A Personal Declaration of Independence

By William A. Cook

As a citizen of these United States for 70 years, I refuse to be ruled by a tyrant who imposes despotic, autocratic control on the citizens of these United States through a series of clandestine actions that usurp the rights of the people.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article15156.htm

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/septe...torturebill.htm
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Torture Bill States Non-Allegiance To Bush Is Terrorism
Legislation tolls the bell for the day America died, birth of the dictatorship

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com | September 29 2006

Buried amongst the untold affronts to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the very spirit of America, the torture bill contains a definition of "wrongfully aiding the enemy" which labels all American citizens who breach their "allegiance" to President Bush and the actions of his government as terrorists subject to possible arrest, torture and conviction in front of a military tribunal.

7:25PM CST UPDATE

After five hours of searching through the 80-plus page bill, Alex Jones, who won the 2004 Project Censored award for his analysis of Patriot Act 2, uncovered numerous other provisions and definitions that make the bill appear as almost a mirror image of Hitler's 1933 Enabling Act.

In section 950j. the bill criminalizes any challenge to the legislation's legality by the Supreme Court or any United States court. Alberto Gonzales has already threatened federal judges to shut up and not question Bush's authority on the torture of detainees.

"No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever, including any action pending on or filed after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission under this chapter, including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions under this chapter."

The Bush administration is preemptively overriding any challenge to the legislation by the Supreme Court.

The definition of torture that the legislation cites is US code title 18 section 2340. This is a broad definition of torture and completely lacks the specific clarity of the Geneva Conventions. This definition allows the use of torture that is, "incidental to lawful sanctions." In alliance with the bill's blanket authority for President Bush to define the Geneva Conventions as he sees fit, this legislates the use of torture.

The media has spun the bill as if it outlaws torture - it only outlaws torture for "enemy combatants," and in fact outlaws the retaliation of any military against the United States as "murder." Those deemed "enemy combatants" are not even allowed to fight back yet the government affords itself every power including the go-ahead to torture.

Further actions that result in the classification of an individual as a terrorist include the following.

- Destruction of any property, which is deemed punishable by any means of the military tribunal's choosing.

- Any violent activity whatsoever if it takes place near a designated protected building, such as a charity building.

- A change of the definition of "pillaging" which turns all illegal occupation of property and all theft into terrorism. This makes squatters and petty thieves enemy combatants.

In light of Greg Palast's recent hounding by Homeland Security, after they accused him of potentially giving terrorists key information about U.S. "critical infrastructure" when filming Exxon’s Baton Rouge refinery (clear photos of which were publicly available on Google Maps), sub-section 27 of section 950v. should send chills down the spine of all investigative journalists and even news-gatherers.

"Any person subject to this chapter who with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign power, collects or attempts to collect information by clandestine means or while acting under false pretenses, for the purpose of conveying such information to an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy, shall be punished by death or such other punishment as a military commission under this chapter may direct."

Subsection 4( (26) of section 950v. of HR 6166 - Crimes triable by military commissions - includes the following definition.

"Any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy, shall be punished as a military commission under this chapter may direct."

For an individual to hold an allegiance or duty to the United States they need to be a citizen of the United States. Why would a foreign terrorist have any allegiance to the United States to breach in the first place?

This is another telltale facet that proves the bill applies to U.S. citizens and includes them under the "enemy combatant" designation. We previously cited the comments of Yale law Professor Bruce Ackerman, who wrote in the L.A. Times, "The compromise legislation....authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."

The New York Times stated that the legislation introduced, "A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted."

Calling the bill "our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts," the Times goes on to highlight the rubber stamping of torture.

"Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses."

Since with this bill, in the aggregate, Bush has declared himself to be above the Constitution and the laws of the United States, the allegiance of American citizens is no longer to the flag or the freedoms for which it stands, but to Bush himself, the self-appointed dictator, and any diversion from that allegiance will mandate arrest, torture and conviction in a military tribunal under the terms of this bill.

Similar to the UK's Glorification of Terrorism law, which top lawyers have slammed as vague, open to interpretation and a potential weapon for the government to kidnap supposed subversives, the nebulous context of "wrongfully aiding the enemy," could easily be defined to include publicly absolving an accused terrorist of involvement in a terrorist attack.

That renders the entire 9/11 truth movement an aid to terrorist suspects and subject to military tribunal and torture. In addition, Bush's recently cited National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, which is available on the White House website, labels conspiracy theorists as terrorist recruiters.

This should leave us with no doubt as to which parties are the target of the government's torture and intimidation campaign.

Could protesting a war approved by the government and their bootlickers in Congress and the Senate be considered breaching an allegiance to the United States? Could campaigning against the bombing of a target country be considered wrongfully aiding the enemy?

When the USA PATRIOT act was rushed through at the height of an anthrax scare without any members of Congress even having time to read it, we were assured that it was to fight terrorists and would not be used against the American people.

Since then a plethora of cases whereby the USA PATRIOT act was used against U.S. citizens emerged, including the internment without trial for over three years of Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was finally released after no evidence of terrorism was uncovered.

The so-called "compromise" before the bill was passed and the media acclaim of John McCain as some kind of human rights champion is one of the biggest con jobs ever inflicted upon the American people.

Shortly after the bill was finalized it was spun by Bush security advisor Stephen Hadley as "good news and a good day for the American people." McCain said that it safeguarded "the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions."

In truth the legislation does the exact opposite, giving Bush carte blanche to "interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions."

In addition, under the bill, "No person may invoke the Geneva Conventions or any protocols thereto in any habeas corpus or other civil action or proceeding to which the United States, or a current or former officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent of the United States is a party as a source of rights in any court of the United States or its States or territories."

The bill also allows hearsay evidence (obtained via phony confessions after torture) to be considered by the military tribunal and bars the suspect from even having knowledge of the charges against him - making a case for defense impossible. This is guaranteed to produce 100% conviction rates as you would expect in the dictatorships of Uzbekistan or Zimbabwe and other torture protagonists who are in many cases allied with the Bush administration and provide phony confessions obtained from torture that allow the U.S. government to scare its people with the threat of imaginary Al-Qaeda terror cells waiting to kill them.

Following the Supreme Court's ruling to previously strike down Bush's shadow penal system, Alberto Gonzales is already out threatening federal judges to shut up and get behind the dictator or face the consequences.

Gonzales has the sheer gall to attack judges for even considering to "overturn long-standing traditions or policies without proper support in text or precedent," which is exactly what Gonzales, Bush and the rest of the White House criminals are doing themselves by de facto abolishing the Bill of Rights!

This is a dark day for the United States, the day America died and the bastard birth of a literal dictatorship.

http://prisonplanet.com/articles/september...6_b_Fascist.htm
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Detainee Bill and the Dawning of a Fascist America

Kurt Nimmo | September 29 2006

As Steve Douglas notes, “the Schmittian drives for the arrogation of all power into the hands of a ‘unitary executive’ Presidential dictatorship,” in the case of both Hitler and Bush, are “essentially, identical.”

In the wake of the Reichstag fire in early 1933, blamed on the Comintern, Hitler and the Nazis, with “the support of a terrified populace … suspended civil rights and civil liberties, fattened their war machine and rode the fascist tide into a full-blown dictatorship,” writes Harvey Wasserman.

After the Reichstag fire, Paul von Hindenburg signed the fateful emergency decree, thus providing Hitler’s SA and SS with the legality required to round up the opposition and throw them in makeshift concentration camps run by local Gauleiters and SA leaders. “The rest, as they say, is history,” notes Wasserman.

Bush, or rather his neocons, who subscribe to the Schmittian drive “for the arrogation of all power into the hands of a ‘unitary executive’ Presidential dictatorship,” have their own gesetzvertretende Verordnungen or “law-substituting decrees,” or rather Constitution-substituting decrees, in particular scrubbing the Fourteenth Amendment.

“The military trials bill approved by Congress lends legislative support for the first time to broad rules for the detention, interrogation, prosecution and trials of terrorism suspects far different from those in the familiar American criminal justice system,” explains the Washington Post. “President Bush’s argument that the government requires extraordinary power to respond to the unusual threat of terrorism helped him win final support for a system of military trials with highly truncated defendant’s rights…. Included in the bill, passed by Republican majorities in the Senate yesterday and the House on Wednesday are unique rules that bar terrorism suspects from challenging their detention or treatment through traditional habeas corpus petitions. They allow prosecutors, under certain conditions, to use evidence collected through hearsay or coercion to seek criminal convictions.”

Naturally, we are told this “arrogation of all power into the hands” of the unitary decider will apply only to “foreign nationals,” that is to say Muslims. Hitler said much the same.

The enemies of the fatherland were foreigners—and their German fellow travelers—members of the comintern (communist international), Hitler declared, and such subversion required austere measures, including interning thousands in concentration camps, subjecting them to interrogation, torture, and summary execution.

As Marty Lederman points out, the so-called “military commissions bill,” if read literally, “means that if the Pentagon says you’re an unlawful enemy combatant—using whatever criteria they wish—then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to ‘hostilities’ at all.”

This definition is not limited to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It’s not limited to aliens—it covers U.S. citizens as well. It’s not limited to persons captured or detained overseas. And it is not even limited to the armed conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, authorized by Congress on September 18, 2001. Indeed, on the face of it, it’s not even limited to a time of war or armed conflict; it could apply in peacetime.

For some, it is a relatively easy task to dismiss Lederman out of hand as a paranoid crank, or possibly another conspiracy nut.

However, even the Los Angeles Times warns of the draconian aspect of this law. “[T]he bill also reinforces the presidential claims, made in the Padilla case, that the commander in chief has the right to designate a U.S. citizen on American soil as an enemy combatant and subject him to military justice,” writes Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale.

This atrocious, Hitlerian bill authorizes “the government to seize and detain indefinitely, without charge or trial, anyone who ‘purposefully and materially supported hostilities’ even if not engaged in armed conflict, including U.S. citizens arrested inside the United States,” explains Human Rights First.

“Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said that by including those who ’supported hostilities’—rather than those who ‘engage in acts’ against the United States—the government intends the legislation to sanction its seizure and indefinite detention of people far from the battlefield,” notes the Washington Post.

“In short,” writes John Dean, “this could include anyone the federal government (Bush and Rumsfeld will delegate and re-delegate this authority) labels ‘an unlawful enemy combatant.’”

Nazi Germany provides a historical example of what we can expect in the months ahead. William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, explains how tribunals operated under fascism. Hitler’s courts consisted of three judges, who invariably had to be trusted party members, without a jury. A Nazi prosecutor had the choice of bringing action in such cases before either an ordinary court or the Special Court, and invariably he chose the latter, for obvious reasons. Defense lawyers before this court, as before the Volksgerichtshof, had to be approved by Nazi officials. Sometimes even if they were approved they fared badly. Thus the lawyers who attempted to represent the widow of Dr. Klausener, the Catholic Action leader murdered in the Blood Purge, in her suit for damages against the State were whisked off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until they formally withdrew the action.

Under Bush’s Detainee bill, however, the secretly accused, snatched off the street and disappeared in classic Gestapo fashion, will not be allowed to select an attorney—one will be appointed by the Inquisition.

At least the Nazis bothered to construct a cover for their tactics, describing the detention of the opposition as Schutzhaft, or protective custody. Bush and the neocons offer no such cover, instead proffering the same old threadbare and transparent palliative—in order to protect the American people from ubiquitous and around-every-corner terrorism, promised to last for generations, the state is unfortunately forced to resort to eviscerating the Constitution, not that most Americans have an inkling of what the document spells out—the rights and the responsibilities—or will they particularly care so long as they are free to shop and watch football and sit-coms.

Of course, the neocons need big fat dossiers of intelligence on “homegrown” enemy combatants in order for the neocon Inquisitor Generals to proceed.

The NSA, Pentagon, and the FBI with its Joint Terrorism Task Force are in the process of gathering this crucial data and entering it into the Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) database, a project initiated back in 2003 by the neocon Paul Wolfowitz, now don of the World Bank loan sharking operation.

So keen are the neocons to gather intelligence on American “enemy combatants,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England issued a memorandum directing intelligence personnel to receive “refresher training on the policies for collection, retention, dissemination and use of information related to U.S. persons,” that is to say traitors, mostly involved in criminal plots to exercise constitutionally guaranteed liberties such as free speech and the right to assemble, now anathema to the fascist state, as it was to Hitler and his minions.

But never mind. Not only are most Americans blissfully unaware of the immense peril they face—thanks to a complicit and soft-pedal corporate media—many of them faithfully support the fascist state, as the German people did before them.

As the above quoted Shirer writes: “The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism…. The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed…. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.”

It will be too late on the day a predatory bureaucrat from the Ministry of Homeland security steals your land or appropriates your wife—a fate inflicted upon countless bovine vassals by rulers and their henchmen down through the dark shadow of history.

Our Machiavellian rulers, wearing expensive suits instead of the ermine of royal heraldic authority, are determined to reduce the planet to a hellish realm of corporate lords, worker drone vassals and serfs, and a small number of liege fiefs lording over the former.

Bush’s detainee bill is a large paving stone in that direction.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/Septe...6Fatherland.htm
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The Fatherland Protection Racket

Thomas J. DiLorenzo | September 30 2006

By now all reasonable people in the world know that the Bush administration (with almost no opposition from Democrats) used 9/11 as a pretense to invade and occupy an oil-rich Middle Eastern country that posed no threat to America. Even President Bush has admitted in a press conference that there were never any WMDs in Iraq. But the war has been very profitable for some, as war always is, as it has drained American taxpayers of hundreds of billions of dollars. It has also ballooned the warfare state, the military-industrial complex, and the conservative anti-civil liberties lobby. (On the day of this writing the talking heads on the FOX War Channel were all but dancing in the streets of Manhattan in celebration of a bill passed by the U.S. Senate the previous evening that would allow for the suspension of habeas corpus. Can mass burn-the-Constitution rallies, perhaps organized by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, be far behind?)

But the state’s use of this illegitimate war to aggrandize itself goes much, much farther than this. Those Americans who are still concerned about the state’s ability to plunder us into poverty and strip us of personal liberties are extremely fortunate that Professor James Bennett of George Mason University has stepped up to explain exactly how this is happening with his new book, Homeland Security Scams (Transaction Publishers, 2006).

Read this book and the crassness, dishonesty, and plain chutzpah of the state in using the "war on terror" as an excuse to pick your pocket will boggle your mind. The average reader will also be shocked at the remarkable blueprint for fascism that has been mapped out for us by our rulers in the post-9/11 world.

Indeed, the very name "Homeland Security" has an obvious echo of "fatherland," as Professor Bennett ominously points out. "Americans have never used the world ‘homeland’ to describe their country" anywhere and at any time. The very word is un-American and reeks of fascism.

The major theme of Homeland Security Scams is stated on page 1:

"[H]omeland security is developing into the largest boondoggle in the history of the U.S. government. Fed by the . . . war on terror, homeland security is being used as an excuse . . . for a vast expansion of government power and spending." And the spending usually has nothing at all to do with "defense" or "security." "Homeland security is not making us safer: just poorer, less free, and more dependent on the federal government," Professor Bennett charges. In the following 217 pages he provides chapter and verse to prove his point.

The "scam" is that the word "homeland security" is routinely invoked to "justify" thousands of pork barrel spending programs that have nothing to do with safety or security. They are simply pork. So much money is being drained from the taxpayers’ pockets under this ruse that governments cannot spend it fast enough. "North Carolina spent only 30 percent . . . of the federal homeland security monies it had received in 2004." "Under President Bush, the Republicans have become the party of Big Government."

Professor Bennett has always been a libertarian-minded conservative, and is disgusted by the descent of formerly like-minded institutions, such as the Heritage Foundation, into the fascistic abyss of Big Government neo-conservatism. He writes that the Heritage Foundation was "largely co-opted by the Reagan administration" in the 1980s and has been "ever since ensconced firmly in the GOP’s right pocket." It has "abandoned any . . . interest in restricting leviathan . . . " (p. 200). The Heritage Foundation’s position papers in "the age of Bush II" sound the old, leftist themes of "Spend, spend, spend. Regulate, regulate, regulate." (This would also seem to have dire implications for the Mont Pelerin Society, of which Heritage Foundation president Ed Fulner is the longtime treasurer and board member.)

The primary beneficiaries of all this are "politicians, lobbyists, and a flourishing homeland security industry." This would also include, in my opinion, all of the neocon "think tanks," magazines, and "scholars" who are paid to provide the intellectual cover for the scam. The "one constant" that keeps the racket going is fear. As long as our rulers can continue to frighten the public with promises of "terror" their motives and actions will not be questioned by the vast majority of the public.

The Department of Fatherland (Oops, I mean "Homeland") Security (DHS) was not simply a response to 9/11. Our rulers had planned for an Orwellian bureaucracy of that sort years in advance, with the twelve-member Rudman-Hart Commission, originated under Bill Clinton’s administration. 9/11 provided the perfect excuse. Professor Bennett reveals exactly how the plot was hatched.

Meanwhile, the already gargantuan "internal security" apparatus of the U.S. government (another phrase that was popular in totalitarian societies) was a complete and total failure on 9/11 because, says Professor Bennett, it had been preoccupied for years with the non-threat of "the bogeymen of the 1990s: militias and other right-wing populist groups." The so-called militias "made a useful hat object for upper-middle-class liberals who wished to feel threatened," and the FBI, CIA, BATF, and other federal agencies gladly complied. After all, some of these "militiamen" were alleged tax evaders.

Professor Bennett gives a detailed explanation of how the Republican Party’s Deep Thinkers decided that simply renaming several dozen bureaucracies would somehow make America "safe." That, in essence, is how the Department of Homeland Security was created – by connecting "bits and pieces and chunks" of various federal bureaucracies in an effort "that would make Dr. Frankenstein proud." And it was a goldmine for every one of these useless, jack-booted bureaucracies, from the INS to FEMA, the "Federal Protective Service" and the "Domestic Energy Support Teams." The claim that they are now "fighting terrorism" is all they needed to get Congress to increase their budgets seemingly exponentially.

The language of the DHS really is eerily reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Its web site claims that its mission is "securing the homeland," a "locution so foreign to Americans as to bring a shudder to the spine." Another slogan is "Preserving our freedoms, protecting America . . . we secure our homeland." One can just imagine that there must be a continual showing of the movie "Triumph of the Will" playing 24 hours a day at DHS headquarters.

Among the more insidious effects of the state’s response to 9/11, writes Professor Bennett, is a massive miseducation of the American public about the true nature of bureaucrats and bureaucracy. "Gone forever [is] the invidious caricature of the pencil-pushing, clock-watching goldbricker: the federal employee of the twenty-first century [is] a cocky, can-do Tom Cruise, a perky and feisty Sandra Bullock." Since 9/11 "every police officer and fire fighter is a saint; soldiers are selfless heroes ‘fighting for our freedom’; CIA agents are sexy glamorous, and deeply ethical; even George W. Bush is a steely-eyed missile man, in the old Mercury Seven astronaut term of praise."

You know the pork barrel is massive when "Thirteen committees and sixty subcommittees of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate have jurisdiction over . . . the DHS." Every member of Congress wants to be on a committee or subcommittee that can distribute pork to his or her constituents and campaign contributors under the phony guise of "homeland security."

State and local police and fire departments are also being slowly nationalized thanks to DHS pork, for with federal money comes federal controls. Conservatives used to fear the federalization of law enforcement, Professor Bennett points out, but now they champion it. Former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge once boasted that his department had "redefined a new federalism" when in fact it "is destroying true federalism" by increasingly taking over local law enforcement. His "strategy" was "to view federal, state, and local governments as one entity" (again reminiscent of Nazi Germany, where all governmental powers were centralized and under the direction of a dictator with no constitutional limits on his authority).

As for the pork, a few examples will give you the flavor of how out-of-control it has become:

Boeing was given a five-year, $1.37 billion contract to equip U.S. airports with "bomb screening devices" that experts say are "laughingly ineffective."
Northrop Grumman "landed a $350 million contract to construct a DHS data network.

"First-responder training facilities are springing up like toadstools after a rainstorm. The Nevada Test Site . . . which trains 3,000 fire fighters, paramedics, and policemen annually, is slated to quintuple that number as the DHS money rolls in."
The new Hampshire town of Bennington, population 1, 272, spent part of its Homeland Security grant to buy chemical weapons suits – just in case bin Laden chose Bennington as his next maximum impact target.

Local police departments in New Hampshire will get access to "satellite television channels that transmit continuous news," courtesy of a DHS grant.

Colchester, Vermont, population 18,000, received a DHS grant to purchase a "search-and-rescue vehicle" that "can bore through concrete and search for victims in collapsed buildings."

Thanks to the influence of Dick Cheney, "Wyoming receives more money per capita than any other state in homeland security grants."

And naturally, "a non-state – the District of Columbia – is far and away the biggest recipient of homeland security grants per capita," receiving more than twice as much as Dick Cheney’s home state.

Citgo, Conoco-Phillips, and Shell received tens of millions of dollars in DHS grants for "refiner security," something they are very well equipped to finance themselves.

The former mayor of Washington, D.C., Sharon Pratt, received a no-bid "bioterrorism consulting contract" for $236,000.

Forty "young people" in Washington, D.C. were paid by a DHS grant to "rap and dance about emergency preparedness."

As part of its nonstop assault on civil liberties the DHS employs an "entertainment liaison" whose job is to try to "shape the political content of films" made in Hollywood. Its "Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II" would "for the first time put the government in the business of conducting regular background checks on everyday citizens."

The Orwellian PATRIOT Act is expertly dissected by Professor Bennett, and its entrails are revealed to be poisonous to personal liberty in American, patently unpatriotic, and useless in "fighting terrorism." This totalitarian legislation eviscerates the Fourth Amendment by permitting "sneak and peak" searches, without a warrant, of email, homes, offices, libraries, and internet records. Warrant-less searches have routinely been made by armed federal agents; and even the attorney-client privilege has been trashed by the Bush administration. The CIA has been given expanded powers to spy on ordinary American citizens and the GOP’s fascistic "internal security" bureaucracies "reach into banking, business, educational, and financial records" in an unprecedented way. The FBI has even been empowered "to force librarians to reveal the borrowing habits of patrons . . ."

Moreover, "practically any act of civil disobedience could be construed to violate the law" under the laughingly-named PATRIOT Act. This is just a small sampling of how Big Government Conservatives are hard at work destroying American liberty while the "liberal opposition" stands idly by like so many political eunuchs.

Apart from revealing the shocking degree to which the state has used the excuse of 9/11 to wage "war" on the American public by picking its pockets and destroying its liberties, Homeland Security Scams also provides definitive proof that the conservative movement no longer has any interest whatsoever in limited government – if it ever did. "The Heritage Beltway Right has gone over almost completely to the statist side," Professor Bennett laments in his concluding chapter.

Frankly, I’m not so sure they were not always on that side. After all, it was "Mr. Conservative," William F. Buckley, Jr., who announced in the 1950s, shortly after the founding of National Review, that what was needed to fight the Cold War was a "totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores" complete with high taxes, a giant military-industrial complex, expansive powers granted to the CIA and FBI, and the subsequent loss of freedoms that all of that would entail. With the exception of a dozen or so libertarians who influenced parts of the Reagan administration in its first two years (after which they became irrelevant), this statist vision has been the defining characteristic of "conservatism" in America for at least the past half century.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/Septe...00906Report.htm
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Report says detainee plan would pardon U.S. officials
CNN: Congressional work on tribunal hearings grants amnesty

World Net Daily | September 30 2006

A video report from CNN's Jack Cafferty says that buried deep within the pending plan to create military tribunals for those suspected of terrorism is amnesty for present U.S. officials.

He said that President Bush "is trying to pardon himself" with the plan, which is in the last stage of congressional endorsement and next will go to the president's desk.

"Here's the deal:" Cafferty said. "Under the War Crimes Act, violations of the Geneva Conventions are felonies, in some cases punishable by death. When the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Convention applied to al-Qaida and Taliban detainees, President Bush and his boys were suddenly in big trouble.

"They've been working these prisoners over pretty good. In an effort to avoid possible prosecution they're trying to cram this bill through Congress before the end of the week before Congress adjourns," he said.

"The reason there's such a rush to do this? If the Democrats get control of the House in November this kind of legislation probably wouldn't pass," he said.

Cafferty said the "real disgrace" was that Sen. Bill Frist and U.S. Rep. Dennis Hastert "and their Republican stooges apparently don't see anything wrong with this. I really do wonder sometimes what we're becoming in this country."

The plan to authorize military tribunals came after a June ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that said the White House's earlier parameters for putting those accused of terrorism on trial wouldn't be allowed.

That plan had held that those suspects could be put before military commissions the president would assemble.

The House approved the new plan 253-168. It would outline interrogation tactics and set up procedures for trials for a couple dozen suspects held at a military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Those include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who's accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Senate voted 65-34 for the plan, and the remaining step was for the House to endorse Senate changes in the proposal.

Sen. John McCain, who was tortured as an enemy prisoner during the Vietnam War, said the nation owes it to its fighting soldiers to affirm the Geneva Conventions. He says this legislation ensures that.

President Bush said in a statement that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 would allow to continue "one of America's most potent tools in fighting the War on Terror."

A review of federal legislation actually shows that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 provides that "it shall be a defense" for anyone in any civil or criminal action arising from the "detention and interrogation of aliens" suspected of terrorism simply that their actions were authorized and "determined to be lawful at the time."

A provision of the 2006 act allows that such a defense shall apply "to any aspect of the detention, treatment, or trial of any person detained at any time" since Sept. 11, 2001; and to any claim or cause of action from that.

A report in the Chicago Tribune summarized the bill as shielding U.S. officials from prosecution under the War Crimes Act retroactively to 1997. That's when the original law was passed criminalizing violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.