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Shvoong Home>Law & Politics>Administrative Law>WHEN GOVERNMENT LEADERS FLIP OUT Summary

WHEN GOVERNMENT LEADERS FLIP OUT

Article Summary   by:Olga Moe     Original Author: Olga Moe
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We should not be entirely surprised that our Ruling Class has suddenly become oppressive and a threat to us as free Americans. It has been happening throughout the past century, no matter how civilized we think we have become. The founding fathers knew that some base human insincts are timeless. That''s why they set us up with a constitution to be used which is dying with every new executive signing statement.


J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly advised President Harry Truman to arrest "all individuals potentially dangerous" to national security, jail them in military prisons and try them before kangaroo tribunals that "will not be bound by rules of evidence." He compiled a massive list of names, identities and activities of individuals found to be "potentially dangerous to the internal security through investigation."


Capitalizing on the anti-communist hysteria at the start of the Korean War, he asked Truman to preemptively detain 12,000 people, 97 % of them American citizens in order to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage." Does all this sound familiar to anyone?


So, in September 1950 Congress passed a law authorizing the detention of "dangerous radicals" in the even of a presidentially declared national emergency. He did declare an emergency three months later, but never followed through with the mass arrests. The "subversives"--people suspected of left-wing political sympathies--remained free.


Another time the government went "crazy" was during the 1960 and 1970s when the CIA cooperated with local police departmemts across the country to compile a list of 300,000 Americans and organizations suspected of opposing the Vietnam War.


On April 6, 1984, President Reagan signed a National Security Decision Directive No. 52. He targeted 400,000 people for arrest and confinement at concentration camps in mothballed Army bases. The National Security Council''s "secret government within a government" planned to cancel the 1984 presidential election so Reagan could remain in office indefinitely.


In 2006 Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act which overturns the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibited the president from using combat troops on the soil of the US. Now they spill into our police force. For the first time in 128 years, the president can declare matial law in case of a hurricane, riot or terrorist attack.


In May 2007 Bush attached a National Security Presidential and Homeland Directive to the National Defense Authorization Act. Now the president could declare a "national emergency without consulting anyone.. He could suspend the Consittution and appoint an unelected provisional government under a "national continuity coordinaor."


Under the Military Commissions Act anyone could be detained on suspician only of being an "enemy combatant" and not have to be told why and be denied habeus corpus, to be incarcerated indefinitely.


Look at Reagan''s Rex-84 Alpha Explan. That was a FEMA plan to put Americans who protested the planned war on Nicaragua into camps. What about the current population who may want to protest the bombing of Iran? Couresy of Haliburton since early 2006 the camps are now ready and waiting.


According to this article, American democracy is an iron fist in a velvet glove, a glove that is becoming increasingly transparent. Even if the threats are never carried out, they work. In a country that authorizes the government to kidnap, torture and murder opponents of Ucy, which one among us is not going to back down? When the Pentagon takes control of the internet''s electromagnetic grid, I know I will become one who remains silent.
Published: January 13, 2008   
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