-
- Let me say at the very outset that I am not a Clinton
Democrat. Indeed, I am not a Democrat at all. The last time I voted, I
voted a straight Libertarian ticket. Let me also state for the international
legal, as well as the karmic record, that I value the civil rights that
are set forth in the Bill of Rights of the American Constitution under
the former American Republic. I owe no allegiance to the hideously violent
and legally repugnant American Empire that George Bush, John Ashcroft and
fellow travelers are imposing on the world. I am no supporter of NAZIism
under any of its guises, whether it comes wrapped in a swastika or in Red-White-and-Blue.
-
- But I must say that what I find so CURIOUS about the
George Bush & Co. coup d'etat and ensuing dictatorial power plays and
ploys is that so many of the Republican Right (this would include many
fundamentalist Christians and camo-dude militia-types) who spent the 90s
whining about how Clinton & Gore were going to use FEMA and the Arkansas
Mafia to seize power and declare a dictorship (or something like that)
have now gone weak in the knees and soft in the brain over Bush.
-
- Bush has done EXACTLY what they warned Clinton would
do (and didn't), but because Bush is a Republican they say little, and
do even less, about America's swift plunge to the neo-FASCIST hard right,
proving themselves to be not American democrats (with a little "d"),
but simply highly dangerous, propagandized, party ideologues, and nothing
more. And that is serious. Because totalitarian political "Parties"
such as the NAZI Party and COMMUNIST Party were behind the most vicious,
murderous and ruthless political regimes in the past century.
-
- Might the REPUBLICAN Party be remembered in future years
by civilized people in the same dread terms that the NAZI and COMMUNIST
Parties are remembered today? So far over the last 18 months we have seen
a savage and rapid stripping away of civil liberties that were formerly
guaranteed to U.S. citizens by birth, for most of the preceding two centuries.
The Patriot Act is without precedent and simply eviscerates the U.S. Constitution.
And with nary a whimper from the U.S. Congress which lamely rolled over
like a docile lap dog, and, without even reading the legislation' passed
this hideously deformed federal Act into grotesque, so-called "law".
-
- The unlawful, illegal, unconstitutional detention of
American citizens by the United States military is a travesty. Two men
are now held without charges, without access to the courts, without recourse
to legal due process, without hope of ever being free again. And all on
the word and whim of Herr Bush and his sluggardly Attorney-Gauleiter OberStormTrooper
Ashcroft.
-
- I say two men are held illegally, incommunicado, indefinitely.
In reality there could be 500 more. Or
- 1,000 more. The truth is that we simply DO NOT KNOW how
many people may have been secretly arrested and jailed by the Pentagon
or the FBI or the CIA or any of the rest of the Federal alphabet-soup of
agencies. In fact, we knew nothing at all about Jose Padilla until Ashcroft
blurted out that he had been secretly arrested and jailed and was being
held in a military prison.
-
- And you know what? The same thing could happen to anyone
else. Herr Bush and Attorney-Gauleiter Ashcroft are drunk on power and
they don't give a fig about "no steenkin' civil rights or human rights."
It's just that simple.
-
- Secret telephone wire-taps, covert break-ins and searches
of private homes, internet surveillance, secret arrest and imprisonment,
body searches to use public transport, surveillance cameras sprouting up
everywhere like mushrooms, police firing on protestors with rubber bullets
and pepper spray as happened in Oregon this week, mass arrests of hundreds
of people at a time as occurred last week in a Houston K-Mart parking lot--
these are the symptoms of a neo-FASCIST police state being born.
-
- There are more than 2 million people in America's jails
and prisons.
-
- George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian police
state that is at perpetual war with most of the rest of the world is here
now.
-
- It's name is-- are you ready?-- America.
-
- Yes, America has become a rogue state, a state that unleashes
unprovoked warfare on other peoples and other nations. America has become
a threat to the security of planet Earth and to the life and liberty of
a growing number of its own citizens.
-
- You know, when I was studying for my first Master's degree
in Latin American Studies, I read a lot of political and sociological literature
that dealt with repressive military regimes in Central and South America.
In most cases these brutal dictatorships are set up and supported as client
regimes by the United States, acting through such agencies as the CIA,
the Pentagon and the U.S. State Department. One of the hallmarks of these
regimes is the systematic, massive violation of civil liberties and the
phenomenon of SECRET imprisonment and DISAPPEARANCES of people. That's
right. The cops and Army just pick people up off the street or out of their
homes and they just vanish. Sometimes they turn up later, after having
been jailed and/or tortured. Sometimes their body shows up in a ditch somewhere.
But in numerous cases, people who disappear under Latin American dictatorships
just vanish. Never to be seen again. The cops or the military just physically
annihilate them and no one ever sees them again.
-
- This is the troubling thing that the cases of Jose Padilla
and the other illegal detainee, Mr. Hamdi represent, both of whom are American
citizens by birth. There are no formal, legal charges against them. The
government has presented no proof of the sensational "illegal combatant"
allegations that have been made against them in the press. We know that
they are a threat and menace because, ... well, because Herr Bush and Attorney-Gauleiter
Ashcroft say so. That's all we know. There is no public evidence, no legally
regular indictment that specifies their alleged crimes.
-
- No one from the outside world can speak with or contact
them. They will remain in prison until those who put them there deign to
release them. That could be years or decades from now or never.
-
- Now that the practice of illegal and secret imprisonment
of citizens is demonstrable FACT in today's America, what's next? Secret
executions? Torture chambers? Will mass arrest become commonplace? In recent
months there has been a great deal of mention in the news media of the
President's purported "right" to empanel military tribunals to
try and even potentially execute alleged "terrorists" and "enemy
combatants"; if need be, even on U.S. Navy aircraft carriers on the
high seas.
-
- What if this is happening now? What if there are secret
arrests and detention, secret military trials and secret executions, with
the unfortunate victims thrown to the sharks from U.S. Navy warships in
mid-ocean?
-
- How would you know? None of us knew about Jose Padilla's
secret arrest and imprisonment by the U.S. military until Ashcroft blurted
it out while visiting the Kremlin (how fitting - the headquarters from
which Stalin's Communist KGB terrorized Russia). What else don't we know?
How many unknown Jose Padillas are there?
-
- America has crossed the Rubicon into Imperial dictorship.
-
-
-
- Copyright (2002) Richard Sauder, PhD
- All rights reserved. Contact author for permission to
reprint or repost.
- http://www.sauderzone.com
- dr_samizdat@hotmail.com
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