Obama’s Abominal First-Term Track Record on Civil Liberties

[Onebornfree commentary: this "interesting"  article by attorney John Whitehead exposes the reality of our imagined "civil liberties"  under the first 4 years of Mr. Obama. The list of  abuses is long, and getting longer by the day. And it ain't gonna stop, regardless of who gets elected president! { possible exception: Ron Paul or similar}. The question for you as an individual is what , if anything, can you do about this state of affairs? How can you protect yourself from the ever broader sweep of a state that now rampages wherever, whenever and now openly targets even US citizens for "elimination" with no due process? If you would like to discus these and related questions email me: onebornfree at yahoo dot com- regards, onebornfree , and The Freedom Network.] 

Four years after Barack Obama was elected on a platform of "change you can believe in," he’s now promising America that the "best is yet to come." However, on almost every front – fiscally, militarily, politically, socially – the country is in a state of disarray.

Most troubling, however, is the state of our freedoms. Indeed, during Obama’s first term, our civil liberties were utterly and completely disemboweled. The great irony is that this happened with a self-proclaimed constitutional law professor at the helm – a man who was supposed to understand and respect the rule of law as laid out in the U.S. Constitution.

Not only did Obama continue many of the most outrageous abuses of the George W. Bush administration (which were bad enough), including indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance of American citizens, but he also succeeded in expanding the power of the "imperial president," including the ability to assassinate American citizens abroad and unilaterally authorize drone strikes resulting in the deaths of countless innocent civilians, including women and children.

Just consider some of the assaults on our freedoms that took place under Obama’s watch, either as a result of his continuing Bush’s policies, enacting his own misguided policies or simply because he did nothing to counter them.

In March 2009, Obama defended Bush’s unconstitutional National Security Agency spying program in court, insisting that actions authorized by the President, including illegally spying on American citizens, should be free from any judicial scrutiny whatsoever.

In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security called for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be "disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war." Coupled with the DHS’ report on "Rightwing Extremism," which broadly defines extremists as "mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely," these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.

In July 2009, Obama threatened to veto an oversight bill that would have required the president to inform lawmakers about covert CIA activities.

In December 2009, Obama announced his intention to ramp up the military industrial complex’s war in Afghanistan and subsequently followed through on his plan.

In February 2010, the Department of Defense issued a U.S. Army field manual detailing the prospective internment and resettlement of American citizens in the event of another terrorist attack or natural disaster on U.S. soil.

In March 2010, the Department of Homeland Security began rolling out controversial full-body scanners to American airports. A year later, an investigative report by ProPublica/PBS NewsHour, revealed that six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines, which were purchased with Obama’s stimulus funds.

In July 2010, the Obama administration arrested and held Bradley Manning in maximum solitary confinement on charges that he leaked classified military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks.

In May 2011, Obama renewed three controversial provisions in the USA Patriot Act that authorize the government to use aggressive surveillance tactics – even against American citizens – in the so-called war against terror. That same month, the U.S. Supreme Court, at the urging of the Obama administration, effectively decimated the Fourth Amendment by giving SWAT teams more leeway to break into homes or apartments without a warrant when they suspect evidence might be destroyed.

In June 2011, the FBI granted its 14,000 agents expansive additional powers, allowing them to investigate individuals using highly intrusive monitoring techniques, including infiltrating suspect organizations with confidential informants and photographing and tailing suspect American citizens, without having any factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing.

In September 2011, two American citizens were killed during a drone attack in Yemen as part of a government "kill list" operation in which Obama personally directs who should be targeted for death by military drones.

In December 2011, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which mandates that anyone suspected of terrorism against the United States be held in military custody indefinitely. This provision extends to American citizens.

In February 2012, Obama signed the FAA Reauthorization Act, which opens up American skies for the domestic use of armed surveillance drones.

In March 2012, Obama approved the "Trespass Bill," which makes it a federal crime to protest or assemble in the vicinity of protected government officials. That same month, Obama issued an executive order stating that in the case of a war or national emergency, the federal government has the authority to take over almost every aspect of American society.

In April 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court – again at the urging of the Obama administration – declared that any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials without reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is carrying a weapon or contraband.

In July 2012, the Obama administration began allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to store and "critically assess" information on innocent Americans for up to five years. Data recorded by the NCTC includes "records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records," among other things.

In September 2012, in major cities across the country, the U.S. military carried out training exercises involving Black Hawk helicopters and uniformed soldiers. The exercises occurred in the middle of the night, with the full cooperation of the local police forces and generally without forewarning the public.

In October 2012, it was revealed that the Obama administration has been "secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the ‘disposition matrix.’" The matrix goes beyond the president’s kill list to detail suspects beyond the reach of American drones. This disposition matrix is also overseen by the NCTC.

So what does the future hold? Unless President Obama changes course – and drastically so – freedom as we have known it will become extinct.

Copyright © 2012 The Rutherford Institute     November 13, 2012

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead [send him mail] is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He is the author of The Change Manifesto (Sourcebooks).

Obama's FEMA Camps

Obama's FEMA Camps and the Deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-Il

by Scott Lazarowitz [N.B. internal links of the original article are not posted here but can be seen in original- please see link at bottom of this page- onebornfree]

"According to this article and this article, Obama’s FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is getting camps ready for not only the post-economic collapse, but for political dissidents and critics of government criminality. This will be made possible by Congress’s just having codified into law Obama’s dictatorship by giving him the power to treasonously turn the military against the American people. Thanks to the imbeciles and criminals of Congress, Obama can have anyone apprehended and detained indefinitely, merely by labeling someone a "terrorist," at his discretion, without any evidence presented against the accused, without any charges or trial.

Now, those two linked articles go to Infowars.com. Some people have smeared Infowars as a "conspiracy theory" website, but Alex Jones and his crew are very responsible and conscientious researchers and reporters, and they present and link to information that documents and gives evidence to their assertions of government "conspiracies." So, they are not ‘theorists," they are conspiracy factualists. And you can see various things by Gov. Jesse Ventura as well. While Ventura actually calls his show "Conspiracy Theory," he goes out on location and investigates such theories and allegations of possible government wrongdoing, and, especially from this unbelievable video posted just recently (especially starting at about 25 minutes into it), you can decide for yourself whether Ventura is just a "theorist" or a factualist.

In that linked video, Ventura exposes a large "residential" center, with locked front doors and surrounded by high fences with barbed wire facing inward. While it looks exactly like a prison, there were children playing on swings in one area within the grounds. Thanks to the emotionally frantic, post-9/11 dupes for the Bush/Obama’s police state, we seem to be on the road to Soviet-Nazi tyranny — unless someone actually takes action such as arresting Obama and those aforementioned senators and congressmen and charging these government officials with treason.

Yes, I know there are many people who are in denial, and so trusting of their beloved government, especially their federal government, regardless of how much the government abuses them. "They would never do anything of a criminal nature to us." But just look at Katrina, and the BP-government police state with that oil spill last year. Look at what our military people have done to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pakistan. As I pointed out in this article, look at what our military people have been doing to their own fellow comrades. Being in denial will not help you when you are a target of military aggression, let alone a target of your local police.

Jacob Hornberger noted here and here how dangerous a government’s military could be.

And, regarding this new law codifying Obama’s dictatorship and his merely labeling someone a "terrorist" without evidence shown, only someone extremely naive could think that Obama or any political ruler or prospective one such as Romney wouldn’t have his goons nab someone who challenges their power grabs and who openly presents views that could convince others to withdraw support of the Regime.

Unfortunately, the naive and gullible dupes for police statism cry,"But we have to allow officials to sweep up those ‘terrorists’ based on the judgment of military personnel or police (and without evidence) because we can’t wait for the process of a trial with a jury to prove someone’s guilt and then imprison him, we have to risk rounding up innocents!"

One thing that Gov. Ventura noted in the video was that, with all this stuff, we’re headed for either tyranny or liberty.

Interestingly, there were two deaths this week of two world leaders who contrasted one another in that liberty-tyranny fork in the road: Kim Jong-Il, the crazy dictator from North Korea; and Vaclav Havel, the sensible political dissident who opposed communist Soviet rule and worked for freedom in his country of the Czech Republic (formerly a merged Czech and Slovak Czechoslovakia).

According to Wikipedia, Havel, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, "was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, that proposed the establishment of the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. He also received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the freedom medal of the Four Freedoms Award, the Ambassador of Conscience Award and several other distinctions." (Need I say, beyond what I’ve exhaustively already written, what Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama has done?)

While still in Czechoslovakia under Soviet dictatorial rule, Havel founded the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted, whose main goal was to educate the population about the persecution of dissidents, people who disagree with government policy and either withdraw their consent and/or openly and actively work to make changes. Yes, the U.S. has the American Civil Liberties Union, and other similar organizations, but it seems that, especially with the latest acts of Congress and Obama and their implicit threats to jail American dissidents, "civil liberties" organizations in the U.S. seem as powerless as they seemed to be in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.

One of Havel’s first acts as President of Czechoslovakia, before it split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, was to give amnesty to and release the country’s political prisoners. Can we possibly expect any U.S. president to do the same here? Particularly with the War on Drugs, which imprisons a much higher proportion of inner-city minorities than others amongst the general population. But what exactly will Obama, the military and FEMA (and Obama’s ACORN and Obama’s obedient union militants) do to political dissidents in the U.S., especially if there is to be economic collapse, civil unrest, looting and so forth?

And, in contrast to Vaclav Havel and all his work toward greater freedom and individual liberty, what did Kim Jong-Il do? According to Human Rights Watch,

"Kim Jong-Il exercised total control for 17 years over one of the world’s most closed and repressive governments. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of North Koreans through widespread preventable starvation, horrendous prisons and forced labor camps, and public executions. Kim family rule, starting with his father, Kim Il-Sung in 1948, is projected to continue with Kim Jong-Il’s son, Kim Jong-Un…

"Kim Jong-Il’s legacy includes the fate of the tens of thousands who have died in the kwanliso camps for alleged enemies of the state, where today an estimated 200,000 North Koreans continue to work and die in conditions of near starvation and brutal abuse. In this system, the sins of one member of the family condemn an entire generation to imprisonment. A steady stream of former prisoners who escaped North Korea have testified to Human Rights Watch and other organizations how even children born inside such camps grow up to inherit their parents’ prisoner status.

"Leaving the country without official permission is considered an act of treason, punishable by torture and imprisonment, yet tens of thousands have fled in the last two decades, and thousands more continue to risk their lives every year to escape."

The way that Jesse Ventura described those "residential" facilities with barbed wire run by FEMA and Homeland Security, it would seem like Dick Cheney, Obama and Janet Napolitano are learning about government-civilian relations more from Kim Jong-Il than from Vaclav Havel.

One wonders about what kind of country America has become when we have the choice between Statist A or Statist B, the Affirmative Action President Obama who collects Spider Man and Conan the Barbarian comics, or Romney who put his dog on the roof of the car for a long trip. (Who would do that?)

And in the current Obama Administration, we have the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs chief Cass Sunstein, who wants to "cognitively infiltrate" Internet websites and social networking sites, and we have an Obama Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan who said that freedom of speech "depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs" (i.e. government-approved speech).

And a "science czar," John Holdren, who believes that a born human infant "will ultimately develop into a human being," but believes that trees should have rights to sue in court. And Obama’s former health care czar and current director of the National Institute of Health bioethics (sic) department, Dr. Zeke Emanuel, believes the government should have the power and control to allocate and ration health care, not the doctors and patients.

Why does it seem that so many people in government are just plain nuts?

As the Economic Collapse Blog noted in this article, the legacy of Kim Jong-Il and his North Korean regime is one of "weirdness," just plain crazy yet frightening stuff. The writer concludes, "Please do not let that happen to America." I think it already is happening, and we have good reason to believe that. Just where are the Vaclav Havels of our time? (I think we know the answer to that question!)

The real crimes in America are not being committed by or planned by private civilians who believe in personal and economic freedom, private property and the philosophy of Live and Let Live, and who want to speak out against intrusions and threats posed by those with armed, compulsory government legal authority and power.

No, the real crimes are those of our government officials who are extremely clueless about liberty and who are totally drunk with power grabs. Seizing and detaining innocent civilians? Suppressing speech and political dissent? "Emergency" camps? Government degenerates and outlaws have become the most dangerous amongst our increasingly vulnerable population under centralized rule.


Scott Lazarowitz is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

[original article with many internal linkshere ]
Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com.