Last night I read a document that turned my blood to ice.
The document I am referring to was created by John Ashcroft
last month and presently exists in draft form. It is called the
Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. It has thus far
been given to only two members of congress that I know of,
the Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, and Vice-President
Cheney as President Pro-Tem of the Senate.
This, in itself, is highly unusual, as draft legislation is routinely
distributed to the appropriate congressional committees. The
first page of the document is marked ?Confidential?Not For
Distribution.? It is clear that an attempt is being made to
conceal this bill from congress until the ?right moment.? This
tactic is consistent with the closed administration of George
W. Bush, which seeks to avoid even legally required contact
with congress.
Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, a conservative
Republican, the Chairman of the Committee on Government
Reform, said recently, "an iron veil is descending over the
executive branch."
But why conceal this? What is the moment that they are
waiting for? It is chillingly clear: When we are living in abject
fear due to a horrible new terrorist attack, this bill, which
effectively wrecks American freedom, is going to be brought
forward?and just yesterday, as I write this, the
president announced that such an attack could happen at
any time.
On February 7, the Justice Department, reacting to the leak
of the document to the Center for Public Integrity, explained
its secretiveness by referring to it as ?an idea or proposal
that is still being discussed at staff level.? But it is not a
proposal. It is an actual, complete bill, fully referenced and
annotated, ready to be presented. Normally, this is the form
that would have been circularized to the appropriate
congressional committees.
There is no national security reason to hide this document. It
is not classified and the Justice Department has no legal
grounds to suppress it in the way that is being attempted.
Under any circumstances other than a fearsome national
emergency, Republicans and Democrats alike would unite to
oppose this monstrous piece of legislation. Indeed, it is so
abhorrent that, even under the direst circumstances, it might
not pass. To pass this bill is to give up on our republic, on its
constitution, indeed, it is to give up on America. The sad part
is that its authors, the White House and the Justice
Department, must already have done that, or it never would
have been written. The mission of government at a time like
this is to preserve our freedom while ensuring our security,
not to destroy freedom in favor of security. In fact, if they
destroy freedom here, if history and the experience of other
countries counts at all anymore, we will not enjoy security,
either.
Among many other things, this new bill enables the Attorney
General by fiat to revoke the citizenship of anybody found to
have ever contributed money to or participated in any
organization the Justice Department deems to be a terrorist
group. This means that the Attorney General can simply take
away your citizenship if it decides that some group you once
gave fifty dollars to was, even though unknown to you, a
terrorist organization. The bill does not require any particular
definition of that term. It?s up to the Attorney General to
decide.
This means that an appointed federal bureaucrat will have
the power to strip you of your citizenship at will. Even if he
does not use this power unwisely, it so degrades the value of
citizenship as to demean and hold in contempt the validity of
our national being, of our traditional valuation of the person,
even of the Declaration of Independence, which states that
human beings ?are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights." Endowed by God, not by the state,
and most certainly not revocable even by congress, let alone
John Ashcroft. It could strip citizenship even from people
whose association with condemned groups had been entirely
lawful. And there is no provision requiring the government to
prove that the individual knew that the group was engaged in
terrorist activities.
The bill also authorizes secret arrests. Never in the history of
our country has such a thing been countenanced. It is a
horrifying reminder of the way people used to disappear into
the night and fog in Nazi Germany--but, as I point out below,
it's actually even worse than the infamous 'Night and Fog'
edict of the Nazis.
Making arrest secret removes due process from the equation.
More terrifyingly, people may be held under secret arrest
without access to any outside contacts?and if their
citizenship has been revoked, presumably held indefinitely
without trial.
It gives the government the right to deport any foreign
national whose presence it decides is damaging to our
economic interests, without regard for his visa status at the
time of deportation. It does not require the government to
explain its action to anybody, and excludes any sort of
effective due process. Again, even though this provision
applies only to noncitizens, it degrades the value of the
United States as a free society by enabling the government
to intervene in the lives of inhabitants without regard to our
traditional respect for the person. It does not require that
there be a finding of terrorist activity at all, but simply that
the person's presence causes an economic hardship of some
unspecified kind. In other words, it allows the deportation of
lawfully present aliens without explanation or recourse.
The surveillance provisions are nothing short of fantastic. The
bill gives the government the right to bypass courts and
grand juries entirely and conduct unfettered surveillance
without any judicial oversight, or even judicial knowledge. It
simply opens the door to unrestricted surveillance, furthering
the provisions of the Patriot Act that led to the creation of
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency?s blanket
surveillance of all records pertaining to American citizens,
whether in public or private hands.
After this bill is passed, if it is, no speech at all, whether it is
uttered in an email or whispered in bed, will remain sacred
from secret surveillance, uncontrolled by the courts and not
subject to due process.
There is little evidence that the destruction of privacy that
has already taken place, and is now contemplated, will
protect us against terrorism. In fact, even if the Patriot Act
had been in force prior to 9/11, none of its provisions would
have led to the discovery of any terrorists. To the contrary,
both the Patriot Act and the new Domestic Security
Enhancement Act, have degraded our national ability to be
responsive to terrorism by exposing even citizens interested
in informing the government of possible terrorist activities to
arbitrary surveillance and possible prosecution.
Who, upon discovering that a charitable group to which they
had contributed was engaging in terrorist planning, would
inform the government? After the passage of the Domestic
Security Enhancement Act, nobody in their right mind--not
and risk the arbitrary cancellation of one?s citizenship for
having innocently contributed to the organization in the first
place.
The great difference that I have felt in my life between free
countries and dictatorships has been a sense of concealed
danger. I felt it in Franco?s Spain. I used to feel it in Mexico,
when the PRI was ruling with the hand of fear. I feel it now in
my homeland.
But the Domestic Security Enhancement Act does not end
with the destruction of personal rights. It also invades states
rights and attacks areas of public safety that have been a
part of the American scene for decades. For example, it
repeals provisions of environmental laws that require chemical
companies to inform local government of what they are
working with in their factories. It does this under the
grotesque guise of national security, but this is a provision
that the chemical industry has been lobbying to repeal since
long before 9/11. It means that, if a chemical plant should
explode in a community, that community will have no way of
knowing whether or not the smoke from the explosion is
dangerous. Local government will not be able to mandate
effective safety plans. And chemical plants explode
frequently enough to make the rollback of this important
safety provision a very real and immediate danger.
The way that this act is being handled by the administration
is of the greatest possible concern. It could not be more
clear that the White House and the Justice Department know
that it will be spectacularly unpopular. Indeed, I don?t think
that it would receive the vote of any true patriot, surely
not the conservative Republicans, hopefully not the
Democrats, although that remains to be seen, given that
both groups voted overwhelmingly for the Patriot Act--some
of them, as they now admit, without really reading it.
Now that this latest attack on freedom has been leaked, it is
to be hoped that they will read it before they vote.
That leaves the Republicans who can be absolutely counted
on by the Administration: about half of the Republican
senators and a bare majority of the House Republicans, who
will vote for the act no matter what. Not enough to pass it.
The Administration obviously knows this, and this is why
there has been an attempt to hide this bill, presumably either
until we are at war with Iraq, or, more terrifyingly, until
another great terrorist incident sends American blood flowing
in the streets.
There is a particularly chilling reason why we should be
concerned about the tactic the Justice Department has used.
It suggests that the administration may already know that an
attack is definitely going to occur, and may be blocking law
enforcement from preventing it, in order to use the terror to
get this latest rollback of our freedoms accomplished.
It breaks my heart to have to say this, but, in fact, it is just
such an action that may have allowed 911 to happen, thus
opening the door to the Patriot Act--a strategy chillingly
similar to the one Hitler used to open Germany to the laws
that became the foundation of his dictatorship. He burned
the German parliament building and blamed it on a communist
insurrection, then used the danger presented to convince the
Germans that it would be a good idea to give up their
freedoms--temporarily, of course.
But surely not in America. No president would allow a terrorist
act to go forward in order to justify the theft of our freedoms?
But there is substantial evidence that this happened, and is
probably why the president has been so unwilling--
fantastically and inexcusably--to investigate 911. Imagine,
the worst attack on the United States homeland in history,
and the White House has OPPOSED an investigation of it!
Why? We are going to find out why on Dreamland on
Saturday.
This Saturday, there will appear on
Dreamland an interview
with Nafeez Ahmed, the author of
the War on Freedom: How
and Why America was Attacked September 11, 2001.
Mr. Ahmed is a British-born Muslim of Pakistani descent. He is
a highly respected scholar and an expert on US foreign policy,
and not in any way involved in Moslem fundamentalism or the
support of terrorism or terrorist states. Nonetheless, many
people will be suspicious of him because he is a Muslim.
The suspicion is misplaced. His credentials are impeccable and
his scholarship is clear, objective and thorough.
His book is a carefully drawn analysis of just what
happened before, during and after the 9/11 attack. It makes
for bone-chilling reading, because the evidence is
overwhelming, on the face of the public record,
that the intelligence community was richly informed of the
probability that a terrorist attack would take place in lower
Manhattan around September 11. What is even more
damning, FAA mandated Standard Operating Procedures
requiring jets to be scrambled on discovery that an aircraft
has been hijacked over the United States were willfully and
intentionally ignored, even to the extent of jets that had
been scrambled being turned back on orders from the White
House, and jets sent to the World Trade Center ordered to fly
at 1/3rd their capable speeds, apparently so that there would
be no chance of their timely arrival.
It is no wonder that the President so long opposed any
investigation into the 9/11 tragedy, and only unwillingly
convened a commission to carry out this essential activity.
Even so, he first nominated Henry Kissinger to head the
commission, knowing, no doubt, that he could certainly be
counted on to obfuscate. The public outcry was so great
that Kissinger was forced to step down, but so far the
commission has done little, and it is unlikely that the
government will ever tell the truth--at least, not the present
government.
There could be blameless reasons why the president
intervened on 9/11 in order to keep fighters away from the
hijacked planes. Among them, a shoot down over populated
areas might have been of great concern. But there is no
excuse for the intentional blocking of information, for
example, from the computer of Zacharias Moussaui, which
was done by FBI officials prior to 9/11, or of the many other
failures of intelligence that have been so extensively
commented upon in the press.
Attorney David Shippers, the former Chief Investigative
Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, and the
prosecutor responsible for conducting the Clinton
impeachment, went public two weeks after 9/11 saying that
he had attempted to warn the administration of the coming
attack, having received information from FBI agents who had
been blocked from acting on it from within the FBI.
He was rebuffed by Ashcroft, who even refused the requests
of close mutual friends to see him. Ashcroft obviously did not
want it on the record that he had heard what Mr. Shippers
had to say. What other reason for the Attorney General of
the United States to refuse even to listen to a man of high
prestige and political standing in his own party, and a friend,
who came to warn of an extremely serious danger to the
country?
The War on Freedom makes an overwhelmingly powerful case
for 9/11 being more than a failure of analysis or investigation.
It appears from the record that there was a clear official
awareness than an attack was imminent, that it would
involve airliners being flown into buildings, and that the World
Trade Center was a likely target. It also appears beyond
question that at least one important route of investigation
was personally blocked by John Ashcroft, when he refused to
see Schippers.
Frankly, Ahmed's book is devastating. It is not speculative at
all. Every claim is backed up by facts that are part of the
public record. Frankly, I have never read such a devastating
book.
When I saw what had been done to us, to humanity's most
precious receptacle of freedom, to the nation that was until
so very recently the hope of the world, my eyes filled with
tears of rage and frustration.
And now we see, in embryonic form, another situation
developing that might well be used, as 9/11 was apparently
used, to further degrade and compromise American freedoms.
If there is a horrendous terrorist attack on our country in the
next few weeks or months, and a similar lack
of official will to act to prevent it, and then the Domestic
Security Enhancement Act is placed before a terrified and
now-compliant congress, then, in my opinion, the conclusion
will be inescapable: the United States of America will have
ceased to be a free nation, and the first American
dictatorship will be under way.
Will it ever be possible to end the dictatorship? Perhaps not
with the vote. Look at what the Civil Rights Commission, the
New York Times and the BBC said about the 2000 Florida
vote: there was methodical disenfranchisement of many
thousands of voters. As matters stand, George W. Bush
received a minority of the votes cast nationwide, but still
gained office.
Now, we find that voting machines, for example, in Nebraska,
are owned by companies controlled by candidates who
received upset victories in the midterm election. To read
more about this outrageous situation,
click
here.
If the vote is lost to us, and our leadership is willing to
manipulate us using terror attacks that kill thousands, where
will it end for the United States of America?
The new act is not intended to prevent terrorism, not if we
are to take the president at his word. He has said that the
destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime is to reduce the
threat of terrorism. So why have a bill waiting in the wings to
combat terrorism at a time when terrorism is supposed to be
on the wane?
Because the bill has nothing to do with combating terrorism,
and everything to do with stealing our freedoms under the
pretext of a national emergency, or through the creation of a
false national emergency. It is not about protecting us. It is
about capturing us.
I called the present bill a terror worse than the Nazi 'Night
and Fog' edict that established secret arrest throughout the
German Reich of 1941.
To read the decree this is the ancestor of the Domestic
Security Enhancement Act, that caused people all over
Europe to disappear into the German enforcement apparatus,
click here. Reflect that it is in one crucial way
NOT as draconian as the DSEA. Provision III does not go
as far as the proposed act. It requires the authorities to tell
inquiring parties that victims have been arrested. The secret
arrest provisions in the DSEA offer no such relief. Under the
DSEA, people will disappear without a word to anybody.
To read the proposed bill,
click here.
To read the Center for Public Integrity's article on the bill,
click here.
What can you do? Speak out! Send the URL for this Journal
to whomever you think may benefit from it. Write your
Representative and your
Senator. It still matters. It's up to
you to keep it that way.
Related Entries:
28-Feb-2007: The 911 Script and the Age of Terror
02-Feb-2006: Was 911 a Hoax?
28-Oct-2001: Bin Laden's Objective
13-Oct-2001: Conspiracy Theories: Should We Listen Now?
27-Sep-2001: The Terrorism Problem--How We Can Solve It
12-Sep-2001: What Next?
