US Slides Towards Fascism (part 1)

Submitted by Henry Poole on September 7, 2007 - 11:07pm.

Richard Stallman was visiting my home this week, and he picked up a new book I had on my coffee table. The next morning, he mentioned that he had read The END of AMERICA, Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, by Naomi Wolf, just published by Chelsea Green Publishing. RMS told me that he couldn't put the book down. He read the entire book that night. He also mentioned that he had blogged it as URGENT. "Really?" I asked.

So, while on a flight to Los Angeles this morning, I began reading it myself. As soon as I was done with my meetings in LA, my friend Brad Burkhart took me to catch my flight. As we were stopped (like everyone else) by armed police driving into the airport, I thought about the book, and continued reading during my trip home. I'm now two thirds through the book, and I'm utterly shocked, angry, and really sad. This book was a wake up call for me, and I didn't have any clue that I was sleeping. But I was.

I'd like to share a passage that I read to Brad on our way to our meeting:

From page 15:

When the U.S. Attorney scandal came to light in March of 2007 and there was still little information, because I had been reading a biography of Goebbels, I remarked to a friend, "I bet the attorneys were in swing states." By the next week, it had been confirmed that most of them were in fact in swing states. All this supposition was not rocket science; it was simply that each of these is a classic move in the playbook of a fascist shift.

Everything changed in America in September of 2006, when Congress passed the Military Commissions Act. This law created a new legal reality that heralds the end of America if we do not take action. Yet most Americans still do not understand what happened to them when that law passed.

This law gives the president-any president-the authority to establish a separate justice system for trying alien unlawful enemy combatants. It defines both "torture" and "materially support[ing] hostilities" broadly. The MCA justice system lacks the basic protections afforded defendants in our domestic system of laws, in our military justice system, or in the system of laws used to try war criminals-Nazi leaders got better civil liberty protection than alien enemy combatants, as did perpetrators of genocide like Slobodan Milosovic. And persons accused by the president (or his designees) of being alien unlawful enemy combatants are forbidden from invoking the Geneva Conventions, a treaty that represents the basic protections of justice common to all civilized nations. The United States has signed the Geneva Conventions and agreed to abide by them, and this repudiation is a radical departure from our traditions. Under the MCA, the government can used "coerced' interrogation to obtain evidence. Finally, and perhaps most damagingly, the MCA denies unlawful alien enemy combatants the right to challenge the legitimacy of their confinement or treatment. So, while the MCA provides all sorts of rules that the military is supposed to follow, it will be difficult, if not impossible to hold anyone accountable for breaking those rules.

But this is not all. The president and his lawyers now claim the authority to designate any American citizen he chooses as being an "enemy combatant"; and to define both "torture" and "material support" broadly. They claim the authority to give anyone in the executive branch the power to knock on your door, seize you on the street, or grab you as you are changing planes at Newark or Atlanta airports; blindfold you and put earphones on you; take you to a cell in a navy prison; keep you in complete isolation for months or even years; delay your trial again and again; and make it hard for you to communicate with your lawyer. The president claims the authority to direct agents to threaten you in interrogations and allow into your trial things you confessed to while you were being mistreated.

The president claims the authority to do any of those things to any American citizen now on his say-so alone. Let me repeat this: The president asserts that he can do this to you even if you have never committed a crime of any kind: "enemy combatant" is a status offense. Meaning that if the president says you are one, then you are.

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Further Reading:
Guardian: Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

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Buy The End of America from Books We Like
Buy The End of America from Chelsea Green Publishing

New White House seal
Submitted by JohnJames on September 8, 2007 - 10:04am.

It should include a royal eraser -- symbolizing the occupant's power to rub out anyone on Earth.

--
John S James
www.smart-accounts.org

boiling frog syndrome
Submitted by fen on September 8, 2007 - 11:11am.
Absolutely Right On! Very few people know about this and - in their defense - could comprehend it's disastrous consequences. (Same with the death of Habeas Corpus.) As we prepare for our encounters with the TSA at the airports, I am reminded that when I was a kid and would see an old black-and-white movie where armed officers asked for people's papers before boarding an aircraft, that was an immediate tip-off that this scene was set in Nazi Germany. That sort of thing would never happen here....
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus become vitally important for the State to use all its powers to repress dissent; for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie - and thus by extension - the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." -- Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945.
"... (I)t 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. ...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 way in any country." -- Nazi Reichsmarshall Herman Goering during an April 1946 interview with U.S. intelligence officer Gustave Gilbert.
It's worth perusing other stories that should have made the news but didn't. Check out Project Censored (also presented by the SF Bay Guardian in a perhaps more readable format).
ref: boiling frog syndrome