Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Making America a Battlefield of Terror


The Senate is set to vote on the National Defense Authorization Act bill this week and S1031 and 1032 would define the whole of the United States as a “battlefield” and allow the U.S. Military to arrest American citizens in their own backyard without charge or trial. The National Defense Authorization Act (S.1867) regularly comes before Congress, but stripping Americans of their constitutional freedoms trampling the Bill of Rights is not only un-American it is treason.  

First off, this bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), before being passed in a closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing.  This is how the Obama Health bill had its beginnings. These secret meetings were the very things men like John McCain and Lindsay Graham spoke against when done by the Obama administration. 

What should concern every America is that YOU could be declared a domestic terrorist and find yourself in a military prison without legal recourse.  Remember when our Homeland Security said to be wary of people who buy gold, own guns, or are past military?

This means Americans could be declared domestic terrorists and thrown in a military brig with no recourse whatsoever. The Department of Homeland Security has already shown an agenda to single out average Americans as the new target of the war on terror.  The entire war on terror has been shifted to target the American people. By defining mundane activities as potential terror, those in power want to create a society where everyone feels under suspicion and guilty even if they are a completely law-abiding citizen.

The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America.  . Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare—political intimidation through the killing of unarmed noncombatants.

But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a “war on terror” did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. 

Although I am not a fan of political liberals,  Zbigiew Brzezinski the former National Security Advisor for Jimmy Carter said the term “War on Terror was intended to generate a culture of fear to obscure reason, intensifies emotions an make it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue.”

Our politicians have created a fear industry in America, and this fear is centered in the world of political propaganda. This is not something new.  Herman Goring, a Nazi politician, stated in an interview during the Nuremberg Trial, “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.  Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany.  That is understood.  But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.  He also went on to say “…voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.  That is easy.  All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.  It works the same in any country.”

If we are to survive as the America established by the founding fathers we must speak out against the treason being committed by those we have trusted to lead us.  If not, I am afraid that we will become the Russians in the Stalin era just waiting for prison or death. 

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn in retrospect of the destruction of his country said, “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Are we just going to sit by or are we are not going to take it anymore? 

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