Fruits From a Poisonous Tree: Ch1 pt4

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Today's excerpt begins on page 16.

The course of conduct being displayed by the government is merely ensuring that new generations of “terrorists” are being created at home as well as abroad.

The Constitution was written and the federal government created in order to insure that all of our liberties were protected even during times of war.
They have failed miserably in that task.
Ashcroft now says that “we will protect you, but some of your liberty must be surrendered to enable us to protect you.”
Rubbish!!!

It is time that all Americans with courage say to the federal government, “Go to Hell!”
There can be no higher expression of patriotism than opposing your government when you believe they are wrong.
That should be the responsibility of our state governments, but they have bought into the federal agenda because it expands their power and control over us and they are no better than the federal fascists that they emulate.

Freedom is a word not often reflected on by us.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Freedom is not free; the price we must pay for freedom is eternal vigilance.”
Collectively we have not been vigilant, and now we can see the result of our apathy.

It is not too late to correct our agent, the federal and state governments.
Individually we are not a threat to the vested interests of the new king, but collectively we can still control if we wake up and smell the dead rotting corpse of this once great republic.
Together we must demand that they cease and desist in their plan for world domination and control over us before the United States of America crashes, smoking and burning, upon the scrap pile of history.

When I left the battlefield of Southeast Asia, I vowed that I would never again take up arms against another human being, and I never will.
But as long as I have a breath in my body and a right of freedom of expression, I will educate, agitate, and indoctrinate as many of my fellow Americans as possible in order to stop or delay this march into madness that we are now on.

The Administration forced a vote on the Patriot Act before many legislators even had a chance to read it.
That is the way the world elite always slip in legislation that destroys our freedom.
That is the way the War Powers Act of 1933, the Federal Reserve Act, and the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution all were passed into law.
Then, NAFTA, GATT and countless other laws were shoved down our throat because Congress has no backbone or are co-conspirators in treason.
The Patriot Act passed by a majority of 337 to 79.

We must prevent these changes from becoming malignant and spreading to the body politic.
Insist that the Congress require these anti-terrorism laws be re-examined in a few years before they become permanent.
This is your only chance to protest what may end up being the most significant event in our nation’s history - events that your grandchildren will not forgive you for if you do nothing.

Some people argue that we live in a “lenient” society that has more than enough liberty - that we can afford to lose some.
Others have argued that only those people who are criminals or buying and selling drugs or gun owners have concern about the Bill of Rights.

Some might think my perception is too negative; they are probably correct.
But being a sentinel for freedom is my responsibility and yours as well if we wish to remain a great nation.
On my way to Hawaii three weeks after the New York tragedy, I was sitting next to a young woman who worked for the World Bank in Washington.
She maintained those sentiments.
As I excused myself and moved to another seat, I told her that I was not going to spend the next seven hours listening to an idiot mouth concepts about which she had absolutely no understanding of the gravity of her conclusions.

In my opinion, most of the general population who espouse those beliefs do not have the brains God gave a goose.
They don’t realize that once the freedom is given away, it will never be returned, and the rights which are used by criminals to evade incarceration are the same rights which protect each of us.
If one is denied that right, so too will all be denied that right.

In undergraduate school, I took several American history courses, as that subject has been of interest to me for the last thirty years and it is an excellent foundation for law.
But I discovered that what was written in the history books was not the same as what was written in the settled case law of that same time period.
The law is where the true history of a nation is found, not in a revisionist history book.

This nation’s history is composed of many great dreams and ambitions which were sacrificed upon the altar of “pragmatism,” “necessity,” “circumstance” and “thousands of dead heroes.”
Our constitutional rights are like that.

The government has never simultaneously observed all the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution for the United States of America as they are actually written.
The government, all three branches, has always been quick to say, “That’s not what they meant,” as if we are too stupid to read the simple language of that compact and understand the founders’ intent; and that’s in good times.

In dreadful times, when things get difficult and Americans are concerned, distressed, or angry, things get suddenly worse.
This has been true from the very start of our nation.

Here are some examples of American history that we were not taught in school.

The second President, John Adams, a founding father (a forefather of Yours Truly), someone who should have known better, got the Alien and Sedition Acts passed.
That law allowed the deportation of any non-citizen who was judged to be dangerous to the United States even if the country was not actually at war.
No trial was required.
The Sedition Act made criticizing the government a prison offense.
These laws were passed and used to silence the public’s opposition to Adam’s foreign policy, especially used to imprison newspaper publishers of the opposing political party (Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans).
A long time ago, right?
That may be so, but it was the beginning of a tradition within our body politic.

In the twentieth century, there was the infamous Sedition Act in World War I.
It was used to jail social reformers, activists, and other people with whom the government disagreed and, if they were non-citizens, to expel them.
Specifically, it made speaking out against war a prison offense.
Prominent journalists and civil libertarians were jailed for merely reading from the Constitution.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous “liberal” Supreme Court justice, voted to uphold this curtailment of the First Amendment with his now famous statement comparing the activism for peace during war to “shouting fire in a crowded theater.”
I have often believed that a judge is a lawyer with a 50 I.Q. - nothing more.

The next shameful event in our history which still plagues us to this day was the “War Powers Act of 1933.”
This Act permitted President Roosevelt to make law in the form of Executive Order, bypass Congress and create his socialist state.
We (citizens of this country) were ever after to be considered enemies of the United States who must be licensed to engage in any commercial activity.
With the aid of the Federal Reserve (the same people who created the Depression), the President confiscated our gold and silver coin and replaced it with worthless pieces of paper and a debt system that will eventually destroy this great country.
Our land and our labor were pledged to the Federal Reserve Bank, Inc., as collateral for a debt system that could never be paid.
How can this most important event in our history not be taught in school?

Everyone knows about the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
All people of Japanese descent, even natural-born Americans, were subject to detention in prison camps.
The federal government jailed 120,000 men, women, and children for three years for the crime of being Japanese.
The Supreme Court upheld the capture, internment, and the effective seizure of their property.
That fact alone confirms my theory that they all have IQs of 50 or lower.

The Smith Act, also passed during this period - in 1940, before America’s entry into WWII - mandated the fingerprinting and registration of all aliens in the United States.
To be an unregistered alien was against the law.
This law also outlawed all organizations that advocated the overthrow of the government, perhaps a reasonable measure in war, but this law was passed during peacetime.
The Smith Act was abused to jail labor leaders, socialists and communists who were opposed to the ways of the robber-baron capitalists, the very ones who created the conditions for the Great Depression.

The Red scare of the 30s and the communist witch-hunt, of the 40s and 50s ruined many American lives.
Their only crime was to know the “wrong people,” or to hold liberal opinions, or to have such opinions in their youth and the gall to stand up to demagogues and others who used antiCommunism as the key to increasing their own power.

The 1950 Internal Security Act, passed by a super-majority to override Truman’s veto, required registration of people and groups who were communists or who had beliefs similar to communists.
It created detention centers around the country, which would be filled with FBI-identified subversives if the President declared an emergency.
Those detention centers are still in existence and new ones have been built all over this country to hold us.
There are over forty-three of them at present under the direct control of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

More recently, many are familiar with the history of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movement.
Did you also know that the FBI’s operation Co-intelligence Program (CointelPro), approved at the highest levels of government, had as its object the suppression of those who worked to change the system?
It was used to intimidate the membership, discredit leadership, and even put into jail those who fought for freedom and peace, in a manner that was not only grossly immoral but also completely illegal.
That was only thirty years ago.

And there is Watergate and Nixon’s inches-thick list of enemies.
He used the power of the IRS, FBI, Customs, and other federal agencies to harass or eliminate his political opponents and everyone he suspected of disloyalty or political opposition.
That took place only twenty-five years ago.

And now, after twenty-five years of drug war and a drug-war friendly Supreme Court, we’ve seen our protections under the 4th and 5th Amendments eroded to nothing.
All of these deprivations of liberty are always under the pretext of some alleged war.

We’re at a watershed point in our nation’s history.
Not everyone who cries, “We must fight terrorism!” is really a friend of the Republic and freedom.
Some people think that we should live in a society with a lot fewer “civil rights.”
They believe that some opinions should be illegal, some activism should be forbidden.
It is this type of individual that permeates the Congress and the federal judiciary.

Will these new laws affect you?

Maybe not at first, perhaps.
They’ll be used to stop people with whose opinions you disagree - to jail civilian militiamen from Montana and Michigan; to put a stop to the KKK, ACLU, Operation Rescue, or Green Peace.
Depending on your political beliefs, that’s a good thing, right?

But the way of judging such a law is not how it operates today, but how it will operate when your most feared enemy is in control.
Who is your most feared enemy?
If no one you know now qualifies for that position, imagine what use these new laws could be put to by Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden, or even George Bush, Jr.

How would you safeguard your freedom and those of your friends and family when your opinions are labeled as terrorist?

My point is this: freedom walks a very narrow road.
On one side of that road stands conformity, censorship of ideas, and the use of force to compel people in their role as citizen or antagonist.
On the other side stands social engineering and political dissent.
The only thing in the middle of the road is dead skunks and ignorant people.

That narrow road is supported by the Bill of Rights and the settled case law which support our rights.
There’s nothing magical about the Constitution; it’s a dead tree ground into paper so those immortal, heavenly concepts of freedom and self-government could be memorialized.
It’s a document written by people for people and interpreted by other people.
It can be followed or it can be ignored.
If it’s followed, there are a few precious, fundamental restrictions on government actions against the individual.

There is in the Constitution, for instance, a guarantee of due process of law before life, liberty, or property is taken from you.
This isn’t a guarantee that you won’t be wrongly prosecuted, or that you won’t be investigated or even punished for your beliefs.
It’s only a guarantee of exposure to other people, your fellow peers and the press, including some judges, who will be watching to see that the rules are being followed.

Sometimes that exposure is enough to make the difference; sometimes it’s not.
The judges are there only to make sure that the rules were followed. Justice does not reside in the courtroom.
If you want justice, go to church: that’s in God’s hands.
All the judiciary cares about is if the rules were followed; nothing more.
The same Congress that has legislated our freedoms away writes the rules.

But when by our apathy we set aside those few guarantees contained in the Constitution - when we allow searches made in secret, the seizure of property without trial, the detention of people without proof of a crime or opportunity to defend themselves - then that form of democracy becomes a paradigm for disaster. Our silence is freedom’s death knell.

People suffer because those who have and exercise power are imperfect people.
They always make mistakes.
They get eager in protecting us and, in so doing, forget that the actions of the over-eager bureaucracy are the clear and present danger to the people.
Some of them have a desire to exercise and abuse their power, to silence their antagonists, to persecute those who are different from them, to make others bow to their demands.
Those types of individuals make great prison guards, politicians and judges.

A strongly respected constitution helps keep a restraint on all that.
Nothing but God can stop a government that is resolute to ignore its Constitution.
The War Powers Act, Alien and Sedition Acts, Red scare, Watergate, CointelPro and now the Patriot Act, are examples in our shameful history that illustrate a government completely out of control.

But the Constitution was drafted in order to make things safer by introducing safeguards.
Competing interests and the Separation of Powers doctrine between the three branches of government, each jealously protecting its own power, are the instruments by which our freedoms are enforced or should be.

When they are not, then you’d better watch your ass if your opinions are unpopular, unpalatable, or even dangerous to the status quo.
The first rule of “Watching Your Ass” is making sure that you don’t look or sound like an Enemy of the State.
It’s called the “Ostrich strategy.”
Self-censorship is always the first step in the loss of freedom, lest you draw attention and the power of those who might do you harm for speaking your opinion.

Self-censorship makes it easier for further more draconian steps to be taken, as no one says: “Stop! This is unconstitutional.”
We fear that if we said that, we might be singled out for government reprisal.

“When Hitler attacked the Jews, I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned.
And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned.
And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned.
Then they attacked me and the Protestant church - and there was nobody left to be concerned. ”

This quote is from a pastor who opposed Nazism in Hitler’s Germany.
He was speaking for the reaction, or lack thereof, of all people of good will in Germany to the events that transpired there.
It’s the silence of people of good will that allows manifest evil and fascism to entrench its self.
“Evil can flourish only when men of good will do nothing” is an ancient maxim that has profound meaning in our time.

I am not saying that the U.S. government is filled with Nazis.
God willing, that specific species of human lunacy will never return.
But the lessons learned in the fight against fascism should always live within us like a festering boil on the surface of our consciousness.
Don’t be silent, and don’t censor yourself.
Speak out against those in power and let them know you disagree and that you are watching their every move.

This is the responsibility of citizens in a Republic.
I believe a Republic’s strength does not result from voting.
In our country, half don’t vote because there isn’t much in the way of a choice:
There is Daryl, my brother Daryl and my other brother Daryl - not a penny difference between them.
But we still have a strong country because people have a right and feel safe in expressing dissatisfaction.
This operates as a relief valve for our frustrations and criticisms of those in power.

There’s a partition between our leaders and us that has grown larger with each passing year and each new shelf row of Federal Register publications.
Many of our representatives are hearing only the call from the President and Attorney General to give them more power in order to make us safe from terrorism, no matter the cost, no matter the loss of precious freedom.
Absolute safety can be achieved only in a police state, and then it is the state that is the source of all terrorism.
This has been the story of human societies from time immemorial.

Few of these new laws are made for the prosecution of a war on foreign terrorists.
We already have every legal tool needed to do this.
The purpose of most of these changes is for the collection of more information about Americans, without the regulation of a judge and the restrictions imposed by the Constitution.
The law already allows intelligence and investigative agencies to spy on foreigners without any serious obstacle.
These laws can be only for the monitoring and imprisonment of those living in the US who have differing opinions of what makes for a fair and just society, citizen or foreigner.
The government’s opinion may be diametrically opposed to your own.

Our war right now is against terrorists in the Middle East.
The first people targeted in this country will be Arabs and Moslems.
Since I’m not Arab or Moslem, it is none my concern.
Next will be the civilian state militias.
Since I am not a member of the militia, it is none my concern.
Next will be the Christians with their belief in a power higher than the government.

Will there be anyone left to object?

We as the unified voice of We the People must, when the first of us is targeted, shout out from the highest hill. . .

Go to Hell!

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