Today’s update on the status of impeachment in Congress also includes a new resource for impeachment activists to use around the country. We also want to send a thank you! to all those who have made a donation to allow the movement to reach this incredible level of activity.
Yesterday, the House voted 251-166 to send the 35 Articles of Impeachment introduced on Monday to the House Judiciary Committee.
ImpeachBush.org is initiating a full-scale grassroots campaign to pressure the House Judiciary Committee to act on HRes 1258, the Articles of Impeachment for George W. Bush. It is now the Judiciary Committee’s obligation to hold impeachment hearings.
We’ve produced a new flyer, “Impeachment: How you can help make it a reality,” which you can download by clicking here. It is perfect for circulating to your friends, family members, classmates, co-workers, community members, and all other potential newcomers to the movement. If everyone on this list were to pass out the flyer to just ten people — and that wouldn’t take long at all — we could magnify our efforts dramatically.
By bringing the millions more people who already support impeachment into the movement, through phone calls, emails, door-to-door outreach, rallies, pickets and advertising, Congress be forced to respond to the will of the people.
We’d especially like to thank everyone who has donated to the impeachment movement in the last few days. It’s your help that allows us to get these grassroots initiatives off the ground and running in no time. If you have not donated this week, please consider taking a moment to do so right now and click this link. If you have already given, we thank you for any additional contribution you can make.
– All of us at ImpeachBush.org
P.S. The 35 Articles of Impeachment of HR 1258 are available for viewing on the ImpeachBush.org website.
In the wake of Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins’ (R-ME) alarmist report, “Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorism Threat,” the Senate may be moving towards passage of the Orwellian “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007″ (S. 1959).
A companion piece of legislative flotsam to the House bill, “The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007″ (H.R. 1955), the Democrat-controlled Congress seems ready to jettison Constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly. The bill passed the House by a 404-6 vote in October. Twenty-three congress members abstained, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers.
Under cover of studying “violent radicalization,” both bills would broaden the already-fluid definition of “terrorism” to encompass political activity and protest by dissident groups, effectively criminalizing civil disobedience and non-violent direct action by developing policies for “prevention, disruption and mitigation.”
Call it COINTELPRO 2.0.
Crafted by former House Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Jane Harman (D-CA), the legislation would create a domestic commission, a university-based “Center of Excellence” that would study and then, target domestic “radicalization” as a “threat” to the “homeland.”
David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s University who studies state surveillance and the harassment of dissident scholars, told Jessica Lee of New York’s Indypendent newspaper last year that Harman’s bill “is a shot over the bow of environmental activists, animal-rights activists, anti-globalization activists and scholars who are working in the Middle East who have views that go against the administration.”
Evoking disquieting memories of political witchhunters ensconced in the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, the anti-radicalization commission would be empowered to “hold hearings and sit and act at such times and places, take such testimony, receive such evidence, and administer such oaths as the Commission considers advisable to carry out its duties.”
With the power to subpoena and compel testimony from anyone, the commission would create the (intended) impression that a person forced to publicly testify before a congressionally mandated star chamber must be involved in “subversive” or illegal activities.
According to Naomi Spencer,
The commission would be composed of appointees, one chosen each respectively by Bush, Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, the Senate and House majority and minority leaders, and by the ranking majority and minority members of the two congressional homeland security committees. Such a selection process would certainly result in an extremely right-wing panel. (”US House passes Democrat-crafted ‘homegrown terrorism prevention’ legislation,” World Socialist Web Site, 1 December 2007)
When one considers that elite consensus favoring “muscular” strategies for fighting “terror”–homegrown or otherwise–emerge during a period when the Bush regime has illegally wiretapped phone calls, sifted e-mails, spied on political and religious organizations, and conducted extensive data mining of financial and other personal records, it becomes clear that the corporate police state is shifting into high-gear in a desperate move to criminalize ideological “thought crimes.”
The intent of the proposed legislation, however, goes far beyond an academic exercise. According to Jessica Lee, Harman stated that “the National Commission [will] propose to both Congress and [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff initiatives to intercede before radicalized individuals turn violent.”
In the context of the post-Constitutional “New Normal” paradigm, Harman and her acolytes evoke images of Philip K. Dick’s Department of Precrime in his dystopian novella, The Minority Report. Only here, in the bizarro world of outsourced “homeland security,” mutant precogs are replaced by high-end–and taxpayer funded–data-miners, psychological profilers and social network analysts in the employ of dodgy security firms linked to America’s military-intelligence complex.
The legislation specifically singles out the Internet as a “weapon” for domestic radicalization. When she introduced her bill to the Senate last November, Harman remarked, “There can be no doubt: the Internet is increasingly being used as a tool to reach and radicalize Americans and legal residents.”
Equating America’s web-surfacing habits with the threat of ideological infection by Islamist pod-people, Harman avers that the Internet allows Americans “to become indoctrinated by extremists and to learn how to kill their neighbors … from the comfort of their own living rooms.”
(Britney, Paris, better move over… there’s a new truck-bombing instructional posted over on YouTube! OMG!)
Harman’s ludicrous pronouncement is considerably ramped-up by the Lieberman and Collins report, based on–what else– “expert testimony” during hearings held by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Lieberman and Collins claim that,
…the report assesses the federal government’s response to the spread of the violent Islamist message on the Internet and concludes that there is no cohesive and comprehensive outreach and communications strategy in place to confront this threat. The report does not discuss relevant classified tools and tactics employed by the law enforcement and intelligence communities, but does recognize that there is no plan to harness all possible resources including adopting new laws, encouraging and supporting law enforcement and the intelligence community at the local, state, and federal levels, and more aggressively implementing an outreach and counter-messaging campaign on the Internet and elsewhere.
In other words, “independent” Democrat Lieberman and “maverick Republican” Collins are proposing new “tools” for regulating the Internet through a counter-propaganda campaign that would create “message force multipliers” that “support law enforcement” initiatives to crush the radical “threat.”
By targeting the Internet, House and Senate thought police claim that “the Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.”
But as the American Civil Liberties Union wrote last week,
Experience has demonstrated that in the event of a terrorist attack, the results of this report will likely be used to recommend the use of racial, ethnic and religious profiling. This will only heighten, rather than decrease, the spread of extremist violence. As an organization dedicated to the principles of freedom of speech, we cannot in good conscience support this report or any measure that might lead to censorship and persecution based solely on one’s personal beliefs.
The ACLU is concerned that identifying the Internet as a tool for terrorists will lead to censorship and regulated speech — especially since the Internet has become an essential communications and research tool for everyone. Indeed, some policy makers have advocated shutting down objectionable websites in violation of the First Amendment. It is an unworkable solution. (American Civil Liberties Union, “ACLU Skeptical of Senate Report on “Homegrown” Terrorism,” Press Release, May 8, 2008)
Precisely. But wait, there’s more! Citing the New York City Police Department (NYPD) as “experts” in the area of “homegrown radicalism,” the report avers:
After more than two years of research into homegrown terrorism cases in the United States and around the world, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) developed a model to explain how this core enlistment message, and the “jihadi-Salafi” ideology that provides the foundation for that message, drive the domestic radicalization process — transforming “unremarkable people” into terrorists.
Perhaps Lieberman and Collins should have consulted the family of Sean Bell as to the NYPD’s “expertise” on analogous crime “modeling.” Murdered by trigger-happy cops after a bachelor party the morning of his wedding, Bell’s life was snuffed-out after he and his friends were shot some 50 times. The cops–surprise!–were recently found “not guilty” on all counts by a New York judge.
We can dismiss senatorial allusions to NYPD’s acumen in the area of “counterterrorist analysis” with the contempt it deserves. But let’s be clear on one thing: the sole purpose of the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” is to target the American people’s constitutionally-protected right to say No.
If the U.S. House and Senate care to examine the “root causes” of terrorism today, they need look no further than the on-going U.S. slaughter in Iraq–a “preemptive” war of choice to which they infamously gave their consent with eyes wide open.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press.
Back in the very early days of the Unitarian/socialist inspired public brain laundry movement, there were some men like Robert Owen the socialist and Amos Bronson Alcott, the meandering Transcendentalist, who firmly believed that public education was the best way to reform society, and the best way to do that was to get the children out of the hands of their parents at the earliest possible age.
These men and others became avid supporters of something called the Infant School Movement, a program designed to get children out of the home as early as two years of age. The poor kids supposedly learned all their nasty habits at home during those early formative years. So, if you could get the kids out of the home and into the infant schools of the public school promoters, you could then get rid of all those bad habits, and by the time the youngster was six years old, the public “educator” (change agent) basically controlled him body and soul.
Even though such men, and women, did succeed in foisting their radical government school program on a mostly Christian populace that should have known better, they had somewhat less than spectacular results with their infant school program. A few years later, one of their spiritual contemporaries came up with the kindergarten program, designed to get children out of the home at about five years of age. Who, you might ask, came up with this “new” kindergarten program? None other than Margaretta Meyer Schurz, wife of the 1848 socialist revolutionary Carl Schurz. Mrs. Schurz established the first kindergarten in this country in Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856. Kindergartens were private at that point. However by 1873 the first government-run kindergarten had been established in St. Louis, Missouri, another area strongly influenced by the Forty-eighter socialists in the Midwest. The possibility of using such schools to advance a socialist agenda had not been lost on these radicals. It apparently had not been lost on the Prussian government in the German states either, because the Prussian government, in 1851, a short three years after the socialist revolts there, outlawed kindergartens. That being the case, the socialist revolutionaries simply brought the concept to America. Now kindergartens are pretty much mandatory all over.
And it seems that the social(ist) engineers just never quite give up. They may lay aside some programs for awhile if they seem to be drawing opposition or hostility. But they realise the public has a notoriously short memory, and so they bide their time and await a further opportunity to foist their socialist programs on an unsuspecting public, in the form of some “new” and exciting and “innovative” program. The same old socialist junk with a nice new Red ribbon tied around it!
A few years back I read an article in the Washington Post about how, at that time, there needed to be new plans made for reaching children at an earlier age. Supposedly studies had been done showing that children that are exposed to government school propaganda at an earlier age do much, much better in their overall studies than do those poor unfortunates that are never exposed to such grand educational “opportunities.” The writer of the article bemoaned the fact that there just wasn’t enough money around to get all the kiddies involved in these wonderful pre-kindergarten programs. Sound familiar? Awhile back I had also read parts of a report that said all these youngsters who get involved in programs like “Headstart” at earlier ages, in the long run, don’t seem to do any better than those who don’t. Of course this newer report disagreed with that. Anyone surprised?
Of course if some innovative educrat can manage to sell an early education program to the government school bureaucracy, then think of all the new teachers they will need, and all the new school buildings that may have to be built, or old ones that will need additions, and just think of all the increased property taxes that will need to be raised for it all to be paid for. I can see the dollar signs in the bureaucrats’ eyes now!
And now we have a new situation in Kalifornia, where, according to Steven Greenhut, senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register “A state court of appeal has basically outlawed home-schooling. As the Los Angeles Times reported ‘Parents who lack teaching credentials cannot educate their children at home, according to a state appellate court ruling that is sending waves of fear through California’s home-schooling families’.” Seems like the public sector really hates competition, especially competition that makes it look bad.
According to this ruling “A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state (emphasis mine) and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.” “Loyalty to the state”–how nice! Hitler and Stalin would just love it! To put it into perspective, how different is this court ruling than the comment made by a senator back in the Lincoln administration who said that, in support of the Morrill Act, “the role of the national government is to mold the character of the American people.” That was fertilizer then and it still is–but it shows plainly the statist mindset. The bureaucrats really think your children belong to them–the property of the state–to do with as they please while you pay for it all. I can’t think of a better reason to tell the government school system to go fish and to remove your children from it (and from Kalifornia if needs be).
Public education is nothing more than an experiment (a failed one by decent standards) in state socialism–and that is all it has ever been since day one. Don’t buy into the counterproductive line that you need to get in there, join the parent-teacher group in your area and “reform our public schools.” They have been peddling that line for 100 years now and it has kept many people fat and happy in the school system that, had they ever begun to realise the truth, would have gotten their children out.
More on this situation in Kalifornia in future articles–Lord willing.
Editor & Publisher called this week’s ABC presidential debate “perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years.”
Moderators George Stephanopolous and Charlie Gibson spent the first 50 minutes obsessed with distractions that only political insiders care about–gaffes, polling numbers, the stale Rev. Wright story, and the old-news Bosnia story. And, channelling Karl Rove, they directed a video question to Barack Obama asking if he loves the American flag or not. Seriously.
Enough is enough. The public needs the media to stop hurting the national dialogue in this important election year. Can you sign the petition to ABC and other media outlets and pass it on to friends who are also fed up?
Many allege that the killing of RFK was a conspiracy rather than the actions of a lone disturbed individual. Having analyzed audio recordings of the assassination, The authors of a new book say that at least 13 shots were fired. The convicted Sirhan Sirhan’s gun could hold only eight bullets, and the angle at which he stood in relation to RFK makes it unlikely that Sirhan fired the fatal shot. http://waronyou.blogspot.com/2008/04/second-shooter-in-assassination-of.html
