Those that are actively engaged in opposition to the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq and the similar threatened action against Iran need to be concerned about the consequences of the passing of the Bill and work to prevent it from becoming Law when it is considered in the Senate as S 1959
The letter below sent to Representative Peter Welch of Vermont, who voted for HR 1955, is representative of the opposition
Dear Mr. Welch,
Your response to Mr. Timothy Price dated November 26, 2007 that contains your defense of HR 1955, Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, has been distributed on the internet for others to read and evaluate. As you know, the official correspondence of the members of the House of Representatives is in the public domain available to anyone that wants to see it or distribute it.
Your letter states, "The bill (HR 1955) does not include any new criminal law or penalties pertaining to terrorism or terrorist ideology, nor does it criminalize or in any way impugn non-violent social activism." This kind of legislation has become known as "enabling legislation"--legislation which lays the ground for governmental activity that leads to legislation that the criminalizes, in this case, speech and other forms of exchanging information.
Yet. there are a myriad of laws that are passed without criminal law provisions that have a profound and lasting deleterious effect on United States citizens and the organization of our society. Not the least of these myriad of laws are the laws that create corporations and establish their "personhood", the laws that fund and support the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestine beyond the internationally recognized 1967 border with Israel.
So your statement about HR 1955 is plain, unadulterated sophistry that is a smoke screen for your support for a law that is specifically prohibited by the Constitution and will, like these other cited laws without criminal provisions, have a lasting deleterious effect on all of us.
What HR 1955 does do is to create categories of speech, writing, ideologies, planning, etc., by using pejorative adjectives in the same way that the Bush/Cheney neocon led government suddenly created a category of prisoner called "enemy combatant" intended to obliterate the meaning of "prisoner" in order to circumvent our laws that protects prisoners; just as they created the categories of "methods" of torture such as "waterboarding" intended to obliterate the meaning of the act of torture in order to circumvent our laws that criminalize the act of torture.
The categories would be laughable if it wasn't for the fact that they are such deadly poison to the rights we have written in the Constitution that specifically prohibit the Government from creating such pejorative categories in this respect.
Here are some of the categories that the law creates:
1-"violent radicalization" of speech, writing, media, philosophy, ideology, religion, theater, cinema, sociology, politics, behavioral science, cultural anthropology etc, etc.,
2-"ideological based violence" in speech, writing, media, philosophy, ideology, religion, theater, cinema, sociology, politics, behavioral science, cultural anthropology etc, etc.
3- "extremist belief system" in speech, writing, media, philosophy, ideology, religion, theater, cinema, sociology, politics, behavioral science, cultural anthropology etc, etc.
You and the rest of Democrats in the House of Representatives of Congress, with the exception of six of its members including Representative Kucinich that opposed it, passed HR 1955 which sole effect is to make a law that is contrary to:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
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