Human Rights

Americas 3. World War - Page 8

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[Reagan passed] the Intelligence Identities Protection act, which makes it a felony to write articles revealing the identities of secret agents or to write about their activities in a way that would reveal their identities. Now, what does this mean? In a debate in Congress - this is very controversial - the supporters of this bill made it clear.... If agents Smith and Jones came on this campus, in an MK-ultra-type experiment, and blew your fiance's head away with LSD, it would now be a felony to publish an article in your local paper saying, `watch out for these 2 turkeys, they're federal agents and they blew my loved one's head away with LSD'. It would not be a felony what they had done because that's national security and none of them were ever punished for those activities.

Efforts to muzzle government employees. President Reagan has been banging away at this one ever since. Proposing that every government employee, for the rest of his or her life, would have to submit anything they wrote to 6 committees of the government for censorship, for the rest of their lives. To keep the scandals from leaking out... to keep the American people from knowing what the government is really doing.

Then it starts getting heavy. The `Pre-emptive Strikes' bill. President Reagan, working through the Secretary of State Shultz... almost 2 years ago, submitted the bill that would provide them with the authority to strike at terrorists before terrorists can do their terrorism. But this bill... provides that they would be able to do this in this country as well as overseas. It provides that the secretary of state would put together a list of people that he considers to be terrorist, or terrorist supporters, or terrorist sympathizers. And if your name, or your organization, is put on this list, they could kick down your door and haul you away, or kill you, without any due process of the law and search warrants and trial by jury, and all of that, with impunity.

Now, there was a tremendous outcry on the part of jurists. The New York Times columns and other newspapers saying, `this is no different from Hitler's "night in fog" program', where the government had the authority to haul people off at night. And they did so by the thousands. And President Reagan and Secretary Shultz have persisted.... Shultz has said, `Yes, we will have to take action on the basis of information that would never stand up in a court. And yes, innocent people will have to be killed in the process. But, we must have this law because of the threat of international terrorism'.

Think a minute. What is `the threat of international terrorism'? These things catch a lot of attention. But how many Americans died in terrorist actions last year? According to Secretary Shultz, 79. Now, obviously that's terrible but we killed 55,000 people on our highways with drunken driving; we kill 2,500 people in far nastier, bloodier, mutilating, gang-raping ways in Nicaragua last year alone ourselves. Obviously 79 peoples' death is not enough reason to take away the protection of American citizens, of due process of the law.

But they're pressing for this. The special actions teams that will do the pre-emptive striking have already been created, and trained in the defense department.

They're building detention centers. There were 8 kept as mothballs under the McLaren act after World War II, to detain aliens and dissidents in the next war, as was done in the next war, as was done with the Japanese people during World War II. They're building 10 more, and army camps, and the... executive memos about these things say it's for aliens and dissidents in the next national emergency....


What they are planning for this society, and this is why they're determined to take us into a war if we'll permit it... is the Reagan revolution.... So he's getting himself some laws so when he puts in
the troops in Nicaragua, he can take charge of the American people, and put people in jail, and kick in their doors, and kill them if they don't like what he's doing....

The question is, `Are we going to permit our leaders to take away our freedoms because they have a charming smile and they were nice movie stars one day, or are we going to stand up and fight, and insist on our freedoms?' It's up to us - you and I can watch this history play in the next year and 2 and 3 years.