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DOREMUS OBSERVES :
MATTERS OF INTEREST
Doremus Jessup, editor of the Fort
Beulah The Daily Informer, in Sinclair Lewis'
famous book "It Can't Happen Here", at its
conclusion, "drove out saluted by the meadow larks,
and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern
Woods where quiet men awaited news of freedom.....still
Doremus goes on, into the sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup
can never die."
TOTAL
POLICE STATE TAKEOVER
The Secret Patriot Act II Destroys What Is Left
of American Liberty
A Brief Analysis of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act
2003, Also Known as Patriot Act II
By Alex Jones
www.infowars.com
Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex) told the Washington Times
that no member of Congress was allowed to read the first
Patriot Act that was passed by the House on October 27,
2001. The first Patriot Act was universally decried by
civil libertarians and Constitutional scholars from
across the political spectrum. William Safire, while
writing for the New York Times, described the first
Patriot Act's powers by saying that President Bush was
seizing dictatorial control.
On February 7, 2003 the Center for Public Integrity, a
non-partisan public interest think-tank in DC, revealed
the full text of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of
2003. The classified document had been leaked to them by
an unnamed source inside the Federal government. The
document consisted of a 33-page section by section
analysis of the accompanying 87-page bill.
*Note: On February 10, 2003 I discovered that not only
was there a house version that had been covertly brought
to Hastert, but that many provisions of the now public
Patriot Act II had already been introduced as pork barrel
riders on Senate Bill S. 22. Dozens of subsections and
even the titles of the subsections are identical to those
in the House version. This is very important because it
catches the Justice Department in a bald-faced lie. The
Justice Department claimed that the secret legislation
brought into the House was only for study, and that at
this time there was no intention to try and pass it. Now
upon reading S. 22, it is clear that the leadership of
the Senate is fully aware of the Patriot Act II, and have
passed these riders out of their committees into the full
bill. I spent two hours scanning through S. 22 and, let
me tell you, it is a nightmare for anyone who loves
liberty. It even contains the Our Lady of Peace Act that
registers all gun owners. It bans the private sale of all
firearms, creates a Federal ballistics database, and much
more.
There are other
bills in the Senate that grant the Federal government
sweeping powers. S.45 states in section one that the
office for State and local government coordination for
Homeland Security will no longer just oversee, but that
now local cities critical functions will be headed by a
Federal director. On Tuesday, February 11th, we noted a
story in The Times-Picayune with the headline: Nagin
announces major overhaul of City Hall --New Homeland
Security office to oversee cops, firemen, emergency
agency. The Federal power-grab taking place is widespread
and all Americans must mobilize to resist it.
Another interesting bill is S. 16. S. 16 is a smorgasbord
of Federal funding and control over local police
departments and needs to be examined closely.
S. 89, The
Universal National Service Act of 2003 is the hallmark of
an authoritarian society. The description of the bill is,
"To provide for the common defense by requiring that
all young persons in the United States, including women,
perform a period of military service of civilian service
in furtherance of the national defense and homeland
security, and for other purposes." We have looked at
some of the programs that the Federal government has
already been setting up for service here in the
"homeland" and they include East German-style
tattletale squads of every type, which are just basically
a super TIPS program. The nightmare goes on and on. Check
it out for yourself.
The Patriot Act II bill itself is stamped
"Confidential -Not for Distribution." Upon
reading the analysis and bill, I was stunned by the
scientifically crafted tyranny contained in the
legislation. The Justice Department Office of Legislative
Affairs admits that they had indeed covertly transmitted
a copy of the legislation to Speaker of the House Dennis
Hastert, (R-Il) and the Vice President of the United
States, Dick Cheney as well as the executive heads of
federal law enforcement agencies.
It is important to note that no member of Congress was
allowed to see the first Patriot Act before its passage,
and that no debate was tolerate by the House and Senate
leadership. The intentions of the White House and Speaker
Hastert concerning Patriot Act II appear to be a carbon
copy replay of the events that led to the unprecedented
passage of the first Patriot Act.
There are two
glaring areas that need to be looked at concerning this
new legislation:
1. The secretive tactics being used by the White House
and Speaker Hastert to keep even the existence of this
legislation secret would be more at home in Communist
China than in the United States. The fact that Dick
Cheney publicly managed the steamroller passage of the
first Patriot Act, insuring that no one was allowed to
read it and publicly threatening members of Congress that
if they didn’t vote in favor of it that they would
be blamed for the next terrorist attack, is by the White
House’s own definition terrorism. The move to
clandestinely craft and then bully passage of any
legislation by the Executive Branch is clearly an
impeachable offence.
2. The second Patriot Act is a mirror image of powers
that Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler gave themselves.
Whereas the First Patriot Act only gutted the First,
Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and seriously damaged
the Seventh and the Tenth, the Second Patriot Act
reorganizes the entire Federal government as well as many
areas of state government under the dictatorial control
of the Justice Department, the Office of Homeland
Security and the FEMA NORTHCOM military command. The
Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as the
Second Patriot Act is by its very structure the
definition of dictatorship.
I challenge all Americans to study the new Patriot Act
and to compare it to the Constitution, Bill of Rights and
Declaration of Independence. Ninety percent of the act
has nothing to do with terrorism and is instead a giant
Federal power-grab with tentacles reaching into every
facet of our society. It strips American citizens of all
of their rights and grants the government and its private
agents total immunity.
Here is a quick thumbnail sketch of just some of the
draconian measures encapsulated within this tyrannical
legislation:
SECTION 501 (Expatriation of Terrorists) expands the Bush
administration’s “enemy combatant”
definition to all American citizens who “may”
have violated any provision of Section 802 of the first
Patriot Act. (Section 802 is the new definition of
domestic terrorism, and the definition is “any
action that endangers human life that is a violation of
any Federal or State law.”) Section 501 of the
second Patriot Act directly connects to Section 125 of
the same act. The Justice Department boldly claims that
the incredibly broad Section 802 of the First USA Patriot
Act isn’t broad enough and that a new, unlimited
definition of terrorism is needed.
Under Section 501 a US citizen engaging in lawful
activities can be grabbed off the street and thrown into
a van never to be seen again. The Justice Department
states that they can do this because the person “had
inferred from conduct” that they were not a US
citizen. Remember Section 802 of the First USA Patriot
Act states that any violation of Federal or State law can
result in the “enemy combatant” terrorist
designation.
SECTION 201 of the second Patriot Act makes it a criminal
act for any member of the government or any citizen to
release any information concerning the incarceration or
whereabouts of detainees. It also states that law
enforcement does not even have to tell the press who they
have arrested and they never have to release the names.
SECTION 301 and 306 (Terrorist Identification Database)
set up a national database of “suspected terrorists”
and radically expand the database to include anyone
associated with suspected terrorist groups and anyone
involved in crimes or having supported any group
designated as “terrorist.” These sections also
set up a national DNA database for anyone on probation or
who has been on probation for any crime, and orders State
governments to collect the DNA for the Federal
government.
SECTION 312 gives immunity to law enforcement engaging in
spying operations against the American people and would
place substantial restrictions on court injunctions
against Federal violations of civil rights across the
board.
SECTION 101 will designate individual terrorists as
foreign powers and again strip them of all rights under
the “enemy combatant” designation.
SECTION 102
states clearly that any information gathering, regardless
of whether or not those activities are illegal, can be
considered to be clandestine intelligence activities for
a foreign power. This makes news gathering illegal.
SECTION 103 allows the Federal government to use wartime
martial law powers domestically and internationally
without Congress declaring that a state of war exists.
SECTION 106 is
bone-chilling in its straightforwardness. It states that
broad general warrants by the secret FSIA court (a panel
of secret judges set up in a star chamber system that
convenes in an undisclosed location) granted under the
first Patriot Act are not good enough. It states that
government agents must be given immunity for carrying out
searches with no prior court approval. This section
throws out the entire Fourth Amendment against
unreasonable searches and seizures.
SECTION 109 allows secret star chamber courts to issue
contemp charges against any individual or corporation who
refuses to incriminate themselves or others. This
sections annihilate the last vestiges of the Fifth
Amendment.
SECTION 110
restates that key police state clauses in the first
Patriot Act were not sunsetted and removes the five year
sunset clause from other subsections of the first Patriot
Act. After all, the media has told us: “this is the
New America. Get used to it. This is forever.”
SECTION 111 expands the definition of the “enemy
combatant” designation.
SECTION 122
restates the government’s newly announced power of
“surveillance without a court order.”
SECTION 123 restates that the government no longer needs
warrants and that the investigations can be a giant
dragnet-style sweep described in press reports about the
Total Information Awareness Network. One passage reads,
“thus the focus of domestic surveillance may be less
precise than that directed against more conventional
types of crime.”
*Note: Over and
over again, in subsection after subsection, the second
Patriot Act states that its new Soviet-type powers will
be used to fight international terrorism, domestic
terrorism and other types of crimes. Of course the
government has already announced in Section 802 of the
first USA Patriot act that any crime is considered
domestic terrorism.
SECTION 126 grants the government the right to mine the
entire spectrum of public and private sector information
from bank records to educational and medical records.
This is the enacting law to allow ECHELON and the Total
Information Awareness Network to totally break down any
and all walls of privacy.
The government states that they must look at everything
to “determine” if individuals or groups might
have a connection to terrorist groups. As you can now
see, you are guilty until proven innocent.
SECTION 127 allows the government to takeover coroners’
and medical examiners’ operations whenever they see
fit. See how this is like Bill Clinton’s special
medical examiner he had in Arkansas that ruled that
people had committed suicide when their arms and legs had
been cut off.
SECTION 128
allows the Federal government to place gag orders on
Federal and State Grand Juries and to take over the
proceedings. It also disallows individuals or
organizations to even try to quash a Federal subpoena. So
now defending yourself will be a terrorist action.
SECTION 129 destroys any remaining whistleblower
protection for Federal agents.
SECTION 202
allows corporations to keep secret their activities with
toxic biological, chemical or radiological materials.
SECTION 205 allows top Federal officials to keep all
their financial dealings secret, and anyone investigating
them can be considered a terrorist. This should be very
useful for Dick Cheney to stop anyone investigating
Haliburton.
SECTION 303
sets up national DNA database of suspected terrorists.
The database will also be used to “stop other
unlawful activities.” It will share the information
with state, local and foreign agencies for the same
purposes.
SECTION 311 federalizes your local police department in
the area of information sharing.
SECTION 313
provides liability protection for businesses, especially
big businesses that spy on their customers for Homeland
Security, violating their privacy agreements. It goes on
to say that these are all preventative measures –
has anyone seen Minority Report? This is the access hub
for the Total Information Awareness Network.
SECTION 321 authorizes foreign governments to spy on the
American people and to share information with foreign
governments.
SECTION 322
removes Congress from the extradition process and allows
officers of the Homeland Security complex to extradite
American citizens anywhere they wish. It also allows
Homeland Security to secretly take individuals out of
foreign countries.
SECTION 402 is titled “Providing Material Support to
Terrorism.” The section reads that there is no
requirement to show that the individual even had the
intent to aid terrorists.
SECTION 403
expands the definition of weapons of mass destruction to
include any activity that affects interstate or foreign
commerce.
SECTION 404 makes it a crime for a terrorist or “other
criminals” to use encryption in the commission of a
crime.
SECTION 408
creates “lifetime parole” (basically, slavery)
for a whole host of crimes.
SECTION 410 creates no statute of limitations for anyone
that engages in terrorist actions or supports terrorists.
Remember: any crime is now considered terrorism under the
first Patriot Act.
SECTION 411
expands crimes that are punishable by death. Again, they
point to Section 802 of the first Patriot Act and state
that any terrorist act or support of terrorist act can
result in the death penalty.
SECTION 421 increases penalties for terrorist financing.
This section states that any type of financial activity
connected to terrorism will result to time in prison and
$10-50,000 fines per violation.
SECTIONS 427
sets up asset forfeiture provisions for anyone engaging
in terrorist activities.
There are many other sections that I did not cover in the
interest of time. The American people were shocked by the
despotic nature of the first Patriot Act. The second
Patriot Act dwarfs all police state legislation in modern
world history.
Usually,
corrupt governments allow their citizens lots of
wonderful rights on paper, while carrying out their
jackbooted oppression covertly. From snatch and grab
operations to warantless searches, Patriot Act II is an
Adolf Hitler wish list.
You can understand why President Bush, Dick Cheney and
Dennis Hastert want to keep this legislation secret not
just from Congress, but the American people as well. Bill
Allison, Managing Editor of the Center for Public
Integrity, the group that broke this story, stated on my
radio show that it was obvious that they were just
waiting for another terrorist attack to opportunistically
get this new bill through. He then shocked me with an
insightful comment about how the Federal government was
crafting this so that they could go after the American
people in general. He also agreed that the FBI has been
quietly demonizing patriots and Christians and “those
who carry around pocket Constitutions.”
I have produced
two documentary films and written a book about what
really happened on September 11th. The bottom line is
this: the military-industrial complex carried the attacks
out as a pretext for control. Anyone who doubts this just
hasn’t looked at the mountains of hard evidence.
Of course, the current group of white collar criminals in
the White House might not care that we’re finding
out the details of their next phase. Because, after all,
when smallpox gets released, or more buildings start
blowing up, the President can stand up there at his
lectern suppressing a smirk, squeeze out a tear or two,
and tell us that “See I was right. I had to take
away your rights to keep you safe. And now it’s your
fault that all of these children are dead.” From
that point on, anyone who criticizes tyranny will be
shouted down by the paid talking head government
mouthpieces in the mainstream media.
You have to
admit, it’s a beautiful script. Unfortunately, it’s
being played out in the real world. If we don’t get
the word out that government is using terror to control
our lives while doing nothing to stop the terrorists, we
will deserve what we get - tyranny. But our children won’t
deserve it.
from Tony Lee
Resistance Rising!
Nat Hentoff, True Patriots Networking
November 22nd, 2002 5:15 PM
With advances in technology and ever-increasing
government surveillance, the situation has worsened since
Orwell's imaginings of the future. —John
Whitehead, the Rutherford Institute, November 4, 2002
Despite the self-satisfaction of George W. Bush and
John Ashcroft, and the somnolence of the press, there is
rising resistance around the country to the serial abuses
of our liberties. More Americans are becoming aware of
what Wisconsin Democratic senator Russ Feingold
prophesied from the Senate floor on October 11, 2001,
when he was the only Senator to vote against Ashcroft's
USA Patriot Act: "There is no doubt that if we lived
in a police state, it would be easier to catch
terrorists. If we lived in a country where police were
allowed to search your home at any time for any reason;
if we lived in a country where the government is entitled
to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations,
or intercept your e-mail communications; if we lived in a
country where people could be held in jail indefinitely
based on what they write or think, or based on mere
suspicion that they are up to no good, the government
would probably discover more terrorists or would-be
terrorists, just as it would find more lawbreakers
generally. But that wouldn't be a country in which we
would want to live."
Some of that warning has come to pass. What has become
more specifically evident is underlined by Lincoln Caplan
in the November-December issue of Legal Affairs (A
Magazine of Yale Law School): "The [USA Patriot
Act] . . . authorized law enforcement agencies to inspect
the most personal kinds of information—medical
records, bank statements, college transcripts, even
church memberships. But what is more startling than the
scope of these new powers is that the government can use
them on people who aren't suspected of committing a
crime."
As then house majority leader Dick Armey—a
conservative Republican libertarian—told Georgetown
University law professor Jeffrey Rosen in the October 21 New
Republic: "The Justice Department . . . seems to
be running amok and out of control. . . . This agency
right now is the biggest threat to personal liberty in
the country."
One sign of the growing fear of losing our Bill of
Rights protections against an out-of-control government
came from the heartland. On September 8 of this year, the
Journal Gazette, a daily newspaper in Fort Wayne,
Indiana, published a full-page, five-column
editorial—its first such broadside in nearly 20
years. The headline was "Attacks on Liberty":
"In the name of national security, President Bush,
Attorney General John Ashcroft, and even Congress have
pulled strand after strand out of the constitutional
fabric that distinguishes the United States from other
nations. . . .
"Actions taken over the past year are eerily
reminiscent of tyranny portrayed in the most nightmarish
works of fiction. The power to demand reading lists from
libraries could have been drawn from the pages of Ray
Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
. . . The sudden suspension of due process for immigrants
rounded up into jails is familiar to readers of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen
Here."
But what is most encouraging is the continued growth
in cities and towns throughout the nation of Bill of
Rights Defense Committees or their equivalents, a number
of which are working with ACLU affiliates. The first
BORDC, as reported here, was formed in February this year
in Northampton, Massachusetts, when about 300 doctors,
nurses, lawyers, students, teachers, and retirees formed
a group to protect the citizens of that town from the USA
Patriot Act and the subsequent unilateral attacks on our
liberties by John Ashcroft.
After the Northampton city council unanimously passed
in May a resolution officially supporting the protests of
the BORDC, other towns and cities learned how to organize
similar committees through the Northampton group's Web
site: www.bordc.org.
Fourteen town or city councils—from Takoma Park,
Maryland, and Alachua County, Florida, to Santa Fe, New
Mexico, and Berkeley, California—have now passed,
sometimes unanimously, similar resolutions originated by
local BORDC organizations. Other proposals are pending
before local government bodies in 40 more cities and
towns, in 24 states. One BORDC is in formation in New
York City.
Next week: The details of some of these resolutions
that involve city and state police and local members of
Congress. The roots of the Bill of Rights Defense
Committees, it is important to remember, are in the
pre-revolutionary committees of correspondence, initiated
by Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty in Boston in 1754.
In 1805, in Boston, there was published Mercy
Otis Warren's History of the
Rise and Progress and Termination of the American
Revolution. A historian, playwright, and
political pamphleteer, she wrote in this, her major work:
"Perhaps no single step contributed so much to
cement the union of the colonies, and the final
acquisition of independence, as the establishment of
committees of correspondence. This supported a chain of
communication from New Hampshire to Georgia that produced
unanimity and energy throughout the continent." Sam
Adams and other patriots continuously spread the news of
attacks on the liberties of these new Americans by the
King, his ministers, and his governors and officers in
the colonies.
These committees, as Supreme Court Justice William
Brennan once told me, were a precipitating cause of the
American Revolution. Yet John Ashcroft accuses his
critics—among the most active of which are the Bill
of Rights Defense Committees—of
"capitulating" to the enemy. More Americans are
coming to agree with Dick Armey that Ashcroft's Justice
Department "is the biggest threat to personal
liberty in the country." Who, then, are the American
patriots now?
Village VoiceŠ2003
William Rivers Pitt delivered the following
comments as the keynote speaker at the Veterans for Peace
National Convention in San Francisco.
We Stand Our Ground
10th August 2003
- They call it Pax
Americana, a plan to invade Iraq, take it over,
create a permanent military presence there, and
use the oil revenues to fund further wars against
virtually every nation in that region. This we
call bringing our "values" over there.
Norman Podhoretz, one of the ideological fathers
of this group of neoconservatives who now control
the foreign policy of this nation, described the
process as "The reformation and
modernization of Islam." That's a pretty
fancy phrase. I am a Catholic, and can therefore
call it by its simpler name: Crusade. We know all
about those.
This is the Project for
a New American Century, the product of a right-wing think
tank that, in 1997, was considered so far out there that
no one ever thought its members would ever come within
ten miles of setting American policy. One broken
election, however, vaulted these men into positions of
unspeakable power. Their white papers, their dreams of
empire at the point of the sword, have become our
national nightmare, and the nightmare of the world. I
speak of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle, John Bolton, Lewis Libby, and the rest of
these New American Century men who have taken our beloved
country and all it stands for it and thrown it down into
the mud.
You will note that I did not name George W. Bush, for
blaming Bush for the gross misadministration of this
government is like blaming Mickey Mouse when Disney
screws up. He is not in charge. Truman said "The
buck stops here," and so we point to Bush as a
symbol of all that has gone wrong. But he is not in
charge. These other men, these New American Century men,
have delivered us to this wretched estate, and by God in
Heaven, there will be a reckoning for it.
But is it all ideology for these men? Of course not.
There is the payout. Have you ever heard of a company
called United Defense, out of Arlington, Virginia? Let me
introduce you. United Defense provides Combat Vehicle
Systems, Fire Support, Combat Support Vehicle Systems,
Weapons Delivery Systems, Amphibious Assault Vehicles,
and Combat Support Services. Some of United Defense's
current programs include:
The Bradley Family of Fighting Vehicles, the M113 Family
of Fighting Vehicles, the M88A2 Recovery Vehicle, the
Grizzly, the M9 ACE, the Composite Armored Vehicle, the
M6 Linebacker, the M4 Command and Control Vehicle, the
Battle Command Vehicle, the Paladin, the Future Scout and
Cavalry System, the Crusader, Electric Gun
Technology/Pulse Power, Advanced Simulations and Training
Systems, and Fleet Management. This list goes on and on,
and includes virtually everything an eternal war might
need.
Who owns United Defense? Why, the Carlyle Group, which
bought United Defense in October of 1997. For those not
in the know, the Carlyle Group is a private global
investment firm. Carlyle is the eleventh largest defense
contractor in the US because of its ownership of
companies making tanks, aircraft wings and other
equipment. Carlyle has ownership stakes in 164 companies
which generated $16 billion in revenues in the year 2000
alone. The Carlyle Group does not provide investment or
other services to the general public.
Who works for the Carlyle Group? George Herbert Walker
Bush works for the Carlyle Group, has been a senior
consultant for Carlyle for some years now, and sits on
the Board of Directors. This company is profiting wildly
from this war in Iraq, a tidy gift from son to father.
And then, of course, there is Dick Cheney's Halliburton,
profiting in the millions from the oil in Iraq.
Halliburton subsidiary, Brown & Root, is also in
Iraq. Their stock in trade is the building of permanent
military bases. Here is your permanent military presence
in Iraq, and all for an incredible fee. Cheney still
draws a one million dollar annual check from Halliburton,
what they call a 'deferred retirement benefit.' In
Boston, we call that a paycheck.
Pax Americana. That which President Kennedy spoke so
eloquently and specifically against when he said,
"What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax
Americana enforced upon the world by our weapons of
war." This is now the rule of law for this nation.
It must be stopped, and we must be the ones to stop it.
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