See other Editorial Articles
Title: Fascist America, in 10 easy steps (pegs this administration so well it is frightening)
Source:
www.guardian.co.uk/
URL Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2063979,00.html
Published: May 13, 2007
Author: Guardian editorial
Post Date: 2007-05-13 16:40:56 by Ferret Mike
Keywords: None
Views: 169
Comments: 13
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 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. 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. · Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.
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#1. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
Outstanding - thanks.
BeAChooser does this! Very informative article.
Within a matter of days? That is pretty slow, except maybe for Thailand. Here, it happened in a matter of hours on 9-11-2001. Luckily, during the roundups, the FBI snared a good number of Mossad agents. ;0)
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition Look here this is a good article.
The first step is the most important one. You have to define your and your group as good and noble, then the enemy group as non-human, evil and insane. That way you can define them as a mortal threat and thereby eradicate them. since they are the cause of all your problems.
"Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war." -- Thucydides
I really relate to this editorial....
It does indeed work all too well.
Of course, the author is implying that the Spanish are freer than we are ... have less restrictions on their freedom. So let's examine the difference in freedom between Spain and the US to see if the author is right. Here's a description of Spain's response to terrorism. http://hrw.org/un/chr59/counter-terrorism-bck4.htm "In the aftermath of September 11, Spain applied its existing strict counter-terrorism regime to the investigation, apprehension, and detention of suspected al-Qaeda operatives. The climate created by the international campaign against terrorism provided the Spanish authorities with a further pretext to crackdown on Basque separatists and supporters of the pro-independence movement. Spanish authorities were also quick to issue public statements equating stricter controls on immigration with the war against terrorism, contributing to a climate of fear and suspicion toward migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. Spain's anti-terror laws permit the use of incommunicado detention, secret legal proceedings, and pre-trial detention for up to four years. The proceedings governing the detentions of suspected al-Qaeda operatives apprehended in Spain in November 2001, July 2002, and January 2003, among others, have been declared secret (causa secreta). The investigating magistrate of the Audiencia Nacional, a special court that oversees terrorist cases, can request causa secreta for thirty days, consecutively renewable for the duration of the four-year pre-trial detention period. Secret proceedings bar the defense access to the prosecutor's evidence, except for information contained in the initial detention order. Without access to this evidence, detainees are severely hampered in mounting an adequate defense. ... snip ... The global anti-terror climate hardened the Spanish government's resolve in the ongoing conflict with armed Basque separatists, Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) and the non-violent pro-independence movement. ETA uses violent means to seek the creation of an independent Basque state in parts of northern Spain and southern France. The group has been responsible for over 800 deaths since the 1960s. In recent years, it has targeted civilians, including academics and journalists. Since September 11, over fifty suspected ETA members have been detained and held under Spain's anti-terror laws. Casualties of the government's hard-line approach, however, have included Gestoras pro Amnistía, an organization that provided support to families of ETA detainees, which was banned in December 2001. In August 2002, the Batasuna Party, widely regarded as the political arm of ETA, was banned for three years. In February 2003, Euskaldunon Egunkaria-the sole remaining newspaper written entirely in the Basque language-was closed down, and ten people associated with the paper were arrested and held incommunicado. These actions give rise to serious concerns that Spain's counter-terrorism measures breach the rights to freedom of association and expression. Human rights organizations have also documented instances of alleged torture and ill-treatment of ETA members and pro-independence supporters detained by Spanish authorities. " My my ... that's not quite the picture I think this thread's author was trying to paint. To equate conditions at Guantanamo to what existed Nazi prisons or the Gulag is so filled with hyperbole as to be laughable. ROTFLOL! I really don't think I need a response beyond that. ROTFLOL! This is a bald faced lie. Here is what the group that helped make sure that democRATS didn't steal the election looked like: They men don't have identical shirts (some aren't even white). And the group includes women. They acted because democRATS tried to move the recount out of an open conference room where it could be observed and monitored into a smaller space where it could not ... and democRATS had already been caught tampering with the ballots and trying to slip ballots from outside into the mix. And here is why Gore lost. Because we live in a republic. democRATS still don't seem to understand that. Because the Supreme Court (including the liberals on it) was wise to the tricks of the democRATS. And because of the reasons cited in this ... http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3468966.html . Every major media outlet has done a investigation and concluded that Bush did in fact win the election. Yet democRATS continue to live in their world of delusions. The New York Times ... which has revealed one secret program after another that most experts considered critical to fighting an effective war against terrorists. The government wanted to tap conversations between KNOWN foreign al-Qaeda when they made calls to someone in the US or when someone in the US made a call to them. They weren't wiretapping you and me ... but people who want to kill you and me. The government wanted to create a database of who calls who (just consisting of numbers) so that when a call like that occurred, they could QUICKLY trace down who that individual knows (and perhaps break up a cell of terrorists before they acted). But thanks to the NYTimes, that's not going to happen now. The government wanted to examine overseas financial transactions to follow the money to the terrorists. But thanks to the NYTimes for revealing that effort, it won't be nearly as effective now (although it did lead to the capture of some prominent terrorists when it was secret). If a nuclear weapon or other WMD goes off in a US city, it may be thanks to liberal stupidity like the above. I find liberals complaining about IRS harassment totally hypocritical on their part. The old-guard democRAT who wrote the impeachment articles against Nixon has stated that Bill Clinton used the IRS and FBI to harass his opponents and that he should have been impeached again for that. Yet, there not a word one from the *new* democRATS about that. They closed ranks, ignored and covered it up. Just like they couldn't care less when Clinton lied over and over and over to literally everyone. Now as to the allegation itself, the Pasadena church is suspected of violating a 1954 law prohibiting churches from doing what that church did. The law was engineered by a democRAT - Senate Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. Its detractors at the time, mostly Christian conservatives, argued that Johnson was seeking retribution against a non-profit group opposed to his re-election. Did democRATS side with those conservatives and act to prevent the law from passing and being signed? No. They did not. The law has never been seriously enforced until about 2004, but efforts by church's to influence the votes of their flocks have grown more blatant since the Clinton era began. Now the IRS says it cannot launch an investigation into a church unless it receives a complaint from a parishioner or an independent watchdog group. The agency has concluded investigations into complaints filed against 40 churches in the 2004 election. "political intervention" was substantiated in all but three cases, yet not a single house of worship saw its tax-exempt status revoked. Instead, the IRS wrote advisories, warning citations that carry no punishment, or assessed excise taxes, the equivalent of light fines, on those churches. One more thing worth noting ... In many Christian right activists have taken up the liberal All Saints' cause, vowing to fight any IRS attempt to revoke the church's tax-exempt status. Did liberal churches ever come forward to defend those savaged by the IRS under Bill Clinton. No, of course not. http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/01/turning_a_blind.html I do agree that the government is wrong to regard animal rights protests and certain other things as terrorism. It is wrong. But it is equally wrong to suggest that no monitoring of certain groups is needed in this time of war and given the rhetoric used when referring to the current President and Vice President. The proper goal should be to find a reasonable balance in terms of defining terrorism, not make a partisan issue of it or pretend like democRATS haven't been part of the decision to define it as it is currently. Unlike Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, that the author is trying to suggest the US is like, organizations like the ACLU (and the media as well) are allowed to exist and create considerable problems for the government. Consider it just part of our system of checks and balances. That should say something about this wonderful country. There should have been equal concern by the ACLU and especially the media when conservative organizations were targeted by an unfriendly administration. But was there? Yes, mistakes are made but a no-fly list is probably a good idea given what happened on 9/11 and what terrorists are clearly still trying to do. Perhaps your effort needs to be put into making sure that the guidelines for putting someone on such a list are good and that there are effective procedures to get names that are mistakes taken off. If you just insist there should be no control of who flies, you will get nowhere. Then you are going to the other extreme. There is more to this story that what the article suggests. First, by the time of his return flight to Albuquerque, he was no longer on the list; he was able to get his boarding pass. It was likely a mistake, just like Kennedy being on the list was a mistake. But no ... the left has to jump to outrageous conclusions. Their theory is even worse than that. Here's what Professor Murphy said: "I flew back without having trouble getting a boarding pass. But when I was in Princeton, I had breakfast with former student — a Republican congressman, and called a number of friends in my academic life, and the NSA monitors a lot of phone calls, especially cell phone calls, so I tried to use the words that might trip their computers like starting calls by saying, "I'm on the terrorist watch list" and "I've been criticizing George Bush" and if indeed these things are monitored, maybe they heard this" ROTFLOL! Professor Murphy is a tad paranoid. Undoubtedly if the government was trying to intimidate him because he said something critical of Bush, why would they stop just because he told a friend on the phone that he's on the terrorist watch list and had criticized Bush? If the nasty Bush regime folds that easy they aren't as nasty and powerful as folks like Murphy and the author of this article would have you believe. They sound more like push overs. He also is quoted saying "On my return flight, I had no problem with obtaining a boarding pass, but my luggage was "lost." Airlines do lose a lot of luggage and this "loss" could have been a mere coincidence. In light of previous events, however, I'm a tad skeptical." Now that makes it sound like his luggage just disappeared. But then he goes on to say "It was delivered later that night, sometime after midnight. I don't know when. I left a note on the door telling them just leave it. It arrived some time overnight and I found nothing missing. But there's more to the story which suggest Murphy was never on the "no fly" list. ************ From http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_04_08-2007_04_14.shtml#1176348555 Let's focus on what we know, based on combining the details of the original Balkinization post with what Murphy told Ryan Singel: 1. Professor Murphy arrived at the Albuquerque Airport and attempted to check in at the curbside. He was informed that he could not do a curbside check-in. 2. Professor Murphy inquired as to why he could not get a boarding pass at the curb-side, and was informed that it was because he was on a "Terrorist Watch List." 3. Murphy then handed his Marine Corps ID to the American Airlines clerk, who then left to show the ID to the TSA. 4. The American Airlines clerk returned about ten minutes later with Professor Murphy's boarding pass. (The sense I get from the Singel interview is that Murphy is still waiting at the curbside at this point, although it's not entirely clear.) 5. During the approximately ten-minute wait for a boarding pass, Professor Murphy had a discussion with an American Airlines clerk about why he was selected for the list. The clerk wondered if Murphy has been to a political protest; Murphy stated that he gave an anti-Bush speech; the clerk responded "that'll do it." 6. On the return flight, Professor received his boarding pass without incident or extra questioning. However, his luggage arrived a few hours late. So the evidence here suggests three events that deviate from the unusual (or at least might do so). First, on one leg of the flight, Professor Murphy could not check in curbside and had to wait for ten minutes (apparently while still at the curbside, although that's not entirely clear) before his boarding pass was brought to him. Second, the American Airlines clerks told him (a) that he was on a "Terrorist Watch List," and (b) that in their experience protesting against Bush or giving an anti-Bush speech could get a person on the "Terrorist Watch List." Third, Professor Murphy's luggage arrived a few hours late on the return flight. ... snip ... In trying to interpret these events, some background brought out by James Taranto and others is helpful. First, there is no such thing as a "Terrorist Watch List." There are two lists: a No-Fly list and a "selectee" list. As I understand it, if a name appears on the No-Fly list the person is not allowed to board a flight period unless the individual can prove they are not the person who the FBI had in mind when putting the name on the list. So for example, Ted Kennedy could fly even though his name was on the No-Fly list because he could prove he was not the same "T. Kennedy" as the terrorist suspect who used that name as an alias. As I understand it, that has to be done on each check-in for air travel, so if a name is on the No-Fly list people with that naame have to prove they are not that particular person targeted in order to fly. On the other hand, the selectee list is a list of individuals who are subject to extra screening for either a particular flight or all flights for any number of reasons. Those reasons may include buying a one-way ticket or paying in cash. Also, I know from personal experience that at least as of 2 or 3 years ago, buying a round-trip ticket online that combines multiple airlines would put a person on the selectee list (apparently because the airlines only know of their leg and see it as a one-way flight). Like individuals on the No-Fly list, people on the selectee list for a particular flight are not permitted to check in curbside. Why is this background relevant? Well, as Taranto and others have noted, it suggests quite strongly that Murphy was never on the No-Fly list. Rather, he was on the selectee list for one leg of one flight. He was not permitted to check in curbside for only one leg; on the return flight, his name was not on any list at all. Given that so many people have been on selectee list before — I suspect most VC readers have been on the list for a flight at some point — it seems pretty unlikely that Murphy was put on the list for that one leg of one flight for any reason related to his Princeton speech. (Think about it — what kind of oppressive government would punish its critics simply by taking away their right to curbside check-in for a single flight?) ************ http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2007/04/11/3892 But now Ed Felten casts a calmer (and more informed) eye on the matter, and comes to a different conclusion: There are two aspects to the no-fly list, one that puts names on the list and another that checks airline reservations against the list. The two parts are almost entirely separate. Names are put on the list through a secret process; about all we know is that names are added by intelligence and/or law enforcement agencies. We know the official standard for adding a name requires that the person be a sufficiently serious threat to aviation security, but we don’t know what processes, if any, are used to ensure that this standard is followed. In short, nobody outside the intelligence community knows much about how names get on the list. The airlines check their customers’ reservations against the list, and they deal with customers who are “hits”. Most hits are false positives (innocent people who trigger mistaken hits), who are allowed to fly after talking to an airline customer service agent. The airlines aren’t told why any particular name is on the list, nor do they have special knowledge about how names are added. An airline employee, such as the one who told Prof. Murphy that he might be on the list for political reasons, would have no special knowledge about how names get on the list. In short, the employee must have been speculating about why Prof. Murphy’s name triggered a hit. It’s well known by now that the no-fly list has many false positives. Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman John Lewis, among others, seem to trigger false positives. I know a man living in Princeton who triggers false positives every time he flies. Having many false positives is inevitable given that (1) the list is large, and (2) the matching algorithm requires only an approximate match (because flight reservations often have misspelled names). An ordinary false positive is by far the most likely explanation for Prof. Murphy’s experience. Note, too, that Walter Murphy is a relatively common name, making it more likely that Prof. Murphy was being confused with somebody else. Lycos PeopleSearch finds 181 matches for Walter Murphy and 307 matches for W. Murphy in the U.S. And of course the name on the list could be somebody’s alias. Many false positive stories involve people with relatively common names. Given all of this, the most likely story by far is that Prof. Murphy triggered an ordinary false positive in the no-fly system. These are very annoying to the affected person, and they happen much too often, but they aren’t targeted at particular people. We can’t entirely rule out the possibility that the name “Walter Murphy” was added to the no-fly list for political reasons, but it seems unlikely. *************** I agree that this case was badly handled and should receive national attention ... as it has. But let's be clear about one thing. When he arrested, he was found to be in possession of a list of Guantanamo detainees and interrogators ... classified information that he was not supposed to be carrying. Also, note that all charges against Yee have been dropped. He's been honorably discharged and has even written a book. To claim he's still of interest means what? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/29/AR2006112901179.html "The U.S. government agreed yesterday to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit filed by an Oregon lawyer who was arrested and jailed for two weeks in 2004 after the FBI bungled a fingerprint match and mistakenly linked him to a terrorist attack in Spain." Just for the record, it was partial fingerprint on a bag of detonators found after 191 people were killed on trains in Spain. And there were other reasons why the FBI suspected him: http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/330. What they found in his possession suggests the government acted in good faith. What "list" is he on? The article doesn't say. He certainly fit a profile but I don't see which "list" he was or is on. Can anyone help me out? Or is this just something added to the "accusation" to *beef it up*? ROTFLOL! Like the democRATS haven't done the same thing. In fact, one reason that our education system and the entertainment industry are so overwhelmingly liberal is that liberals have gone out of their way to make it unpleasant or even impossible for conservatives to work in those fields unless they hide their views. Do we get any examples or is this just an unsubstantiated claim (like I suspect)? Again, it's hard to debunk an allegation that is so vague. Let's hear some names and see if there is anything to the allegation or more that isn't being said? The article forgot to mention that the "closed blog" was hers ... that she'd set up on a secret CIA server ... and that company policy forbade employees from using computers for non-official purposes. Furthermore, the CIA worker has admitted her post was deliberately provocative. ROTFLOL! Did this author complain when Clinton fired 93 US attorneys the moment he took office? Hardly a democRAT did. ROTFLOL! This author thinks our press is controlled? If anything it is totally out of control. It thinks IT should make policy. But then it is mostly made up of liberals. It should be mentioned is that the demonstration turned violent. Let's tell the rest of the story. This guy claims to have evidence that Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and someone named Clay Roberts, along with the ChoicePoint corporation, rigged the ballets during the 2000 and 2004 elections. We are talking anti-Bush NUT, folks. And he snuck into a camp of Katrina victims where cameras were not allowed (his blog says the victims were being held prisoner) and foolishly took video of a large oil refinery which since 911 is prohibited. But I guess that Mr Palast thinks he's above the law. Joseph Wilson is the only person in that case who is a proven liar. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/217wnmrb.asp "July 7, 2004. On that date, the bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on the intelligence that served as the foundation for the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq. The Senate report includes a 48-page section on Wilson that demonstrates, in painstaking detail, that virtually everything Joseph Wilson said publicly about his trip, from its origins to his conclusions, was false." Furthermore, Wilson outed his own wife. Just so everyone understands the story behind this accusation, Kate Adie says she was warned prior to our attacking Iraq in 2003 that all satellite uplinks in Iraq detected by our planes during the upcoming war would be targeted ... even if they were media. Now is it possible the military needed to shut down all Iraqi communication to save lives and in the time needed to react to detected signals would not be able to distinguish between media and Iraqi communications? Perhaps the military was actually trying to save the lives of journalists, not kill them. Let's be clear on this incident. The soldiers who killed Lloyd did not know they were shooting at a journalist. First, a car that Lloyd was in was fired on because it found itself in the midst of a number of vehicles filled with Iraqis that were being fired on (and firing themselves). Lloyd got between a rock and a hard place. Then, while being transported to a hospital in an ambulance, the ambulance itself was fired on because the soldiers thought it was engaged in a suicide attack. Keep in mind that islamic terrorists have used ambulances in that way and things were mighty chaotic in Iraq during the invasion since many of the combatants on the Iraqi side were running around out of uniform and using terrorist tactics. There's a story behind that too. http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/09/18/america/NA_GEN_US_Iraq_Photographer_Detained.php http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2391 "The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. "He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces," ... snip ... one of his photographs were part of a 20 photo Pulitzer prize winning series. The subject? Four 'insurgents firing a mortar and small arms' as U.S. troops advanced on Fallujah." ... snip ... It is obvious from some of Hussein's pictures, in particular, that he had no fear of the insurgents and that his presence was welcomed by them. ... snip ... One of Hussein's most controversial pictures - that of a dead Italian man with two masked insurgents standing over him with guns - was taken when the man already was dead, it said. This is the photo:" But an even bigger story is that dozens of journalist have been abducted in Iraq ... not by the US military but by terrorists. And on more than one occasion, it is the action of the US military to which some who survived the abduction owe their freedom and likely their lives. But the author ignores that. That would be the Sidney Blumenthal, Special Assistant to the President (Bill Clinton) who testified that Bill told him that Monica was the aggressor; that she stalked him? That would be the same Sidney Blumenthal who lied under oath during the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton? ROTFLOL! Actually, what they did might qualify. They destroyed the effectiveness of several very important programs in the War On Terror that required they not be advertised to be effective. At the very least, revealing classified information that might negatively affect millions of lives (and our soldiers lives) should put someone in jail, don't you think? Especially when the Lichblau/Risen article states that administration officials asked "The New York Times not to publish this article, saying that disclosure of the Swift program could jeopardize its effectiveness. They also enlisted several current and former officials, both Democrat and Republican, to vouch for its value." Among those asking the information be kept secret was John Murtha. So this wasn't just the Bush administration acting like Gestapo. Yet the NYTimes went ahead and published it anyway, claiming it "is a matter of public interest". No, the only thing NYTimes was worried about was their falling readership. What Keller did is in fact treasonous given he knew that doing so would immensely damage our side in the WOT ... especially given the fact that according to the NYTimes own reporting, the program was LEGAL. They didn't suspend the rule of law. They simply changed the law. No, he can send National Guard, who have LONG been used in that capacity. False. http://www.homelandsecurity.org/journal/articles/Trebilcock.htm "The statutory language of the act does not apply to all U.S. military forces. While the act applies to the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines, including their Reserve components, it does not apply to the Coast Guard or to the huge military manpower resources of the National Guard. The National Guard, when it is operating in its state status pursuant to Title 32 of the U.S. Code, is not subject to the prohibitions on civilian law enforcement. (Federal military forces operate pursuant to Title 10 of the U.S. Code.) In fact, one of the express missions of the Guard is to preserve the laws of the state during times of emergency when regular law enforcement assets prove inadequate. It is only when federalized pursuant to an exercise of presidential authority that the Guard becomes subject to the limitations of the Posse Comitatus Act." Well you'd better hope that it couldn't have been prevented with one of those secret programs that the NYTimes revealed ... or there might be hell to pay.
--------------------------------------------------------- Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
The lawful counters had to move because they were being harassed by a pack of thugs similar to those in the picture you posted. A pack of thugs expressly flown in for this purpose. The only evidence of ballot tampering is the word of the thugs trying to prevent the recount and howels echoed by NewsMax and the other publications the GOP uses to manipulate goobers like yourself. The fact still remains that the GOP could not allow the recount to continue. They could not even allow the State Court to decide the state matter. They had to prevent the recount by running to the Supreme Court and suing - a stock Republican tactic. Recall that the polls at the time showed that the vast majority of Americans simply wanted the ballots counted - and once again the GOP derailed the will of the people they were eleccted to serve - just as they are now doing with the Iraqi war. And voila!! When you let a group of crooks and thugs manipulate the election, you get a group of crooks and thugs like Bush and Cheney elected. Miserable failures dispised by the whole world save for the 28% of Americans that can be easily manipulated - such as yourself.
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The editorial is quite correct in pointing out that the threat is the same from either the left or the right side of the spectrum. Certainly a Hillary Clinton is no more likely to protect the rights of Americans than is a Rudi Giuliani. The editorial seems to portray the threat as a "Republican" or "right wing" threat; however, I believe that there are equally as many ready and waiting "brownshirts" on the Democratic side of the aisle. If you would see them, go onto Daily Kos, write some posts describing the liberty quashing functions of the Hate Crimes Act or such, and you will find them quite quickly.
First of all, those were the "thugs" and they were republican staffers who had every right to be there. Let's go over the facts. The machine recount turned up only a few additional Gore votes. Then they decided to do a hand count of 1 percent of the ballots. It was then they moved to the conference room on the 18th floor with plenty of room for observers. There were 40 TV cameras in that room, recording everything on tape, as well as a substantial press presence. At the same time, BOTH republicans and democRATS began to marshall their forces, including bringing people in from outside. To suggest the democRATS did not, is to lie. The truth is that in the second floor cafeteria of the building, BOTH parties set up holding areas for these "observers". And speaking of outside parties, where do you think Warren Christopher and William Daley, the very first democRATS to show up in Florida to demand recounts came from? And isn't it interesting to note that Christopher had a confidential document in his files stating there were TWO survivors of the Ron Brown crash that he never mentioned, and that Daley took over from Brown as head of the Department of Commerce where, according to a judge, a considerable amount of document shredding took place immediately after Brown died. Now back to the chronology of what actually happened. By the time the 1% sample recount was over, there was only a six-vote change for Gore. The canvassing board voted 2-1 against doing a countywide recount. But democRATS took it to court arguing that six votes in 1 percent of the precincts could mean as many as 600 countywide, more than enough to turn the election. Republicans protested that Democrats were cherry-picking precincts that heavily favored Gore. When the canvassing board met, the Democrats prevailed. The count was back on. The Republicans took the matter to the circuit court and then to the Florida Supreme Court. It's ruling was that manual recounts could continue but they had to be done by Sunday, November 26, at 5 p.m. In Miami-Dade, the manual recount proceeded, with Gore picking up a surprising number of new votes. But the Florida Supreme Court deadline created a problem. With Thanksgiving only 24 hours away and the weekend looming, that gave only two working days to count 654,000 ballots. It couldn't be done. The election boards solution was to use computer software to separate "undercounted" ballots on which voting machines were unable to detect a vote for president. There were estimated to be about 10,000 of those ... allowing enough time to do a hand count. Republicans demanded that any hand recount include all ballots and again took the matter back to court. But in the meantime, the democRAT controlled board decided to move operations back to their 19th floor offices, where the 13 computerized ballot scanning machines were kept in a small room. There was much less room for observers and the media. Republicans, and some members of the media, complained that the board was violating Florida open government laws by excluding them. Cuban radio stations in Miami began warning their listeners that Democrats were about to steal the election. An angry crowd began to gather outside, adding to the tense atmosphere. Inside, the group of officially credentialed Republican observers of the recount process (the "thugs" you mentioned) were very concerned. As one described it ********* From http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_48_16/ai_72273737 "On the Sunday before we began counting, the board decided to run all the ballots through the machine for the third time, but they didn't want to count them. They just wanted to pull out the ballots that weren't punched for president. All those ballots were put in white envelopes, to be personally reviewed by the board. We were not allowed to observe the envelope ballots." It was after the decision to count only the ballots in the white envelopes that the board decided to move the operation upstairs to a small room on the 19th floor where the ballots were stored. The shocked Republican election officials followed them but were excluded. "It was a small, private room, where there would be only one pool reporter and one TV camera aimed through a window 25 feet away," one of the official observers says. No microphones were allowed. And the attorneys advised the excluded observers that this action was contrary to Florida's sunshine law, requiring meetings to be open to the public, and that they were being unlawfully excluded. ************* So they began chanting "fraud", pounding on the doors and at one point harassing a democRAT who was seen carrying a ballot from the area. Beyond that, nothing was broken. Now maybe you think they got a little carried away in the heat of the moment (staffers of ANY party are known to get worked up) but they certainly had good reasons: Again, from the above source: *********** "We were trying to make it clear that if they were going to make a count behind closed doors, that was not going to be fair," says an Insight source who was present. "We did not want them to come out and say, `We're going to give Gore 5,000 more votes.' If they were going to do it, we wanted them to do it in an open, public hearing. We wanted to get enough cameras so that camera operators could zero in so it could be seen by everybody. Then if one of the Democrat board members claimed a dimple where there was none, it would be a matter of public record that what they were doing was not counting votes but casting votes that had never been voted in the first place." *********** A few hours later the board decided they were right and called off the recount knowing it was impossible to meet the Florida Supreme Court deadline. Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections David Leahy admits that the protest made him aware of a public perception that the partial recount was unfair. Added to that was a written complaint by some in the media demanding better access to the count. "Over time it hit us," Leahy said. "We were hit by concern in the news media that we were not being fair and we could be taken to court." And when the dust finally cleared, the US Supreme Court ruled in Bush's favor and severely chastised the Florida Supreme Court for letting this travesty take place in the first place. Face it ... democRATS were just outplayed. They cannot face the fact that for once, at least, the republicans used their tactics (rowdy protest) against them. ROTFLOL! Those "thugs" were accredited election observers. Here's an example of tampering, from the Wall Street Journal, a credible source ... http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=65000674 "On Tuesday, a Broward County ballot was discovered in which chads--the ballot parts that voters punch out--for both George W. Bush and Al Gore had been punched. But the Bush chad had been taped back over the hole, albeit sloppily. Palm Beach ballot chads have black dots on their front side, the retaped ballot had the black dot facing the wrong way. In addition, the Broward canvassing board has used highly inventive reasoning to declare some ballots valid. The Associated Press reports that the board added 81 votes to Mr. Gore's total after examining 105 absentee ballots with taped over chads. AP noted dryly that "the Board determined that the voters had mistakenly punched a hole, taped over it, and repunched a second choice." Of these 105 ballots, the board counted an extra 88 votes for Mr. Gore and only seven for Mr. Bush." Here's another ... In Palm Beach County canvassing board member Carol Roberts was reported by several witnesses in sworn affidavits to have given favoritism to Gore ballots and to have possibly tampered with ballots. And indeed, there is something very odd about Palm Beach voting patterns ... According to http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a0c85230a29.htm ************* ONLY in Palm Beach FL were 15,000 ballots "double punched" in the 1996 election. (This is unique among the entire nation! It is an error rate TEN TIMES larger than reported in ANY other district in the nation using that kind of ballot!) ONLY in Palm Beach (and almost ONLY heavily Democratic precincts) were 19,200 ballots rejected in 2000 for double punching....(This is a 4.4% error rate overall; in the rest of Florida there is less than ½ of ONE percent "double punch" error rate! (Unofficially, this error rate was 15% in predominately Afro-American precincts, and 10% in precincts with large numbers of Jewish retirees.) In strongly Republican precincts, the error rate was the "usual" ½ of one percent.) ONLY in Palm Beach did this "double punch" error happen ONLY in the Gore-Bush-Buchanan selection. (In a truly random "error," the mistakes happen in every race, all at about the same rate. In Palm Beach, the massive errors (over 19,000) ONLY happened in the Presidential race.) ONLY in Palm Beach has the news media complained about "massive" ballot confusion. In the 43 counties in Missouri, also mostly Democratic voters, which use the same kind of ballot, there are NO complaints about "confused voters" at all. (St Louis Post Dispatch, Nov 8, 2000) Therefore, ONLY in Palm Beach FL do the Democrats have to "explain" a massive number of incorrect votes. ONLY in Palm Beach did Gore GAIN 750 votes in a recount. In 64 out of 67 counties in FL, the average gain was 5-7 votes, and the "changes" were equally split between ALL the candidates, in proportion to the original number of votes. This means that Palm Beach FL had an error rate in favor of Gore more than 120 TIMES greater than any other county, (Two other heavily Democratic "inner city" counties (Flagler and Pinellas) had changes greater than 400 votes.) In a statistically valid recount, half of the errors would favor Bush, and half favor Gore. This extreme change from the normal in only three counties shows massive "favoritism" towards Gore in those three counties.) In Palm Beach Gore got more votes than there are registered Democrats. (Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections: registered Democrats = 296,122 while Gore voters = 296,696.) ONLY in Palm Beach did Bush receive LESS than 65% of the registered Republican voters. (Registered Republicans = 231,626 while Bush voters = 152,954.) In every other county in FL Bush received MORE votes than there were registered Republicans. In the rest of the nation, poll results show more than 90% of registered Republicans actively supported the Republican candidate. (Also, unique in the entire state, the percentage of Republican voters COUNTED as voting in Palm Beach was much less than normal, despite the pre-election attention to Florida as a critical state; and massive Republican get-out-the-vote campaigns.) ONLY in Palm Beach did Buchanan get less than HALF the of votes he received before in 1996. His losses in that county in 2000 were much greater than in any other district in Florida. (Buchanan received over 8,000 votes in 1996 Republican PRIMARY (where only registered Republicans can vote; but he received only 3,407 under the Reform Party from ALL voters in the 2000 Presidential election. (Pat Buchanan has relatives who lives in Palm Beach County, and this local support greatly increase the number of local voters who choose Buchanan, compared to every other region of the country. There are over 14,551 members of the Reform party in Palm Beach County - which indicates that less than 1/5 of the Reform voters voted for their own candidate. The Fraud is NOT whether Gore voters were "confused" and voted for Gore, but rather WHY Reform Party and Libertarian voters were prevented from registering THEIR vote!) ONLY in Palm Beach County did the Reform Party candidate for Senator get MORE votes than the the reform Party candidate for President (Buchanan)...in every other county, the candidate for Senator for EVERY party got FEWER votes than the candidate for President from that party did. *************** And you think there wasn't voter fraud and ballot tampering by democRATS? ROTFLOL! But here's the ultimate irony ... http://www.sierrascollectibles.com/election2000b.htm "After counting and recounting 5 times, Palm Beach County has a net 14 vote gain for BUSH! Remember Carol Roberts, member of the canvasing board that proclaimed they would find 1900 more votes for Algore if they counted the whole County? As we told you, she was distorting the truth! The 3 precincts used in the original 1% recount were in the most Democratic Precincts that had voted 50:1 and 20:1 for Algore. In that there was 19 net votes found for Algore. She proclaimed by doing the full hand count they would find 1900 votes for Algore! Now any 3rd grader can tell you, you can't accurately extrapolate that when you counted Only the MOST democratic precincts and none of the republican precincts. Well, the 3rd graders were right! In fact, Algore LOST votes as a result of the full manual recount and instead of 1900 Algore votes Carol Roberts Proclaimed, BUSH has netted a gain of 14 votes! I hope the taxpayers send Carol Roberts a bill for this hand recount!" Meanwhile, democRATS systematically challenged and prevented the counting of over 1500 military absentee ballots, ballots which favored Bush by 2 to 1. Gore’s lawyers falsely cited the law pertaining to postmarks on absentee ballots. Many military ballots were disqualified under the claim “lack of postmark” when in fact these ballots were carried by military mail systems that do not use conventional postmarks. Instead of postmarks, several hundred military voters provided a dated signature as is permitted under the Florida Administrative Code. It specifically mandates that absentee ballots that are "postmarked or signed and dated...shall be counted" if recieved within 10 days after the election. While Gore repeatedly claimed he wanted “every vote to count” in reference to ballots that had already been counted two and three times, Gore simultaneously had little hesitation in blocking military ballots that were not counted even once. http://members.tripod.com/~GOPcapitalist/floridaelection.html The above source also notes the fact that several organizations have undertaken extensive county and statewide studies of voter fraud during the Florida election of 2000. They include the Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post, and the Florida Times-Union. "Each of these studies have sought to identify instances where common types of voter fraud occurred: felons illegally voting, non-citizens voting, deceased persons voting, persons casting more than one ballot, persons voting in the wrong county or state, and physical ballot theft and tampering. These studies have all revealed extensive fraudulent voting in Florida to the tune of several thousand votes. A statewide Palm Beach Post study found 5,643 November 2000 voters who appeared on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's registry of convicted felons, meaning they weren't legally allowed to cast a vote. Several regional and county studies of felon voters in the Miami Herald found similar numbers. Studies elsewhere in the state have found in excess of 1,100 additional illegal votes cast by non-registered voters. Other common cases have included non-citizens and deceased persons casting ballots, as well as persons voting more than once. In total, reasonable estimates of illegal votes identified in Florida to date exceed 8,000. Contrary to the common Gore supporter claim, each and every study of these votes has pointed to Democrats as the main culprits, not Bush. The Palm Beach Post study alone concluded that at least 68% of the 5,643 illegal felon voters were confirmed Democrats. The Florida Times-Union noted that their study in Duval County similarly suggested that the fraud was overwhelmingly Democrat. The Miami Herald's many investigations produced similar results. In one case, massive fraud was traced back to a precinct that voted 90% for Al Gore. Another Miami Herald study estimated that 75% of the illegal voters it found were Democrats. After extensive investigations of voter fraud, the results could not be more clear: voter fraud was widespread in Florida, and was committed overwhelmingly by Democrats in almost every single case. In other words, Al Gore would have easily fallen several thousand votes short of George W. Bush instead of just a few hundred had Gore not benefited from massive and widespread voter fraud on his behalf in Florida." If there was any attempt to steal the election, it was by democRATS. http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=65000674 "In addition, a Democratic lawyer (with the silent assent of the Gore campaign) is pursuing a lawsuit seeking to have every one of Seminole County's 15,000 absentee ballots thrown out. The suit, to be heard next week, alleges that the local elections supervisor allowed Republicans to write in the voter identification number on 4,700 absentee ballot request forms that had been delivered to her office. No one alleges any tampering with the ballots themselves, but Democrats insist that clerical additions to ballot applications renders the votes invalid. Because all the absentee votes have been mixed together, the Democrats are demanding that 10,000 absentee voters with perfectly proper applications and ballots be nulllified. This was too much even for liberal writer Jacob Weisberg. He wrote in Slate that "if you want to count dimpled chad, I don't think you should go around trying to invalidate ballots in which a voter made a minor mistake." He concludes that "through this double standard, Gore's pregnant chad threaten to give birth to an equally illegitimate presidency." And you just can't live with that fact. Can you, democRAT.
--------------------------------------------------------- Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
Why should the sheeple continue to trust a govt that allowed the next event to happen? Treason disguised as incompetence should not be rewarded with greater power.
"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." ~George Washington
#2. To: Ferret Mike, BeAChooser (#0)
Cast dissent as "treason"
#3. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
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.
#4. To: Ferret Mike, REDPANTHER (#0)
(Edited)
BUMP!
Good article but I would have added many more documented examples of how this is happening today in the UK and the US. Were I an English teacher, I would consider this only rough draft #1.
#5. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
#6. To: Diana (#5)
#7. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
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."
#8. To: YertleTurtle (#6)
#9. To: Ferret Mike, Diana, YertleTurtle, ALL (#0)
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy ... snip ... 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 ... snip ... 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.
3. Develop a thug caste ... snip ... 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,
4. Set up an internal surveillance system ... snip ... 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 ... snip ... 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".
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release ... snip ... 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".
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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;
But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well.
9. Dissent equals treason ... snip ... 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.
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.
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.
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb?
#10. To: BeAChooser (#9)
They acted because democRATS tried to move the recount out of an open conference room where it could be observed and monitored into a smaller space where it could not ... and democRATS had already been caught tampering with the ballots and trying to slip ballots from outside into the mix.
#11. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
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.
#12. To: ..., ALL (#10)
The lawful counters had to move because they were being harassed by a pack of thugs similar to those in the picture you posted. A pack of thugs expressly flown in for this purpose.
The only evidence of ballot tampering is the word of the thugs trying to prevent the recount and howels echoed by NewsMax and the other publications the GOP uses to manipulate goobers like yourself.
#13. To: Ferret Mike (#0)
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.
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