Legislation tolls the bell for the day America died, birth of the dictatorship

[pisshead]

just listen to the neo-cons who say this bill protects our freedom from those evil freedom hating muslims that just hate us so much for our freedom...

don't go and do anything crazy like actually READ THE BILL.

Torture Bill States Non-Allegiance To Bush Is Terrorism
Legislation tolls the bell for the day America died, birth of the dictatorship
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | September 29 2006 (http://prisonplanet.com/)
Buried amongst the untold affronts to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the very spirit of America, the torture bill contains a definition of "wrongfully aiding the enemy" which labels all American citizens who breach their "allegiance" to President Bush and the actions of his government as terrorists subject to possible arrest, torture and conviction in front of a military tribunal.
Subsection 4(b) (26) of section 950v. of HR 6166 (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.6166:) - Crimes triable by military commissions - includes the following definition.
"Any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy, shall be punished as a military commission under this chapter may direct."
For an individual to hold an allegiance or duty to the United States they need to be a citizen of the United States. Why would a foreign terrorist have any allegiance to the United States to breach in the first place?
This is another telltale facet that proves the bill applies to U.S. citizens and includes them under the "enemy combatant" designation. We previously cited the comments of Yale law Professor Bruce Ackerman, who wrote in the L.A. Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ackerman28sep28,0,619852.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail), "The compromise legislation....authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."
The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/opinion/28thu1.html) stated that the legislation introduced, "A dangerously broad definition of â??illegal enemy combatantâ?� in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted."
Calling the bill "our generationâ??s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts," the Times goes on to highlight the rubber stamping of torture.
"Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable â?? already a contradiction in terms â?? and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses."
Since with this bill, in the aggregate, Bush has declared himself to be above the Constitution and the laws of the United States, the allegiance of American citizens is no longer to the flag or the freedoms for which it stands, but to Bush himself, the self-appointed dictator, and any diversion from that allegiance will mandate arrest, torture and conviction in a military tribunal under the terms of this bill.
Similar to the UK's Glorification of Terrorism law (http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/may2006/040506liberties.htm), which top lawyers have slammed as vague, open to interpretation and a potential weapon for the government to kidnap supposed subversives, the nebulous context of "wrongfully aiding the enemy," could easily be defined to include publicly absolving an accused terrorist of involvement in a terrorist attack.
That renders the entire 9/11 truth movement an aid to terrorist suspects and subject to military tribunal and torture. In addition, Bush's recently cited National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, which is available on the White House (http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nsct/2006/) website, labels conspiracy theorists as terrorist recruiters (http://prisonplanet.com/articles/september2006/070906terroristrecruiters.htm).
This should leave us with no doubt as to which parties are the target of the government's torture and intimidation campaign.
Could protesting a war approved by the government and their bootlickers in Congress and the Senate be considered breaching an allegiance to the United States? Could campaigning against the bombing of a target country be considered wrongfully aiding the enemy?
When the USA PATRIOT act was rushed through at the height of an anthrax scare without any members of Congress even having time to read it, we were assured that it was to fight terrorists and would not be used against the American people.
Since then a plethora of cases whereby the USA PATRIOT act was used against U.S. citizens (http://www.infowars.net/articles/december2005/091205Patriot_act.htm) emerged, including the internment without trial for over three years of Jose Padilla (http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/August2006/210806_b_Padilla.htm), an American citizen who was finally released after no evidence of terrorism was uncovered.
http://prisonplanet.com/images/september2006/290906mccain.jpg
The so-called "compromise" before the bill was passed and the media acclaim of John McCain as some kind of human rights champion is one of the biggest con jobs ever inflicted upon the American people.
Shortly after the bill was finalized it was spun (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/washington/21cnd-detain.html?ex=1159675200&en=c0bef7f7dc68c2b7&ei=5070) by Bush security advisor Stephen Hadley as "good news and a good day for the American people." McCain said that it safeguarded "the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions."
In truth the legislation does the exact opposite, giving Bush carte blanche to "interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions."
In addition, under the bill, "No person may invoke the Geneva Conventions or any protocols thereto in any habeas corpus or other civil action or proceeding to which the United States, or a current or former officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent of the United States is a party as a source of rights in any court of the United States or its States or territories."
The bill also allows hearsay evidence (obtained via phony confessions after torture) to be considered by the military tribunal and bars the suspect from even having knowledge of the charges against him - making a case for defense impossible. This is guaranteed to produce 100% conviction rates as you would expect in the dictatorships of Uzbekistan or Zimbabwe and other torture protagonists who are in many cases allied with the Bush administration and provide phony confessions obtained from torture (http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2005/301205publicontorture.htm) that allow the U.S. government to scare its people with the threat of imaginary Al-Qaeda terror cells waiting to kill them.
Following the Supreme Court's ruling to previously strike down Bush's shadow penal system, Alberto Gonzales is already out threatening federal judges (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/09/29/national/w084539D78.DTL) to shut up and get behind the dictator or face the consequences.
Gonzales has the sheer gall to attack judges for even considering to "overturn long-standing traditions or policies without proper support in text or precedent," which is exactly what Gonzales, Bush and the rest of the White House criminals are doing themselves by de facto abolishing the Bill of Rights!
This is a dark day for the United States, the day America died and the bastard birth of a literal dictatorship.
RELATED: Bush Given Authority To Sexually Torture American Children (http://prisonplanet.com/articles/september2006/290906sexuallytorture.htm)

[pisshead]

Gonzales Cautions Judges on Interfering (http://prisonplanet.com/articles/September2006/290906_b_Gonzales.htm)

Pinochet Also Thought He Could "Legalize" Torture And Immunize Himself (http://prisonplanet.com/articles/September2006/290906_b_Pinochet.htm)

Legal residents' rights curbed in detainee bill (http://prisonplanet.com/articles/September2006/290906_b_bill.htm)

Detaining People Indefinitely, Even After Acquittal, Plus A Little Torture A-OK With Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist Because â??We Donâ??t Want Them To Have Everyday Rightsâ?� (http://prisonplanet.com/articles/September2006/290906Detaining.htm)

[pisshead]

Detainee Bill and the Dawning of a Fascist America
Kurt Nimmo | September 29 2006 (http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=580)
As Steve Douglas notes, â??the Schmittian drives for the arrogation of all power into the hands of a â??unitary executiveâ?? Presidential dictatorship,â?� in the case of both Hitler and Bush, are â??essentially, identical.â?�
In the wake of the Reichstag fire in early 1933, blamed on the Comintern, Hitler and the Nazis, with â??the support of a terrified populace â?¦ suspended civil rights and civil liberties, fattened their war machine and rode the fascist tide into a full-blown dictatorship,â?� writes Harvey Wasserman.
After the Reichstag fire, Paul von Hindenburg signed the fateful emergency decree, thus providing Hitlerâ??s SA and SS with the legality required to round up the opposition and throw them in makeshift concentration camps run by local Gauleiters and SA leaders. â??The rest, as they say, is history,â?� notes Wasserman.
Bush, or rather his neocons, who subscribe to the Schmittian drive â??for the arrogation of all power into the hands of a â??unitary executiveâ?? Presidential dictatorship,â?� have their own gesetzvertretende Verordnungen or â??law-substituting decrees,â?� or rather Constitution-substituting decrees, in particular scrubbing the Fourteenth Amendment.
â??The military trials bill approved by Congress lends legislative support for the first time to broad rules for the detention, interrogation, prosecution and trials of terrorism suspects far different from those in the familiar American criminal justice system,â?� explains the Washington Post. â??President Bushâ??s argument that the government requires extraordinary power to respond to the unusual threat of terrorism helped him win final support for a system of military trials with highly truncated defendantâ??s rightsâ?¦. Included in the bill, passed by Republican majorities in the Senate yesterday and the House on Wednesday are unique rules that bar terrorism suspects from challenging their detention or treatment through traditional habeas corpus petitions. They allow prosecutors, under certain conditions, to use evidence collected through hearsay or coercion to seek criminal convictions.â?�
Naturally, we are told this â??arrogation of all power into the handsâ?� of the unitary decider will apply only to â??foreign nationals,â?� that is to say Muslims. Hitler said much the same.
The enemies of the fatherland were foreignersâ??and their German fellow travelersâ??members of the comintern (communist international), Hitler declared, and such subversion required austere measures, including interning thousands in concentration camps, subjecting them to interrogation, torture, and summary execution.
As Marty Lederman points out, the so-called â??military commissions bill,â?� if read literally, â??means that if the Pentagon says youâ??re an unlawful enemy combatantâ??using whatever criteria they wishâ??then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to â??hostilitiesâ?? at all.â?�
This definition is not limited to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Itâ??s not limited to aliensâ??it covers U.S. citizens as well. Itâ??s not limited to persons captured or detained overseas. And it is not even limited to the armed conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, authorized by Congress on September 18, 2001. Indeed, on the face of it, itâ??s not even limited to a time of war or armed conflict; it could apply in peacetime.
For some, it is a relatively easy task to dismiss Lederman out of hand as a paranoid crank, or possibly another conspiracy nut.
However, even the Los Angeles Times warns of the draconian aspect of this law. â??[T]he bill also reinforces the presidential claims, made in the Padilla case, that the commander in chief has the right to designate a U.S. citizen on American soil as an enemy combatant and subject him to military justice,â?� writes Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale.
This atrocious, Hitlerian bill authorizes â??the government to seize and detain indefinitely, without charge or trial, anyone who â??purposefully and materially supported hostilitiesâ?? even if not engaged in armed conflict, including U.S. citizens arrested inside the United States,â?� explains Human Rights First.
â??Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said that by including those who â??supported hostilitiesâ??â??rather than those who â??engage in actsâ?? against the United Statesâ??the government intends the legislation to sanction its seizure and indefinite detention of people far from the battlefield,â?� notes the Washington Post.
â??In short,â?� writes John Dean, â??this could include anyone the federal government (Bush and Rumsfeld will delegate and re-delegate this authority) labels â??an unlawful enemy combatant.â??â?�
Nazi Germany provides a historical example of what we can expect in the months ahead. William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, explains how tribunals operated under fascism. Hitlerâ??s courts
consisted of three judges, who invariably had to be trusted party members, without a jury. A Nazi prosecutor had the choice of bringing action in such cases before either an ordinary court or the Special Court, and invariably he chose the latter, for obvious reasons. Defense lawyers before this court, as before the Volksgerichtshof, had to be approved by Nazi officials. Sometimes even if they were approved they fared badly. Thus the lawyers who attempted to represent the widow of Dr. Klausener, the Catholic Action leader murdered in the Blood Purge, in her suit for damages against the State were whisked off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until they formally withdrew the action.
Under Bushâ??s Detainee bill, however, the secretly accused, snatched off the street and disappeared in classic Gestapo fashion, will not be allowed to select an attorneyâ??one will be appointed by the Inquisition.
At least the Nazis bothered to construct a cover for their tactics, describing the detention of the opposition as Schutzhaft, or protective custody. Bush and the neocons offer no such cover, instead proffering the same old threadbare and transparent palliativeâ??in order to protect the American people from ubiquitous and around-every-corner terrorism, promised to last for generations, the state is unfortunately forced to resort to eviscerating the Constitution, not that most Americans have an inkling of what the document spells outâ??the rights and the responsibilitiesâ??or will they particularly care so long as they are free to shop and watch football and sit-coms.
Of course, the neocons need big fat dossiers of intelligence on â??homegrownâ?� enemy combatants in order for the neocon Inquisitor Generals to proceed.
The NSA, Pentagon, and the FBI with its Joint Terrorism Task Force are in the process of gathering this crucial data and entering it into the Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) database, a project initiated back in 2003 by the neocon Paul Wolfowitz, now don of the World Bank loan sharking operation.
So keen are the neocons to gather intelligence on American â??enemy combatants,â?� Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England issued a memorandum directing intelligence personnel to receive â??refresher training on the policies for collection, retention, dissemination and use of information related to U.S. persons,â?� that is to say traitors, mostly involved in criminal plots to exercise constitutionally guaranteed liberties such as free speech and the right to assemble, now anathema to the fascist state, as it was to Hitler and his minions.
But never mind. Not only are most Americans blissfully unaware of the immense peril they faceâ??thanks to a complicit and soft-pedal corporate mediaâ??many of them faithfully support the fascist state, as the German people did before them.
As the above quoted Shirer writes: â??The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarismâ?¦. The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowedâ?¦. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.â?�
It will be too late on the day a predatory bureaucrat from the Ministry of Homeland security steals your land or appropriates your wifeâ??a fate inflicted upon countless bovine vassals by rulers and their henchmen down through the dark shadow of history.
Our Machiavellian rulers, wearing expensive suits instead of the ermine of royal heraldic authority, are determined to reduce the planet to a hellish realm of corporate lords, worker drone vassals and serfs, and a small number of liege fiefs lording over the former.
Bushâ??s detainee bill is a large paving stone in that direction.

[cannabis=freedom]

Oh...my....god. It's from reading stuff like that that makes me so happy I'm a Canadian. I have nothing but respect and liking for the American people, but this government of theirs, and its president, is the most dangerous organization since the Nazis, as pisshead said in as many words. This is a complete violation of peoples' freedoms. What happened to free fucking speech? Boys, we need to reignite the '60s before it's too late.

[pisshead]

i wouldn't worry just yet, but canada's not far behind...in some respects you're further along...

Bush Given Authority To Sexually Torture American Children
The "horror of the shrieking boys" gets a rubber stamp from the boot-licking U.S. Congress & Senate as America officially becomes a dictatorship
Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | September 29 2006 (http://prisonplanet.com/)
http://infowars.com/images2/bush/290906bush.jpgSlamming the final nail in the coffin of everything America used to stand for, the boot-licking U.S. Senate last night gave President Bush the legal authority to abduct and sexually mutilate American citizens and American children in the name of the war on terror.
There is nothing in the "detainee" legislation that protects American citizens from being kidnapped by their own government and tortured.
Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ackerman28sep28,0,619852.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail)in the L.A. Times, "The compromise legislation....authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."
Similarly, law Professor Marty Lederman (http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/09/imagine-giving-donald-rumsfeld.html)explains: "this [subsection (ii) of the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant'] means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all."
We have established that the bill allows the President to define American citizens as enemy combatants. Now let's take it one step further.
Before this article is dismissed as another extremist hyperbolic rant, please take a few minutes out of your day to check for yourself the claim that Bush now has not only the legal authority but the active blessings of his own advisors to torture American children.
The backdrop of the Bush administration's push to obliterate the Geneva Conventions was encapsulated b y John â??tortureâ?� Yoo, professor of law at Berkeley, co-author of the PATRIOT Act, author of torture memos and White House advisor.
During a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, John Yoo gave the green light for the scope of torture to legally include sexual torture of infants.
Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress â?? that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memoâ?¦
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
Click here (http://movies.crooksandliars.com/yoo-1.mp3)for the audio.
So if the President thinks he needs to order children's penises to be put in vices, there is no law that can stop him and after last night's vote, the Senate and Congress, exemplified by sicko 16-year-old boy groomer Mark Foley (R-FL) (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Congressman_accused_of_sending_sick_emails_0928.ht ml), has graciously provided Bush its full support for kids around the world to be molested in the name of stopping terror.
Yoo's comments were made before the passage of the torture legislation last night. Up until that point Bush had merely cited his role as dictator-in-chief as carte-blanche excuse for ordering torture - now his regime have the audacity to openly put it in writing - going one step further than even the Nazis did.
http://infowars.com/images2/bush/290906liberty.jpgAgain, for those who are still deluded into thinking the extent of the "pressure" is loud music and cold water being thrown over Johnny Jihad in Ragheadistan, consider for a moment the fact that your own Congress and President who, according to the Constitution, are mandated to serve you, have just legalized abducting your kids from your home and electric shocking their genitals.
Now that the criminals have declared themselves outside of the law does that mean we'll see Bush barbecuing babies on the White House lawn? Of course not, but the policy of torturing children in front of their parents has already been signed off on by the Pentagon and enacted under the Copper Green (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/040524fa_fact)program and it happened at Abu Ghraib (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/7/14/193750/666).
Women who were arrested with their children were forced to watch their boys being sodomized with chemical glow sticks as the cameras rolled. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says that the U.S. government is still withholding the tapes (http://radio.weblogs.com/0107946/2004/07/14.html)because of the horror of the "soundtrack of the shrieking boys" and their mothers begging to be killed in favor of seeing their children raped and tortured.
Your government has just lobbied for and Congress has passed legislation to discard the Geneva Conventions and mandate all this.
Pedophiles nationwide should rejoice - they can comfortably take a stroll down to the local swimming pool, grab whoever they like, drag them home, rape and torture them, and then in their defense cite the U.S. government as an example of how one should conduct themselves.

The bill also retroactively gives Bush, the Neo-Cons or any of their henchmen immunity from war crimes charges dating back to September 11 (http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/09/28/cafferty-what-are-we-becoming/). Ask yourself why they would be so careful to protect themselves from accusations of war crimes.
Could that possibly be because they are knowingly committing war crimes?
The legislating of torture itself should be a criminal act. All laws that contradict the U.S. Constitution are null and void. It was once a law that black people were slaves.
Only by engaging in civil disobedience and refusing to tolerate or acknowledge the laws of a criminal regime that has greased the skids for sexually torturing kids can we ever have a hope of returning America to its past glory.

[Tom Swierzbinski]

Someone needs to shoot that Bush guy square in the head. People like him are too dangerous to be kept alive, for any purpose.

[cannabis=freedom]

I'm actually amazed Bush hasn't been shot yet. I mean, Reagan was shot, and while many free-thinking people judged him an idiot, Bush is even more of one, and much more harmful.

[Weednuts]

The president is never near dissenters. ALL of his appearances have hand picked crowds. And the security is the greatest of any other president. Besides, I'd much rather see him rot in jail or legally executed for treason. :)

[Breukelen advocaat]

Someone needs to shoot that Bush guy square in the head. People like him are too dangerous to be kept alive, for any purpose.

He's going to be out of office very shortly. You can't lay the blame on one guy for everything you think is wrong with the world. He's no worse than most other leaders, and probably better than many - he's just in a position of more power. The root of his inability to think properly, about some important things, is probably due to his religion, which has illogical and self-destructive effects on susceptible people. His advisors are also to blame.

I wouldn't see much danger in his having a job without the power that the presidency has. I can't see him doing much harm in a "regular" job, even as a CEO.

He's been president for too long - but we'll elect a new one in 2008.

[graymatter]

The Texas Rangers could use a new owner... wait, he already tried that. I do wonder what he'll do without his handlers telling him what to say, god or otherwise.

[WalkaWalka]

I guess I looked at the Revolutionary War as never realy being over as we were always going to be fighting in one way or another for our liberty. Well with recent turns of events I'm going to call it. Its over we lost we're fucked we fucked ourselves this isn't America. This is the twilight facist zone did I mention we were fucked.

[Weednuts]

Its over we lost we're fucked we fucked ourselves this isn't America. This is the twilight facist zone did I mention we were fucked.


Not yet my friend. I certainly understand your cynical view. But look at history throughout the world. Whenever a corrupt power gets too powerful things start to go wrong and it eventually collapses under it's own weight. Just watch how it plays out. Propaganda can only go so far in this age of instant communications. We are truly in the middle of a renaissance, a real turning point. Global communications, imo, will push corrupt elements like the Bush regime out.....in time.

[Krogith]

theres more at play than USA your being close minded.

[Myth1184]

long live the usa, death to terrorist, they arent protected by US laws.

[Tom Swierzbinski]

long live the usa, death to terrorist, they arent protected by US laws.

Neither are Americans any more... Bush has basically stated that if you dont agree with HIS views and HIS ideas, then youre a terrorist. The Fourth Amendment has just been thrown out of the window.

[WalkaWalka]

I got over my earlier depression with a trip to the gun store. I don't know what its going to come too but if it goes that far I will go guerilla.

[Nylo]

Dude, paraphrase. Paraphrase. Paraphrase. You're like C-SPAN, you could have the most important information in the world but people are going to pass right over you until you figure out how to get to the meat and potatos. Call it reader-laziness, but it's also a golden-rule in ethical writing.

Anyways, I think you're taking the allegiance text way out of context. If you're found aiding or harboring a known terrorist you're in breach of your allegiance to the United States. I mean honestly, this document isn't taking away your habeus corpus.

In the united states you can be claimed guilty for any law under the sun, but you have to be proven guilty first. Nowhere in this document do I see anything (like in the first draft of the Patriot Act) that would impede on the judicial process of getting to the truth of the case.

I think this issue is important, but c'mon, 4th amendment out the window? Even if you burn a flag that's no in violation of your allegiance to the United States. I smell fearmongering.