the war against American ideals,
disguised as security against "terrorism"

We've said it before, and we'll keep on saying it: A country whose leader has the power to imprison any citizen, on his order alone, and hold them indefinitely, in military custody, without access to the courts, without a lawyer, without any charges, their fate determined solely by the leader's arbitrary whim -- that country is a tyranny, not a democracy, not a republic, not a union of free citizens...

What we are witnessing is the mutation of a democratic republic into a military autocracy: Bush bases his claim of arbitrary power on the president's constitutional role as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces. Although there is nothing in the constitution that warrants the extension of military command to cover arbitrary rule over the entire citizenry, and certainly nothing that countenances the abrogation of basic rights and liberties on the unchallengeable say-so of an all-powerful leader, the "commander-in-chief" argument nevertheless serves a useful purpose for the autocrat, creating the illusion of a limited and temporary suspension of liberties -- a drastic but necessary "wartime" measure.

But Bush and his officials have already warned us that this "wartime emergency" might never end.

Another leader in another time made a similar case for the primacy of domestic security over freedom.

"An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation," he wrote. "We must take steps to insure our domestic security and protect our homeland."

The leader was Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who was writing about the creation of the Gestapo in Germany in 1933. It took just one day for Hitler, using the burning of the Reichstag (blamed on the Communists, but never conclusively proven) as the pretext to convince a dottering, 86-year-old President Paul von Hindenberg to sign, on February 28, 1933, an emergency decree suspending the basic rights of German citizens for the "duration" of the emergency.

The government is supposed to govern the people by the laws of the Constitution, not govern the Constitution. To quote Mr. [Thomas] Paine, "A government on the principles on which constitutional governments arising out of society are established, cannot have the right of altering itself. If it had, it would be arbitrary. It might make itself what it pleased; and wherever such a right is set up, it shows there is no constitution."

Cowboy George and his posse are attempting to make an end-run around the Constitution. Bush is demanding broad, unfettered powers for the Department of Homeland Security, Ashcroft is arbitrarily holding American citizens without charges or evidence, we are fighting and preparing for wars with foreign countries that have not been approved by the system put in place by our forefathers

A police state exists when federal and state police mechanisms:

1. Serve the central government instead of serving the citizens
2. Enforce the policies of the central government instead of responding primarily to criminal misdeeds
3. Spy on and intimidate citizens

Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System)
one of the front line operations of the US against Americans:

Operation TIPS-TIPS: Report TIPS informants - suggested countermeasures!
Tom Ridge Wants U.S. Troops to Police Your Town, Mike Blair, American Free Press

How we burned in the prison 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? Or, if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat 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 to lose and had boldly sat 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, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.

...Aleksandr Isaevich Solzshenitsyn

FEMA - Federal Emergency Management Agency
what are they up to?

14 April 2003 - Fearing FEMA, Sander Hicks, Guerilla News Network
5 February 2002 - FEMA: 400,000 volunteers needed, by Mark Benjamin and Nicholas M. Horrock

These are not good days for asking people to look at the bigger picture. Since Sept. 11, we have been shaped by the narrow lenses of our fears. We see enemies everywhere.

So, to suggest that Mazen Al-Najjar is being mistreated is to invite hollers and jeers.

...His lawyers disclosed on Sunday that a Middle Eastern country -- which one, they would not say -- has agreed to take Al-Najjar. His wife and children, U.S. citizens all, will follow him later....If he had committed a crime, why wasn't he indicted? If the government wouldn't make the evidence public, or couldn't indict him, why was his freedom denied?

The government had Al-Najjar on a technicality, a long ago expired visa. They put him in jail after several years of fruitless federal investigation...Al-Najjar has been in jail for more than 41/2 years. Since November, he has been held in solitary confinement

...The same judge, who once released Al-Najjar on the grounds the government had failed to share the evidence so he could defend himself, decided last February that the government had the right to pick him up again and hold him. There was no new evidence against him, however. Even the prosecutors said so. Al-Najjar has been held this round for 10 months,

Someday this history will shame us. We will be ashamed that we treated Al-Najjar with contempt and in violation of the simplest rules of crime and punishment, guilt and innocence. We didn't have enough evidence to indict him, let alone convict him through that form of fair play known as due process. The best we could do is kick him out of the country.

The government's determination to be free of constitutional norms and the prying questions of impertinent judges is clear in the case of Yaser Hamdi, 21, who was born in Louisiana and raised in Saudi Arabia. Jailed in the United States since April, this U.S. citizen is not permitted to speak to a lawyer and has not been charged with any offence.

"So, the Constitution doesn't apply to Mr. Hamdi?" demanded Judge Robert Doumar , an appointee of Ronald Reagan. The government's lawyer replied that it's the President's job to decide what to do with captives; judges have a limited role to play.

Judge Doumar could find no precedent for this sort of state behaviour. He compared it to medieval England's secret hearings in the Star Chamber. Twice he insisted that Mr. Hamdi be allowed access to a lawyer; twice an appeals court asked him to give the government more room to make its case. The government did present a two-page statement explaining that a military screening team found that Mr. Hamdi met the criteria for enemy combatants; but the government did not explain what the criteria are, or in which way Mr. Hamdi met them. "Why am I here?" Judge Doumar asked in exasperation.

The other day, a little reported story emerged out of the Justice Department that would have once been viewed as incomprehensible in the United States: Attorney General John Ashcroft is contemplating the creation of prison camps for U.S. citizens that he declares to be enemy combatants. Under the proposal, Ashcroft could order the indefinite incarceration of American citizens and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts with the mere designation as "enemy combatants."

...His greatest problem has been preserving a level of panic and fear that would induce a free people to surrender the rights so dearly won by their ancestors.

...If we cannot join together to fight the abomination of American camps, we have already lost what we are defending.

...internees will be deemed enemy combatants. By whom? By the military alone - without any right to judicial review in a federal court or otherwise. The government's position is that its own decision as to who is an enemy combatant is binding on federal courts, and that it need not even offer the courts individualized facts to support particular detention decisions.

Americans don't seem to care, but they should care - and care deeply. These are potential detentions of American citizens that can go on forever, according to the government, without judicial review, and without any charges being brought or trial conducted. The war on terrorism is a war without boundaries, belligerent nations and time limits.

...Under one proposal, citizens could be interned and subjected to military detention if a committee - of the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency - so decided. Again, no court would be involved at any stage of the process.