Our taxes are funding research to devise ways to decrease freedom of information access. The man doing it was the Green Beret senior legal advisor for six years. For this friend of fascism and Bush apologist, black ops and secrecy are his middle name.

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File Under Fascist

Jeffrey Addicott is a nasty creature who makes his living, a very good living, as an apologist for fascism and dirty work.

According to USA today, he's received a million dollar grant, through St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, to develop model verbiage for laws to be cookie cutter adopted by states nationwide. The goal of the laws is to restrict information that is currently available.

Now, this may seem like a reasonable national security issue. But a simple googling of Addicott shows his involvement portends a much morre sinister side to this grant-- basically a grant to restrict public access to information.

Here, he defends the abuse of Posse Comitatus, supporting the use of US troops in the U.S., saying, "the usual ranting by the "Black Helicopter" crowd that views every use of the United States military as a continuing government conspiracy to garrison this nation with United Nations forces.." and more ominously, "...it is certain that the United States is slowly crossing the mental bridge from using its armed forces to wage conventional warfare on foreign soil to developing action-oriented tactics and strategies to combat terrorism in the homeland..."

A Reuters report cites Addicott further on his position opposing the Posse Comitatus law,

Jeffrey Addicott, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army JAG Corps, wrote that the law handcuffs the nation when it comes to responding to terrorist attacks.

''We've got a homeland defense office, but if there's not reforms, the Posse Comitatus Act will cut them off at the knees,'' Addicott, now a law professor at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, said in a recent interview.

''This is a new kind of war,'' Addicott said. ''We have to make a compromise now to prevent these guys from committing an act of terror on a larger scale.''

He defends the torture at Abu Ghraib with ridiculous, circular reasoning, based on the misleading assertion that "t was the military itself that self-reported to the media the fact individual soldiers were being investigated and punished in accordance with the rule of law for wartime abuses at the prison." So what? The military only reported on the abuses when they were caught. Claiming the military is innocent because it prosecutes some scapegoated grunts does not make them innocent. I can't imagine who. outside of people who want an easy explanation and way to accept an excuse, would believe his nonsense.

USA today reports,

Jeffrey Addicott, a professor at the law school, said he will use that research to produce a national "model statute" that state legislatures and Congress could adopt to ensure that potentially dangerous information "stays out of the hands of the bad guys."

"There's the public's right to know, but how much?" said Addicott, a former legal adviser in the Army's Special Forces.

"There's a strong feeling that the law needs to balance that with the need to protect the well-being of the nation. ... There's too much stuff that's easy to get that shouldn't be," he said.

The federal Freedom of Information Act, which became law 40 years ago this week, has long been a source of tension between the government and the public and news media.

Critics say the research plan overstates the need for secrecy and is likely to give state and federal governments too much discretion to withhold material. "Restricting information (for) security and efficiency and comfort level, that's the good story," says Paul McMasters, a specialist in public information law at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va. "The bad story is that it can also be a great instrument of control. ... To automatically believe that the less known the better is really not rational."

With people like Addicott, the US will be moving towards fascism faster and faster.

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Jeffrey Addicott is Associate Professor of Law and Director, Center for Terrorism Law, St. Mary's University School of Law. He was an active duty army officer in the Judge Advocate General's Corps for 20 years, spending a quarter of that time as a senior legal advisor to the Army Special Forces. He was the senior legal advisor for the Green Berets for six years, operating in Peru, Colombia, Haiti, Bosnia, Albania, Ukraine, Thailand, etc.

In a blog interview, he makes a very interesting comment,

I firmly believe we are in a "state of war" with al Qaeda and similar al Qaeda-like groups. The Global War on Terrorism is not a metaphor like the "war on drugs" or the "war on poverty." Indeed, if we are not in a "state of war," then the government is clearly engaging in a wide variety of illegal activities to include the detention process at Guantanamo. If we are at war, then these things are not unprecedented at all.

I wonder. There are many who argue that we are not at war, that the label is a politically expedient term. That would indicate that the behavior at Guantanamo is criminal. OF course, Addicott takes the position that every there is just hunky dory, business as usual. Addicott goes on, in the interview to suggest that the "we are at war" theory should allow the president to arrest anyone, including US citizens and to hold them for the duration, as long as the, "war" is still defined to be ongoing.

That raises the question of whether we are at war or not. Addicott has said, in a NORAD article

"President Bush has declared numerous times that we are at war," said Addicott. He also opined that Congress and the Supreme Court - by recent actions - accede that United States is at war.

But Bush also said the major hostilities had ceased, back in 2003. it is convenient to say we are war, to claim our being at was as an excuse for all kinds of abuses of democracy and the constitution.

This suggest that we have all the more reason to demand that the congress take a stand and legislate a clear statement that we are not at war, that, basically, Bush is full of it. Once congress passes that legislation, it changes all the rules, as Addicott says. It's time to move forward. This nonsense about being at war with a widespread group of people is a metaphor at best, a fraud and scam at worst.

People like Addicott are well funded and working hard to erase the freedoms, the democracy that the US was born with and with which the founders endowed us. It's important to know that people like him are getting major funding from our tax dollars to turn the US more and more into a secretive police state where anything goes, based on the excuse that we are "at war."

Addicott is a dangerous man, a threat to democracy thinly veiled in lawyer garb.

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