- This week marks the anniversaries of three landmark events
that paved the way for the further erosion of our personal freedoms we
face today. Nine years ago, the FBI ended a stand-off that the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had begun 51 days earlier, resulting in the
deaths of 82 Branch Davidians, including 30 women and 25 children-guilty
only of being members of a religious commune. Seven years ago this week,
on the second anniversary of the killings at Waco, 168 men, women, and
children were killed in Oklahoma City when the Murrah Federal Building
was bombed-many believed in protest of those horrific events for which
no federal employee had ever been held accountable. Timothy McVeigh, convicted
and executed for the bombing, made no comment during his trial until his
sentencing, when he quoted Supreme Court Justice Brandeis: "Our government
is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the
whole people by its example."
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- Six years ago this week, in response to the Oklahoma
City bombing (which, if indeed perpetrated by a lone nut armed only with
a rental van and fertilizer, begs the question of why sweeping new legislation
was necessary), Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death
Penalty Act, "antiterrorism" legislation which not only gives
the attorney general the power to use the armed services against the civilian
population, neatly nullifying the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (which prohibited
the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement), but also selectively
suspends habeas corpus, the heart of Anglo-American liberty. As he signed
it into law, Clinton attacked critics of the bill as "unpatriotic:"
"There is nothing patriotic about pretending that you can love your
country but despise your government." This is breathtaking since it
includes, at one time or another, most of us. Put another way, was a German
in 1939 who said that he detested the Nazi dictatorship unpatriotic?
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- Thus began the latest chapter in the death struggle between
the American republic, whose plainly ineffective defender I am, and the
American Global Empire, our old republic's enemy. Since V-J Day 1945 ("Victory
over Japan" and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in
what the historian Charles A. Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual
peace." I have occasionally referred to our "enemy of the month
club": each month we are confronted by a new horrendous enemy at whom
we must strike before he destroys us. The Federation of American Scientists
has catalogued nearly two hundred such military incursions since 1945 initiated
by the U.S.
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- According to the Koran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah
created darkness. Last September 11 when suicide pilots were crashing commercial
airliners into crowded American buildings, I did not have to look to the
calendar to see what day it was: Dark Tuesday was casting its long shadow
across Manhattan and along the Potomac River. I was also not surprised
that despite the seven or so trillion dollars that we have spent since
1950 on what is euphemistically called "Defense," there would
have been no advance warning from the FBI or CIA or Defense Intelligence
Agency. While the Bushites have been eagerly preparing for the last war
but two-missiles from North Korea, clearly marked with flags, would rain
down on Portland, Oregon, only to be intercepted by our missile-shield
balloons-the foxy Osama bin Laden knew that all he needed for his holy
war on the infidel were fliers willing to kill themselves along with those
random passengers who happened to be aboard hijacked jetliners.
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- The awesome physical damage Osama and company did to
us on Dark Tuesday is as nothing compared to the knockout blow to our vanishing
liberties: the Anti-Terrorist Act of 1996 and the recent USA PATRIOT Act
(still being written after it was passed, and thus unread by the Congress
which passed it), which among other things grants additional special powers
to wiretap without judicial order; and to deport lawful permanent residents,
visitors, and undocumented immigrants without due process. Even before
signing the Anti-Terrorist Act, President Clinton revealed his disregard
for the Bill of Rights (March 1, 1993, USA Today): "We can't be so
fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans."
A year later (April 19, 1994, on MTV): "A lot of people say there's
too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have
to move to limit it."
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- According to a November 1995 CNN-Time poll, 55 percent
of the people believed that "the federal government has become so
powerful that it poses a threat to the rights of ordinary citizens."
Three days after Dark Tuesday, 74 percent said they thought, "It would
be necessary for Americans to give up some of their personal freedoms."
Eighty-six percent favored guards and metal detectors at public buildings
and events.
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- Bush himself, in an address to a joint session of Congress,
offered up his interpretation of Osama bin Laden and disciples' motives:
"They hate what they see right here in this Chamber." I suspect
a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. "Their
leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion,
our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with
each other." If this is indeed the terrorists' motivation, they are
succeeding beyond even their dreams, as each day, with each extension of
"emergency powers," our Bill of Rights is shredded more and more.
Once alienated, an "unalienable right" is apt to be forever lost,
in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth
but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT
teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated.
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- *Gore Vidal is the world-renowned author, playwright,
and man-of-letters. His new book is Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace:
How We Got to Be So Hated, from which this article is adapted. He spoke
in San Francisco on April 18th at the program, "Understanding America's
Terrorist Crisis: What Should Be Done?", sponsored by The Independent
Institute.
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- http://www.independent.org/tii/news/020419Vidal.html
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