Hello, I’m here to defend your freedoms!

It vill not be difficult, mein Führer… excuse me… Mr. President.

Today, Mr. Padilla was being held in a high security jail at the Charleston Naval Weapons Station in South Carolina. Bush administration officials said Mr. Padilla had been declared an enemy combatant, a status that makes it easier for the government to detain him without having to bring a criminal charge that would force it disclose sensitive intelligence sources.

There was also some question as to whether there was enough evidence, absent information gathered from intelligence sources, to bring a traditional criminal prosecution that could be won in court. That meant, officials said, that the best and perhaps only realistic alternative was to turn him over to military custody in which he could be held indefinitely.

When I heard the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense cooperated effectively to place an American citizen under indefinite detention without charges in complete violation of the Constitution, I felt much safer from those who hate our freedom. God Bless America.

For further reading:

• Ex parte Merryman decision (1861), under which Executive suspension of habeas corpus during wartime is unconstitutional
• Tom Tomorrow on the convenient timing of the announcement of this month-old arrest
• GT 2001/10/01: Biff’s Back, for a commentary on civil liberties in this time of crisis
• GT 2001/09/17: Fears of Domestic Fascism

I am scared, honest-to-God scared, about what is happening in this country.

There are no words for the terror, grief, sadness, rage, and pain of the attack on Tuesday. Perhaps 5,000 people dead. Thousands more wounded. All of us paralyzed by the carnage, the gut-wrenching horror, the crime against humanity that unfolded before us on live television, the Internet, the radio, the choking words between friends and strangers.

And now we have begun to react predictably, tragically, terrifyingly, like a beast stung. It had begun already on Tuesday when pols stood on state house and capitol steps all across the country and belted out God Bless America — as if the motherfucking abstract nation-state identity of America were brutally attacked by three exploding jets, rather than 5,000 innocent people. The flags and the yellow ribbons are appearing everywhere. In an unprecedented act of hatred, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell used the 700 Club as a pulpit to blame gays, lesbians, feminists, and secularists for the attacks. I can’t count the number of hateful anti-Muslim or anti-Arab statements I’ve heard person-to-person, or through the mass media. And now the violence has begun. Amateur brownshirts in Chicago had to be turned back by police with machine guns when a mob chanting U-S-A, U-S-A had to be stopped from setting fire to a mosque. A Muslim community center was firebombed. In Detroit, with the largest Arab population in the United States, Muslim centers were subjected to bomb threats and death threats; two young men were arrested after saying they were going down to kill all the Arabs in Dearborn. In Arizona, a Sikh gas station owner was murdered because his turban and beard made him resemble the media portrayal of Arabs.

On the radio I hear Sen. Zell Miller (GA) saying that when we find who is responsible for the attack we should Bomb the hell out of them. If that means collateral damage, so be it. What he doesn’t say is that collateral damage is a polite way of saying mass murder of civilians, and when he tries to justify it by saying that They obviously don’t care about our civilians he forgets that the innocents he is so eager to murder had nothing to do with the atrocity of 9/11/2001. NATO has already invoked the World War III clause of their charter. The hawks of the Right and Left have cried Havoc, and authorized President Bush with a blank check for military force and billions in new defense spending. They are already preparing us for permanent war against an unspecifiable, unlocatable enemy (a war against terrorism), which they have promised to fight through covert means (over 6,000,000 people worldwide have been killed by United States covert operations since World War II) and have made it explicit that no particular tactic is off the table (for those keeping count, that includes: nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, carpet-bombing, etc.). At home, Tim Russert is saying on national Teevee that the line between security and freedom will have to be redefined — meaning less freedom. Already motions are being made to strengthen the police state through imposing new bans on Internet security software, increasing invasive searches and racial profiling of Arabs at airports, and extending the FBI’s wiretap powers. Nobody in the government feels they can afford to stand up to the railroading tactics of the Defense Department and the FBI, and what’s worse, perhaps nobody even wants to.

We cannot ever, ever forget that the warfare State and the spectre of terrorism have been the greatest instruments of fascist tyranny, and the demonic influence of tyranny is hard to exorcise once it makes its way through. The Cheka (Lenin and Stalin’s murderous secret police) grew to power in the USSR through playing on the threat of counter-revolutionary terrorism in the early 1920s. Woodrow Wilson used WWI to force through tyrannical Sedition and Espionage Acts — which somehow failed to be revoked after World War I ended, and were continually used to suppress dissent during Wilson’s term. The supposed threat of Communist conspiracy was used to justify innumerable police state tactics (sometimes illegal, sometimes not) by the FBI, including their surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. (who they attempted to blackmail) and Malcolm X (who they may have aided the Nation of Islam in murdering) and their murderous COINTELPRO program which they used to hunt down and kill members of the Black Panther Party and to destroy both above-ground and underground antiwar / radical Left activist groups. And already activists have been given notice to watch their backs, by Rep. Don Young (R-AK):

Young warned against rushing to the conclusion that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible. There’s some possibility, he said that the attacks are linked to the protests against the World Trade Organization, another of which [actually, a protest against the World Bank/IMF –CWJ] is scheduled for later this month in Washington D.C.

If you watched what happened (at past protests) in Genoa, in Italy, and even in Seattle, there’s some expertise in that field, Young said. I’m not sure they’re that dedicated, but ecoterrorists — which are really based in Seattle — there’s a strong possibility that could be one of the groups.

Never mind that this is a vicious slander against Left-wing activists on the part of Rep. Young. It’s not any attempt to convey information at all. It’s an outright threat: *We are calling for new powers. And we are coming after you, all of you, the Lefties, the Muslim fanatics, the greenies, the anarchists, the militias… it doesn’t matter who you are, if you are opposed to this government and this American form of life, you will be targeted.

I don’t know what to say or what to do. I am physically, mentally, spiritually exhausted by what happened last Tuesday. I am horrified, I am sick, I still need more time to deal with this. But I am also scared, because I know that a lot of people — a lot of innocent Muslims, a lot of innocent people who look like Muslims, people who will be slaughtered in the bombing and covert operations pushed through by the same Reagan-Bush-Bush cabinet that brought you Iran/Contra and the death squads of El Salvador, people who will die in the terrorist retaliation, 18-24 year olds like me who will be sent to fight and die, dissidents like me who will be targeted by a growing, many-tentacled police state. Today I am honestly frightened about the prospect of domestic fascism in the United States of America.

Not content with having the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act enacted at the level of federal legislation, a Religious Right group called the Alliance for Marriage has proposed a strategy to enshrine a ban on gay marriage in the United States Constitution. Not only would the proposed amendment trample on states’ rights to enable gay marriage where they see fit, but it would also destroy all laws which give gay couples the equivalent privileges of marriage, such as Vermont’s Civil Unions law. Although I have deep reservations about the idea of gay marriage and want marriage-privilege abolished rather than extended to lesbian and gay male couples, we cannot stand for this kind of overt homophobia and discrimination being put into the highest law of the land. As long as State-recognized marriages exist, the government should not discriminate on the basis of gender or sexuality as to who can have them.

Take action! Sign a petition urging elected representatives to Oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment Petition

Richard Shedenhelm wrote a good, brief article using the Confederate Constitution to help refute revisionist claims that Southern secession was about state’s rights, Northern tariffs, or what have you. Although Shedenhelm doesn’t note it, one of the provisions he discusses — Article IV, Section 3 codifies the decision of the United States’ Supreme Court in Dredd Scott v. Sanford by specifying in the Constitution that the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States. Like Dredd Scott, this is in fact a profoundly anti-states’ rights provision, since it fundamentally barred the states of the CSA from self-determination on whether or not to enforce an abolition of slavery within their own borders. Therefore, it seems that the maintenance of white supremacist slavery was more important to the crafters of the Confederacy than states’ rights ever were (which we might also note is backed up by their use of military occupation to keep 1/2 of the state of Tennessee from seceding back into the Union, and Jefferson Davis’s repeated speaches denouncing the ideology of states’ rights as harmful to the Confederate cause).

The Equal Rights Amendment has been re-Introduced in Congress. Rock on. Here’s hoping that (1) it actually gets through this time, (2) it doesn’t paralyze NOW into a one-issue group for the next several years, and (3) Phyllis Schlafly stays in her cave for the duration. The ACLU‘s heavy-handed self-congratulations patting itself on the back over its feminist record is rather hypocritical, but that is another post entirely….