials said Friday.
The "biometrics" data, most frequently seen only in futuristic movies, will include fingerprints, hand shapes, iris patterns, and voice and * prints.
Not only will the IDs be used to gain entry into bases and Department of Defense offices, but they will be used alongside ID cards and passwords used to log on to Pentagon computers. Those terminals will then only grant access to the files that the workers are cleared to call up.
"The point of all of this is to allow people to have broader access to information, freely, over a network," John Stenbit, the Pentagon's chief information officer.
Computers will recognize who is on the network and will track what Web sites are viewed, e-mails sent and files retrieved.
The system will also provide a layer of security for users because encrypted e-mail will be protected from unauthorized users, Stenbit said.
Already one million cards have been handed out with computer chips that record military information underneath the picture. At Friday's demonstration of the new technology, Army Spc. Trenton Dugan, who got the one-millionth ID card, sent reporters an encrypted e-mail to the Defense Department press office.
The high-tech ID cards will be available to the more than three million military and civilian Defense Department workers in the next several years.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,58866,00.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty
Army National Guard Spc. Jacob Pierce, right, searches a car entering the United States near Jackman, Maine, from Quebec, Canada, with U.S. Customs inspector Wayne Chalker on March 19, 2002. Unlike the Customs officials they are assisting, the National Guardsmen are not armed.
WASHINGTON (July 29, 2002 7:52 a.m. EDT) - National Guard troops helping guard borders with Canada and Mexico can't look for lawbreakers while they are flying to their new posts, and some haven't been allowed to carry weapons on duty.
White House officials say such problems show why the Bush administration is studying whether to ask Congress to loosen the 124-year-old ban on soldiers doing law enforcement work inside the United States.
"Let's review those kind of issues right now, when we have some time, so in the future if the military needs to be called up domestically, we have these issues worked out," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security.
But Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, say there's no good reason to change the military policing ban, known as the Posse Comitatus Act.
"It's not clear to me that there's any need to change Posse Comitatus at this time," Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week. "It has not been pointed out what the advantages to doing that would be."
Military officials have resisted any expansion of their domestic role, saying troops are trained to fight wars, not crimes. Added domestic duties since the terrorist attacks - such as providing fighter jet patrols over major cities - also have strained some military units' time and budgets.
One top military leader said, however, he would support an expanded role for the military inside the United States.
Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, who will head the new military command charged with defending American territory, told The New York Times he would support changes in Posse Comitatus that would help the military protect Americans. He did not say what specific changes he favored.
Rumsfeld said he didn't plan to recommend any adjustments to the military's role. "I don't think anyone should hold their breaths waiting for changes in Posse Comitatus," he said.
Congress passed the law in 1878, at the end of the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. It ended the Army's police role both in the South and in the West, where soldiers either enforced the law directly or local officials pressed them into service as a posse.
Posse comitatus is a Latin phrase meaning "power of the county." In this case, it's another way of saying law enforcement is not the military's responsibility.
"We don't want a military dictatorship, and this is one of the ways of preventing that," said Michael Spak, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and a former military lawyer.
Congress has softened the law several times, allowing the military to offer equipment and support to fight drug smuggling and respond to terrorist attacks using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Military personnel still cannot make arrests within the United States, however.
The law does not apply to National Guard units when they are acting under the authority of the states. Guard units often help respond to riots, natural disasters and other crises.
When the president calls the National Guard into federal service, however, the Posse Comitatus Act does apply. That's why President Bush asked state governors to call up Guard units to provide airport security after the Sept. 11 attacks, spokesman Johndroe said.
"This took the lawyers several days to decide," he said. "It's one example of something that needs to be reviewed. ... We have a situation where we need to deploy troops, but we have to talk to a lawyer to figure out if we can do it or not."
Homeland security chief Tom Ridge has said giving the military the power to make arrests was "very unlikely." Top Senate Democrats also have said they would oppose giving troops that much power.
"I don't fear looking at it to see whether or not our military can be more helpful in a very supportive and assisting role - providing equipment, providing training, those kind of things," said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich.
http://www.nandotimes.com/nation/story/481547p-3846581c.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
(New York-AP, July 26, 2002) - There are so many surveillance cameras in Manhattan showing public areas, that one man has decided to give guided tours of the spots. Tour guide Bill Brown has been giving free walking tours of Manhattan's most camera-dense neighborhoods on Sundays for the last two years.
Focusing on such key areas as Times Square, Chelsea, the United Nations, Washington Square Park and Fifth Avenue, Brown tells his tour groups there are roughly five thousand cameras watching the streets of Manhattan. And those are just the ones he can see.
Standing on 16th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, he points out 16 cameras.
Brown says 90 percent of Manhattan's surveillance cameras belong to private companies concerned about protecting property and lower insurance rates.
Others, are police cameras, such as the one on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 14th Street. Police don't dispute his claim, but won't discuss their methods.
Brown puts a sticker on the camera poles that read: "You Are Being Watched, Surveillance Camera Notice."
Brown's tours, which are free, attract about a dozen people each Sunday.
(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/news/wabc_072602_hiddencams.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
By Ritt Goldstein
July 27 2002
Recent pronouncements from the Bush Administration and national security initiatives put in place in the Reagan era could see internment camps and martial law in the United States.
When president Ronald Reagan was considering invading Nicaragua he issued a series of executive orders that provided the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with broad powers in the event of a "crisis" such as "violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition against a US military invasion abroad". They were never used.
But with the looming possibility of a US invasion of Iraq, recent pronouncements by President George Bush's domestic security chief, Tom Ridge, and an official with the US Civil Rights Commission should fire concerns that these powers could be employed or a de facto drift into their deployment could occur.
On July 20 the Detroit Free Press ran a story entitled "Arabs in US could be held, official warns". The story referred to a member of the US Civil Rights Commission who foresaw the possibility of internment camps for Arab Americans. FEMA has practised for such an occasion.
FEMA, whose main role is disaster response, is also responsible for handling US domestic unrest.
From 1982-84 Colonel Oliver North assisted FEMA in drafting its civil defence preparations. Details of these plans emerged during the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal.
They included executive orders providing for suspension of the constitution, the imposition of martial law, internment camps, and the turning over of government to the president and FEMA.
A Miami Herald article on July 5, 1987, reported that the former FEMA director Louis Guiffrida's deputy, John Brinkerhoff, handled the martial law portion of the planning. The plan was said to be similar to one Mr Giuffrida had developed earlier to combat "a national uprising by black militants". It provided for the detention "of at least 21million American Negroes"' in "assembly centres or relocation camps".
Today Mr Brinkerhoff is with the highly influential Anser Institute for Homeland Security. Following a request by the Pentagon in January that the US military be allowed the option of deploying troops on American streets, the institute in February published a paper by Mr Brinkerhoff arguing the legality of this.
He alleged that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which has long been accepted as prohibiting such deployments, had simply been misunderstood and misapplied.
The preface to the article also provided the revelation that the national plan he had worked on, under Mr Giuffrida, was "approved by Reagan, and actions were taken to implement it".
By April, the US military had created a Northern Command to aid Homeland defence. Reuters reported that the command is "mainly expected to play a supporting role to local authorities".
However, Mr Ridge, the Director of Homeland Security, has just advocated a review of US law regarding the use of the military for law enforcement duties.
Disturbingly, the full facts and final contents of Mr Reagan's national plan remain uncertain. This is in part because President Bush took the unusual step of sealing the Reagan presidential papers last November. However, many of the key figures of the Reagan era are part of the present administration, including John Poindexter, to whom Oliver North later reported.
At the time of the Reagan initiatives, the then attorney-general, William French Smith, wrote to the national security adviser, Robert McFarlane: "I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the revised Executive Order exceeds its proper function as a co-ordinating agency for emergency preparedness ... this department and others have repeatedly raised serious policy and legal objections to an 'emergency czar' role for FEMA."
Criticism of the Bush Administration's response to September11 echoes Mr Smith's warning. On June 7 the former presidential counsel John Dean spoke of America's sliding into a "constitutional dictatorship" and martial law.
Ritt Goldstein is an investigative journalist and a former leader in the movement for US law enforcement accountability. He revealed exclusively in the Herald last week the Bush Administration's plans for a domestic spying system more pervasive than the Stasi network in East Germany.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/27/1027497418339.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
by Clark Walter
The birth of this Nation signaled the dawn of a new day in the history of Mankind's struggle against the bondage of class distinctions and tyrants. We cannot today fully appreciate the tremendous impact of this event. Mankind had finally broken the shackles that had destined him to be a slave since the dawn of time. America would prove that equality of opportunity, coupled with the protection of our unalienable rights granted equally by our Creator, would inspire men and women to achieve a freedom that they, themselves, never dreamed was possible. Wave after wave of immigrants came to our shores thirsting for the chance to prove their worth and, in so doing, to earn their freedom and, incidentally, to build a new Nation. The practical idealism expressed in our Declaration of Independence was an inspiration and a clarion call to all the peoples of the world.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
These truths are self-evident because they are based on the long tradition of natural law which acknowledges that there is a "higher law" of right and wrong. The last five of the Ten Commandments are the foundation of our criminal law. It is this "higher law" from which we derive human law and against which we must evaluate all law. It is moral reasoning, not political will, which is the foundation of our government and the rationale for its existence. Our republic was nurtured by the high ideals and ambitions of a fiercely independent and religious people.
The Declaration of Independence says: "That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed." They devised a government that would be strong enough to secure our rights, yet not so powerful as to be oppressive itself.
The Preamble of our Constitution states: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Article I, Section 8 states: "The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common Defense and the general welfare of the United States." It goes on to enumerate seventeen powers to execute that mandate. In Section 9 it withheld eight specifically enumerated powers.
These United States of America became an ideal. We were a living example that there was hope for the emancipation of all Mankind from the bondage of social status and tyrannical governments. We would prove that every person, regardless of race, creed or social status, can earn freedom by working to make this world a better place in which to live, while respecting those rights with which we are all endowed by our Creator. Many new governments adopted our Constitution which places upon government the responsibility to protect those rights.
Today we find ourselves dependent on a government which becomes more and more the master of our lives. Some people say that our Constitution is no longer relevant. They say that they are happy to pay taxes to defend America and to help the needy. To those we might ask: "Why, after 60 years, do all of our problems multiply and grow?" Today we have an uneasy sense that something is radically wrong in America. The corruption and criminal behavior of our fellow citizens in corporations, in civic, charitable and other organizations, in government agencies, and even in religious institutions are not acceptable. The cures for our problems seem to be worse than the disease. How and why has all of this happened?
In 1913, prior to our entering World War I, "war profiteers" were singled out as unpatriotic. Many people felt that their excessive profits should be shared with Uncle Sam to help pay for the war. Our sacred Bill of Rights stood in the way. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searchers and seizures, shall not be violated." Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution states: "No Capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid." The States ratified the Income Tax Amendment in 1913. "The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived." That was the first "unalienable right" we gave away. The tax rate was small and affected only a few citizens in very high income brackets. It required one tax return to be filed and paid on March 15 for income in the prior year. Very few expected it to grow into the monstrosity we know today. No one conceived that it would empower our government to effect the greatest redistribution of wealth in the history of the world.
The stock market crash in 1929 ushered in the Great Depression. Our people, in desperation, turned to President Franklin Roosevelt for help. The "rubber stamp" Congress passed scores of New Deal programs. They were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court which was under extreme political pressure. Finally, Justice Roberts joined the four dissenting Justices and the Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of the "emergency" programs passed by Congress. It did so by interpreting the "general welfare" clause in Article I, Section 8 to authorize the expenditure of tax receipts to benefit unemployed citizens and beleaguered farmers. That second "unalienable right" was given away by our sacred Supreme Court, the ultimate guardian of our rights. Since that time increasingly larger groups of citizens and corporations have become dependent on the power of government to benefit and care for them. Our early history proved that the general welfare of everyone is improved by a government that encourages every citizen to enlarge the economic pie, not to fight over how a limited pie is to be divided.
The reasons why our beloved America is in deep trouble, become obvious. The Income Tax empowered our government to target the wealthy. The Supreme Court decisions in the 1930's authorized the redistribution of that wealth to those who would benefit by it. Those are the fundamental reasons for the unstoppable corruption that pervades our government, our politics and our society. We have become "The United Socialist States of America."
The overwhelming majority of voters falsely believe that corporations and the wealthy pay for all these social and corporate welfare programs. The politicians will give the people what they want to get reelected. The majority of voters do not object to higher taxes because they think that they are not paying them.
In 1919 we, the people voluntarily gave away another "unalienable right" when we ratified the Prohibition Amendment. History proved that it was an unwinnable war because it conflicted with an unalienable right. It was repealed in 1933.
The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and other legislation prohibited addictive drugs, gambling and prostitution. All of these activities are protected by the Bill of Rights and do not infringe on the rights of others. Is it any wonder that all such laws are unenforceable? The exercise of any unalienable right that does not infringe on the rights of others demands that the citizen, not the taxpayer, be accountable for the consequences. That might sound "mean spirited," but it provides a powerful incentive to be and do the best that is in us. None of this implies that such activities cannot be regulated in some reasonable way.
The horrors and fears which followed September 11 have prompted us to enact the USA Patriot Act. Once again we relinquish a few more rights to government. We become dependent on government for the safety it promises but cannot deliver.
It is time that we comprehend the tyranny that is already upon us and, as free citizens, declare our individual independence from government and vote to take back those rights which we have let our politicians and courts take from us. http://libertyforall.net/2002/archive/july20/rights.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878