A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (2 page)
Read A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State Online
Authors: John W. Whitehead
24
The Criminalization of America's School Children
25
The Prison Industrial Complex
26
The Psychology of Compliance
PART VII
THE POINT OF NO RETURN?
28
Have We Reached the Point of No Return?
29
Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them
30
Compliant Lambs or Nonviolent Gadflies?
31
What Kind of Revolutionary Will You Be?
By Nat Hentoff
I
f James Madison or Thomas Jefferson were brought back to life, they would not recognize this country.
We have been through some troubling times before in our nation's history. There were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 when newspaper editors, civilians–who criticized the government–were placed in jail. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. He even arrested members of the Maryland legislature and all kinds of people around the country who objected to his policies.
We had the Red Raids in the early 1920s that started off J. Edgar Hoover's career in which hundreds of people were arrested, some of them deported without any due process at all. During the First World War, Woodrow Wilson not only practically suspended but also discarded the First Amendment. Then there were the Japanese internment camps of World War II, followed by Senator Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror, which was ended by fellow senators who realized that he had gone too far.
What we have now may be more insidious. Indeed, I believe we are in a worse state now than ever before in this country. With the surveillance state closing in on us, we are fighting to keep our country free from our own government.
Whereas we once operated under the Constitution, we are now, for example, under the USA Patriot Act, among other government dragnets, that permits pervasive electronic surveillance with minimal judicial review. The government listens in on our phone calls. It reads our mail. You have to be careful about what you do and say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with McCarthy, since the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious. We have no idea how much the government knows about average citizens. This is not the way the government born under the Declaration of Independence is supposed to operate.
Under the USA Patriot Act, FBI agents with a court order from a secret court, can enter people's homes and offices when they are not present, look around and take what they like. They can examine a hard drive and install in your computer the magic lantern, known less metaphorically as the keystroke jogger, which means they can record while you are not there everything you have typed on your computer, including stuff you have never sent. Then, under the USA Patriot Act, they can come back when you are not at home and download whatever information of yours they so desire. With advances in technology, they can even accomplish their clandestine objectives from a remote location.
All of this makes a prophet out of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who, during the first wiretapping case back in 1928
[Olmstead v. U.S.]
, said in his dissent: "Ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home."
Government officials like to claim that everything they are doing is for security, to keep America safe in the so-called war against terrorism. What they are really effectuating is a weakening of why we are Americans. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans today have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans, let alone why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights. People are becoming accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment, for example. One of the things that is taught so badly in our schools, from elementary and middle school through graduate school, including journalism schools, is the Constitution—our liberties and rights.
Too many Americans appear unconcerned about the loss of fundamental individual liberties—such as due process, the right to confront their government accusers in a courtroom, and the presumption of innocence–that are vital to being an American. Yet the reason we are vulnerable to being manipulated by the government out of fear is that most of us do not know and understand our liberties and how difficult it was to obtain them and how hard it is to keep them.
We are Americans because, under our Constitution, we are guaranteed freedom–which makes us the oldest living constitutional democracy. I think the greatest decision by the United States Supreme Court was rendered by Justice Robert Jackson in
West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette
in the middle of the Second World War. When the children of Jehovah's Witnesses would not salute the flag, they were expelled and their parents threatened with jail for contributing to the delinquency of minors. Their religion forbade them to salute the flag, which was a graven image. Jackson said, and I am paraphrasing here, that in this country there is no orthodoxy of belief or of conscience whether political, religious or anything else. You can't say that about any other country in the world.
So that's why we are Americans: we are free to be ourselves; to believe in what we believe; to not interfere with other people's beliefs or conscience. Ronald Reagan was known for this phrase, but the first time I heard it was from William O. Douglas, who was a great Supreme Court justice in terms of liberty. Douglas used to say that the government has to be off our backs when it comes to our individual liberties: the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom to be who we are.
For more than sixty-five years as a reporter and an author (the latter beginning with
The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America)
, my primary mission has been provided by James Madison: "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives." I have spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now.
Barring that, a good place to start is with John W Whitehead, whose writing exemplifies George Orwell's freedom-saving advice: "If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." If Orwell were still alive, he would be an avid reader of Whitehead's work.
As you'll find in this book, John is unequalled in revealing the removal of the Constitution's separation of powers by an executive branch that turns the Declaration of Independence upside down. At this stage of our history, with ever advancing government digital technology causing our Fourth Amendment right to privacy to hang by the thread, I can say without exaggeration that no American guardian of the Constitution has done more continually–indeed, almost daily–than John W. Whitehead, through his writing and his legal work. Unlike any other Madisonian investigative reporter and analyst, he deploys his Rutherford Institute allied attorneys to defend–at no charge–Americans of all backgrounds whose personal constitutional liberties are being invaded by government.
The danger we now face is admittedly greater than any we have had before. If I were to judge what I do and write on the basis of optimism, I would probably go back to writing novels, but I figure you have to do what you feel you have to do and just keep hoping and trying to get people to understand why we are Americans and what we are fighting to preserve. That is why I keep writing. That is why John Whitehead continues to write and advocate for those whose rights are being trampled.
I was privileged to have Duke Ellington as a mentor, who said of the jazz that was unsuccessfully banned in their countries by Stalin and Hitler: "The music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country." But only a basically free country could have produced back then such freedom of expression that has become so energizing a global presence. If we are to be again this free a nation, John Whitehead will have had a lot to do with our being able to swing again.
"America will never be destroyed from the outside.
If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because
we destroyed ourselves."
2
–ABRAHAM LINCOLN
W
ho can forget the television and Internet images of sinister-looking, black-garbed police officers in riot gear facing down unarmed groups of nonviolent protesters? Or the young family cowering in fear while a SWAT team crashes through their front door, killing their dog and holding them at gunpoint? Or the young Marine handcuffed, arrested, and held against his will in a hospital psych ward simply for posting song lyrics and antigovernment rhetoric on his Facebook page? Or the small farmers who had their farm raided and their equipment destroyed by armed agents of the Food and Drug Administration simply because they shared unpasteurized goat milk with friends? Or the father of six young children who was jailed for sixty days for holding religious studies in his home?
