This discourse is primarily for right-wingers here who love to argue that
they live in a free society, and chastise the Left for critically
examining the Constitutional rights recently abridged by the passage of
Patriots Acts I and II.
For those who continually bellow that the USA has to restrict rights due
to Bush's war on terrorism for the safety and security of its citizenry,
they might carefully examine the rise of fascism in history.
In a vacuum of ill-informed citizens, scared and angry, fascism takes root
by the very governmental tactics that've been used since October 2001.
Rather than ask the Left what rights have been reduced or lost, neocons
would be better served using the internet's vast research capabilities
(and public libraries) and, although it will be stressful to remain
open-minded, peruse the many resources to answer the question yourselves.
Many rights pertaining to free speech and privacy have been severely
abridged and, if you can temporarily put away your biases, you'll
understand that the conservatives' much-touted "American freedom" is no
longer with us fully intact.
Think of the following as merely a starting point, an overview, and dig
into the disturbing facts of how Constitutional America has been widdled
down to a near-fascist police state. And, then, typically, refuse to think
its serious and/or that its only temporary. After the terrorism-induced
"national emergency" is finally over someday (?), you can dream about all
your original rights being restored fully.
And then think about how those restrictions kept you and the rest of
America safe and secure so you could live to consume more material goods.
www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/ palmeri/commentary/patriot.htm
Dr. Blunt ---------Serving the Usenet's mentally ill since 1998.
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| Title: Re: A brief primer on rights abridged by Patriot Acts |
28 Jun 2004 05:07:07 AM |
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On The Patriot Act: Same Old Story
by Tony Palmeri
[note: On May 8th, 2003 the UW Oshkosh Student Green Party sponsored a
forum on the USA Patriot Act. Speakers included Andy Posselt of the
Student Greens, Dr. Martin Gruberg of the UW Oshkosh Political Science
Department, Director of the UW Oshkosh Polk Library Patrick Wilkinson, UW
Oshkosh Sociology Professor Peter Remender, UW Oshkosh Media Studies
Professor Andrew Schroeder, and me. Below is a revised and extended
version of the remarks I delivered. -Tony Palmeri].
Opponents and supporters of the USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct
Terrorism) Act justify their positions by calling the Act part of
America's post 9/11 "new normal" environment. For opponents of the Act,
the "new normal" produces conditions under which an oppressive regime of
neo-conservatives could exploit 9/11 and put in place core elements of
their police state utopia. For supporters of the Act, the "new normal"
requires expanding the surveillance and investigatory police powers of the
State in order to reduce the chances of a 9/11 repeat.
I believe the Patriot Act along with its still in discussion frightening
twin Patriot II are not part of the "new normal" as much as they are the
Same Old Story.
Let's tell the truth: the United States Constitution did not even apply to
all American citizens in a real sense until the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964. Black people, for example, were systematically
prevented from enjoying constitutionally protected liberties due to the
existence of 3/5 compromises, Jim Crow laws, and other state and federally
sanctioned legalisms that make today's Patriot Act almost seem benign by
comparison.
Same Old Story
In 1798, less than a decade after the passage of the First
Amendment, Congress passed the "Alien and Sedition Acts" during the John
Adams Administration to quell dissent linked to the French Revolution and
Irish rebellions. The act clearly abridged the freedom of speech,
something the First Amendment says that Congress may not do. Yet the
Supreme Court found the Act constitutional on the grounds that freedom of
speech in America, like British seditious libel, only meant that
government cannot prevent an individual from speaking. Once he speaks,
however, punishment might follow. To this very day the courts interpret
the First Amendment as meaning "no prior restraint" of speech, an
interpretation most Americans find to be shocking when they first hear it.
President Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus
during the Civil War, rounding up newspaper editors and other dissenters
against his war policy. The Great Emancipator ignored a Supreme Court
opinion arguing that his actions were unconstitutional, saying that "the
Constitution is not a suicide pact."
President Woodrow Wilson, one of the earliest "New Democrats,"
throws out the first ball while Eugene Debs runs for President from a
prison cell.
Same Old Story
In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson announced that the United States
would enter World War I and make the world safe for democracy. Many
dissenters were prosecuted under the "Espionage" Act, legislation that
identified "willful attempts" to "cause insubordination" in the military
or "willfully obstruct" military recruiting efforts as subject to as much
as twenty years in jail.
Probably the most famous dissenter to be tried, convicted, and sent
to prison for violating the Espionage Act was the Socialist Eugene Debs.
While housed in Atlanta's federal penitentiary in 1920, Debs received
almost one million votes as the Socialist party candidate in the that
year's presidential election. John Ashcroft didn't put him in the pokey.
Same Old Story
The anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War featured numerous government
abuses of civil and human rights in America. These abuses are usually
mislabeled "McCarthyism," making it sound as if the pathetic Wisconsin
Senator Joe McCarthy was alone responsible for the abuses. The fact is
that anti-Communist hysteria pervaded the entire federal government during
the late 1940s and 1950s. The liberal Democrat Harry Truman in 1947 issue
Executive Order 9835, which launched a program to locate "infiltration of
disloyal persons" in the US government. Howard Zinn in his classic A
People's History of the United States quotes Douglas Miller and Marion
Nowack from their book The Fifties:
Though Truman would later complain of the "great wave of hysteria"
sweeping the nation, his commitment to victory over communism, to
completely safeguarding the United States from external and internal
threats, was in large measure responsible for creating that very hysteria.
Between the launching of his security program in March 1947 and December
1952, some 6.6 million persons were investigated. Not a single case of
espionage was uncovered, though about 500 persons were dismissed in
dubious cases of "questionable loyalty." All of this was conducted with
secret evidence, secret and often paid informers, and and neither judge
nor jury. Despite the failure to find subversion, the broad scope of the
official Red hunt gave popular credence to the notion that that government
was riddled with spies. A conservative and fearful reaction coursed the
country. Americans became convinced of the need for absolute security and
the preservation of the established order.
The hysteria contributed though the 1960s and 1970s, most notably through
the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) stings which from
1956-1971 were designed to "neutralize" civil rights and other activists
using means condemned strongly in the mid-1970s by a US Senate Committee
chaired by Senator Frank Church. The Committee's final report said, "The
American people need to be assured that never again will an agency of the
government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it
considers threats to the established order. Only a combination of
legislative prohibition and Departmental control can guarantee that
COINTELPRO will not happen again."
Same Old Story
Please do not fall prey to the erroneous thinking that abuses of civil
liberties are more likely to happen during Republican as opposed to
Democratic administrations. We have already learned of Democrat Woodrow
Wilson's and Democrat Harry Truman's failings in this area. But one of
America's most widely respected civil libertarians, journalist and author
Nat Hentoff, has suggested that the Democratic Clinton Administration was
by far the worst for civil liberties that the nation has ever seen. The
Clinton Justice Department's advocacy of roving wiretaps, reduced appeal
privileges for death row inmates, enhanced restrictions on the rights of
immigrants, and the Communication Decency Act (the reactionary Internet
censorship legislation that even the right-leaning Supreme Court found
unconstitutional) all add up to a disgraceful record on civil liberties
that was every bit in keeping with what we are seeing now under Bush and
Ashcroft.
I will acknowledge, and I suspect Hentoff agrees, that in the Patriot Act
and the proposed Patriot II we are heading into territory that has the
possibility to become worse than anything we have seen before. Section 501
of Patriot II strips citizenship from those whom the Justice Department
has determined to have provided "material support" to an organization the
Department defines as "terrorist." Section 201 explicitly allows for
secret arrests along with allowing detainees to be held indefinitely
without charges. Sections 301-306 would allow for the extraction of DNA
samples from those identified as terrorists or merely "associated" with a
terrorist organization. These are harsh police state tactics that thuggish
bureaucrats like A. Mitchell Palmer (Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General)
and J. Edgar Hoover would have salivated over.
As terrible as these procedures may be, history gives us no reason to
believe that the Democrats are any more likely to stop them than the
Republicans. You know the Democrats will not stop these activities. Only
one Democrat voted against Patriot I in the Senate and a small group of
Democrats in the House. Why would we imagine that the Democrats are any
more likely than the Republicans to defeat Patriot II?
Same Old Story
The good part of the same old story is that throughout our history it has
been average, everyday people whose names we will never know that stepped
in and said NO to government encroachment of liberties. It will not be the
intellectuals, or the pundits, and certainly not the politicians who will
protect our liberties. Only average people acting together in their
communities can force the government to respect the rights of free people.
And that's why I want to end this talk with a note of thanks and
encouragement for the Student Green Party members who organized this event
tonight. If you are here and are a member of the Green Party, you are
performing a very vital and important service for Oshkosh, for Wisconsin,
and for the country as a whole. We desperately need political
organizations willing to stand for grassroots democracy and common decency
while the Republicans and Democrats wallow in corporate cash and
chicanery. Please do not get discouraged by the propaganda and cynicism of
those who try to deflate your passion for democracy and social justice
with their tired and hopeless moralizing about "Nader only got 2% of the
vote," "your meetings are not well attended," and all the other statements
heard commonly from people who will speak endlessly about the need for
real reforms in America but will not bring themselves to join or support
organizations actually fighting for such reforms.
The UW Oshkosh Student Greens represent one such organization. Only the
dedicated activism of people like yourselves can ensure that America does
not continue to be mired in the stale plot of the same old story. I admire
your courage and convictions.
Thank you.
Tony Palmeri welcomes your feedback
This is the discourse on the loss or abridgments of the US Constitution I
referred to in another post. I found that the reference URL didn't turn up
the file, though. So, here it is. You'll notice that it blames the Left
and Right historically and currently for assaults on our rights. And that
protecting or restoring those rights will more likely be effective by a
grass roots movement than relying on politicians. I am a Green Party
member.
Dr. Blunt ------------Serving the Usenet's mentally ill since 1998.
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