U.S. a Closing

Signs of the Times today in the Country that it is on the way to becoming a “Closed Society.” The invoking of a terrifying internal and external enemy. 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. 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 civilization as we know it. 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, labor activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well. This process took place in 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.
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 neighbors to spy on neighbors. 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.
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 organizations 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.
The most disgusting and the most evil, perverse, vile and dangerous harassment that is being done by the Government is the attempt to inhibit Activism and the American people who stand-up for their Rights and demand a fair Trial, (usually falsely imprisoned in the first place) they are being falsely declared “incompetent” and committed to a State Mental Hospital Facility for up to life without a Trial. The Mental Hospitals are being used today as Concentration Camps to brainwash and condition people to conform, to stop complaining about or criticizing the Government. They say in the State Hospitals that you are psychotic and delusional if you think that an Attorney, the Judge, the DA or Cops or the Government could or would lie or do anything at all illegal or wrong to you. They say that’s being insane, that you are Paranoid-Schizophrenic unfit and incompetent to go to Trial and that it’s necessary to keep you in the Mental Hospital and force you to take extremely dangerous and destructive Anti-Psychotic Drugs and Treatment until you can stop thinking that the Government can do any wrong.
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 criticized Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens. 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.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; 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 politically liberal. But on March 1, 2007, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "Because he was on the Terrorist Watch list". The Airline employee asked him, "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee. Murphy said, "I have not marched but I 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? A potential terrorist. Support the constitution? A potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
Then there is the threatening of civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalize 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.
Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalize 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. Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
It was always the Law in the past that you cannot prosecute thought, nor predict or project anything regarding what an individual might do in the future. Not any longer, if you tell somebody off, Swear at them it’s a Crime, “Making Terrorists Threats.” Now arrests are made and prosecutions along with people being detained or sent to Mental Hospitals, to stay for being a potential danger. This is being done everywhere in the Country, everyday now without any proven cause, without any proven Crime or without even having a Preliminary hearing to see if there’s enough evidence to hold them at all in the first place.
Most Americans do not realize 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. U.S. citizens will usually get a trial eventually – now, although some U.S Citizens are held without a Trial today. 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. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
These things that are happening are signs that this Country is headed towards and may be coming close to becoming a “Closed Society” like what happened in the total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. As Americans turn away, busy with their lives, their work and entertainment the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. The President can declare a state of emergency and become a Dictator. We need to look at history and face the facts.
Suspending 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.
The New York Times editorialized 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.
For Freedoms sake, it’s time to stand-up and say “NO” to all of these things, now . . .