Freedom Is Not Free – And Americans Are Poised To Lose Everything, Part II

About to be consummated by the Senate may be one of the most egregious, far-reaching, and dangerous attacks on constitutional rights in U.S. history. What is scheduled to take place this week on the Senate floor is a hearing about shielding telecommunication companies from both past and future criminal and civil liability for helping the Bush Administration to deploy and operate a massive computerized system of unlawful search and seizure with the potential to disrupt and destroy free elections, privacy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in America — in a word, democracy.

The gravity of this attack on democracy in America cannot be overstated and is now by far the most serious crisis gripping this nation. Yet most Americans do not know about it. Nor is it on the evening news or being addressed by the mainstream pundits who instead speak at length about who won the last Democratic presidential debate. Sadly, it may not matter.

Since September 2001, and possibly earlier, AT&T, working cooperatively with the White House and the National Security Agency, has conducted monitoring of all e-mail and phone messages passing through the AT&T system, which also includes Qwest and Sprint. Making copies of all these messages and routing them for analysis to secret rooms hidden deep inside major AT&T hubs in the United States, this system has the potential to analyze message content according to predefined search criteria. Absent judicial oversight, as is now the case, these criteria could easily (and may presently be) set to find and read all messages sent by Democratic opponents of the GOP for purposes of gaining an unfair advantage in the upcoming presidential election in November 2008. Worse, this infrastructure supports interception, analysis, and reconfiguration of electronically cast votes when they are routed from individual voting precincts through the phone lines to a central headquarters for tallying. Unless this surveillance system is dismantled or placed immediately under careful, ongoing judicial watch, the outcome of voting in the next election — and in subsequent elections — may be as predictable as rolling loaded dice. Unfortunately, the FISA revisions currently before the Senate do not provide for the judicial oversight urgently needed to prevent the use of this system for such nefarious purposes.

HR 3373, the so-called Restore Act, which has recently been passed by the House of Representatives, has been scheduled for a Senate hearing this week along with the Senate’s version of the bill, S. 2248, The FISA Amendments Act. Each of these bills attempts to revise the 1978 FISA law passed after the Nixon Administration to protect American citizens from being illegally spied on by government. MUCH MORE I highly suggest you read this brilliant article.

I was going to provide a commentary on Operation Falcon and what the danger of these transparent ploys to coordinate city, state, and federal law enforcement agencies that would have the ability to sweep-up hundreds of thousands of people in the early hours of the morning. Those doing the arresting would be led to believe they were arresting actual criminals, not the voice of freedom and those who seek to preserve our constitutional values. These are the imminent dangers we face as a nation, and each must be addressed immediately! Below are some excerpts on Operation Falcon:

Operation FALCON - The USA is turning into a Police State

Operation Falcon: Blueprint for removing dissidents and political rivals

The Bush administration has carried out three massive sweeps in the last two years, rolling up more than 30,000 minor crooks and criminals, without as much as a whimper of protest from the public.

So far, not one of the more than 30,000 victims has been charged with a terror-related crime. So far, not one of the more than 30,000 victims has been charged with a terror-related crime.Operation Falcon is the clearest indication yet that the Bush administration is fine-tuning its shock-troops so it can roll up tens of thousands of people at a moment’s notice and toss them into the newly-built Halliburton detention centers. This should be a red flag for anyone who cares at all about human rights, civil liberties, or simply saving his own skin.

Operation Falcon was allegedly the brainchild of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his counterpart in the US Marshal’s office, (Director) Ben Reyna. But its roots go much deeper into the nexus of right-wing Washington think tanks where fantasies of autocratic government have a long history. The name, Falcon, is an acronym for “Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally.” It relates to the more than 960 state, local and federal agencies which are directly involved in the administration’s expansive criminal dragnets.

Typically, law enforcement agencies are protective of their own turf and wary of outside intervention. The Falcon program overrides these concerns by streamlining the information-sharing processes and setting up a chain-of-command structure that radiates from the Justice Department. This removes many of the traditional obstacles to agency interface. It also relocates the levers of power in Washington where they can be manned by members of the Bush administration.
MUCH, MUCH MORE Another must-read article.

I had planned to cover a lot of ground in this piece, however our situation is dire. I’m hoping these measures weren’t voted on today, and thankfully, I haven’t seen anything otherwise posted. In the part of this series, Freedom Is Not Free – And Americans Are Poised To Lose Everything, Part 1, we need everyone reading these articles to get on the phones, call congress, the media, call or write your local editors, do what-ever is legal to make Congress and the Mainstream News Media take “We the People” seriously and understand that America belongs to the majority, not the elite and tyrants that seek to undermine the very basics of what make this nation great. We teeter on the verge of total dictatorship, and I believe the only way to halt these tyrants is for five million or more Americans ( A relatively small group when you consider their are 300 million of us here.) pledging to spend ten to fifteen minutes per day calling the White House, Senate, House of Representatives and every other federal agency we can imagine. It is our constitutional right to engage in peaceful protests, and tying up the phone lines in Washington will prove to the politicians that America is watching, and we want our rights protected, not sold-out to a Lobbyist or special interest group. We want our Constitution protected and abided by - not treated as if it meant nothing, and those who died in making a dream become a reality would truly be grief-stricken if they could see the abuse our government has suffered…

Who I am means nothing. The message above could be the equation to helping win the fight for our individual and collective freedom(s), and unfortunately, the time for discussion has long passed. It’s time to take action, right now, and express your outrage that Free Speech and the freedom of a nation is under direct attack by those that seek to destroy the American way of life. Whether it’s five million, or one million people who begin to express their disgust and outrage on how our Constitution and Bill of Rights is being trampled-upon is immaterial - what counts is that you understand the seriousness of what’s at stake, and pick up those phones today, tomorrow, and everyday thereafter until these threats against the American people have been quashed and/or replaced with legislation that makes sense - not legislation that is so vague and odious that it condemns those who are fighting daily for democracy to whatever Homeland Security desires, and that easily could mean imprisonment and the loss of everything they and their families own.

William Cormier 

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