- Americans have been losing the protection of law for
years. In the 21st century, the loss of legal protections accelerated with
the Bush administration's "war on terror," which continues under
the Obama administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and
U.S. civil liberties.
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- The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus
in order to hold people indefinitely without bringing charges. The regime
had acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for "terrorists."
Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by grabbing
unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.
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- The Bush regime needed to hold the prisoners without
charges because it had no evidence against the people and did not want
to admit that the U.S. government had stupidly paid warlords and thugs
to kidnap innocent people. In addition, the Bush regime needed "terrorists"
prisoners in order to prove that there was a terrorist threat.
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- As there was no evidence against the "detainees"
(most have been released without charges after years of detention and abuse),
the U.S. government needed a way around U.S. and international laws against
torture in order that the government could produce evidence via self-incrimination.
The Bush regime found inhumane and totalitarian-minded lawyers and put
them to work at the U.S. Department of Justice (sic) to invent arguments
that the Bush regime did not need to obey the law.
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- The Bush regime created a new classification for its
detainees that it used to justify denying legal protection and due process
to the detainees. As the detainees were not U.S. citizens and were demonized
by the regime as "the 760 most dangerous men on earth," there
was little public outcry over the regime's unconstitutional and inhumane
actions.
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- As our Founding Fathers and a long list of scholars warned,
once civil liberties are breached, they are breached for all. Soon U.S.
citizens were being held indefinitely in violation of their habeas corpus
rights. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui an American citizen of Pakistani origin might
have been the first.
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- Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis
University, was seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan,
and was held secretly for five years in the U.S. military's notorious Bagram
prison in Afghanistan. Her three young children were with her at the time
she was abducted, one an eight-month old baby. She has no idea what has
become of her two youngest children. Her oldest child, 7 years old, was
also incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to similar abuse and horrors.
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- Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related
offense. A British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was
being tortured, disclosed her presence. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24605.htm
An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending
Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a captive,
she grabbed a U.S. soldier's rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot
him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier's excuse for shooting
Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach resulting in her near death.
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- On February 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York
jury for attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was
the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken
a pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented
of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman
had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was presented
that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes.
Just an accusation.
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- Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: "The
trial took an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints
taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the
U.S. interrogators, did not match hers."
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- An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for
being a Muslim. This is the kind of "justice" that always results
when the state hypes fear and demonizes a group.
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- The people who should have been on trial are the people
who abducted her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international
borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for the
fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two gunshots to
her stomach. Instead, the victim was put on trial and convicted.
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- This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state.
And this victim is an American citizen.
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- Anyone can be next. Indeed, on February 3 Dennis Blair,
director of National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee
that it was now "defined policy" that the U.S. government can
murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government's
judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction,
just execution on suspicion of being a threat.
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- This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential
appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of Congress
that the executive branch has decided that it can murder American citizens
abroad if it thinks they are a threat.
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- I can hear readers saying the government might as well
kill Americans abroad as it kills them at home--Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Black
Panthers.
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- Yes, the U.S. government has murdered its citizens, but
Dennis Blair's "defined policy" is a bold new development. The
government, of course, denies that it intended to kill the Branch Davidians,
Randy Weaver's wife and child, or the Black Panthers. The government says
that Waco was a terrible tragedy, an unintended result brought on by the
Branch Davidians themselves. The government says that Ruby Ridge was Randy
Weaver's fault for not appearing in court on a day that had been miscommunicated
to him, The Black Panthers, the government says, were dangerous criminals
who insisted on a shoot-out.
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- In no previous death of a U.S. citizen by the hands of
the U.S. government has the government claimed the right to kill Americans
without arrest, trial, and conviction of a capital crime.
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- In contrast, Dennis Blair has told the U.S. Congress
that the executive branch has assumed the right to murder Americans who
it deems a "threat."
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- What defines "threat"? Who will make the decision?
What it means is that the government will murder whomever it chooses.
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- There is no more complete or compelling evidence of a
police state than the government announcing that it will murder its own
citizens if it views them as a "threat."
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- Ironic, isn't it, that "the war on terror"
to make us safe ends in a police state with the government declaring the
right to murder American citizens who it regards as a threat.
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- Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in
the Reagan administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.
He is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles.
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