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Banned
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Is American "conservatism" and the President's Oath of Office, Incompatible?
Quote:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/pihtml/pioaths.html
Each president recites the following oath, in accordance with Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
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Our history:
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/wa...gewanted=print
December 23, 2007
Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950
By TIM WEINER
A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.
Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.
“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.
Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.
The Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include “threatened invasion” or “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory.”
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an “unlawful enemy combatant.”
But the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of American citizens to seek a writ of habeas corpus. This month the court heard arguments on whether about 300 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay had the same rights. It is expected to rule by next summer.
Hoover’s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection makes up a new volume of “The Foreign Relations of the United States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department since the Civil War.
Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.
So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.
The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.
The only modern precedent for Hoover’s plan was the Palmer Raids of 1920, named after the attorney general at the time. The raids, executed in large part by Hoover’s intelligence division, swept up thousands of people suspected of being communists and radicals.
Previously declassified documents show that the F.B.I.’s “security index” of suspect Americans predated the cold war. In March 1946, Hoover sought the authority to detain Americans “who might be dangerous” if the United States went to war. In August 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark gave the F.B.I. the power to make a master list of such people.
Hoover’s July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney W. Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.
In September 1950, Congress passed and the president signed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. Truman did declare such an emergency in December 1950, after China entered the Korean War. But no known evidence suggests he or any other president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal.
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Quote:
http://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/actio...ointelpro.html
Within one year of the formation of the Black Panther Party, the FBI established a special counter-intelligence program called COINTELPRO, to neutralize political dissidents. Between the years 1956 and 1971, the FBI used the COINTELPRO program to investigate "radical" national political groups for intelligence that would lead to involvement of foreign enemies with these groups. This of course meant that the FBI specifically targeted American citizens. According to COINTELPRO documents, 5 groups were singled out for investigation - the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party, White Hate Groups, Black Nationalist Hate Groups and the New Left. The Black Panther Party was specifically targeted and bore the brunt of the most damage.
According to FBI documents, one of the purposes of the COINTELPRO program was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists". They wanted to prevent the rise of a black "messiah" and Martin Luther King Jr. had been amongst the candidates until his assassination in 1968 when the attention shifted to Huey P. Newton. Of the 295 documented actions taken by COINTELPRO to disrupt Black groups, 233 were directed against the Black Panther Party.
In his doctoral thesis, War Against The Panthers: A Study of Repression in America, Newton accuses J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO of: fostering a split between Eldridge Cleaver and himself through false letters and documents; creating discord between the BPP and other Black groups such as Ron Karenga's group United Slaves [US], which led to the murders of Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and John Huggins at the University of California; and involvement in the murder of Fred Hampton, leader of the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1969.
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A description of what THEY are planning, and who they are entrusting "IT" with:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews
FBI Prepares Vast Database Of Biometrics
$1 Billion Project to Include Images of Irises and Faces
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 22, 2007; Page A01
CLARKSBURG, W. Va. -- The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.
Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.
"Bigger. Faster. Better. That's the bottom line," said Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which operates the database from its headquarters in the Appalachian foothills.
The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that people's bodies will become de facto national identification cards. Critics say that such government initiatives should not proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a criminal out of a crowd.....
....The FBI is building its system according to standards shared by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
At the West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), 45 minutes north of the FBI's biometric facility in Clarksburg, researchers are working on capturing images of people's irises at distances of up to 15 feet, and of faces from as far away as 200 yards. Soon, those researchers will do biometric research for the FBI.
Covert iris- and face-image capture is several years away, but it is of great interest to government agencies.
Think of a Navy ship approaching a foreign vessel, said Bojan Cukic, CITeR's co-director. "It would help to know before you go on board whether the people on that ship that you can image from a distance, whether they are foreign warfighters, and run them against a database of known or suspected terrorists," he said.
Skeptics say that such projects are proceeding before there is evidence that they reliably match suspects against a huge database. .....
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Considered in the framework of this study's conclusions, and in the experiences under "republican rule" over the last seven years, why is it unreasonable to believe that the beliefs, actions, and goals of this president and his party are contradictory to the pressident's oath of office?
Quote:
http://www.wam.umd.edu/%7Ehannahk/reply.pdf
Copyright 2003 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
2003, Vol. 129, No. 3, 383–393 0033-2909/03/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.129.3.383
Exceptions That Prove the Rule—Using a Theory of Motivated Social
Cognition to Account for Ideological Incongruities and Political
Anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas (2003)
A meta-analysis by J. T. Jost, J. Glaser, A. W. Kruglanski, and F. J. Sulloway (2003) concluded that
political conservatism is partially motivated by the management of uncertainty and threat. In this reply
to J. Greenberg and E. Jonas (2003), conceptual issues are clarified, numerous political anomalies are
explained, and alleged counterexamples are incorporated with a dynamic model that takes into account
differences between “young” and “old” movements. Studies directly pitting the rigidity-of-the-right
hypothesis against the ideological extremity hypothesis demonstrate strong support for the former.
Medium to large effect sizes describe relations between political conservatism and dogmatism and
intolerance of ambiguity; lack of openness to experience; uncertainty avoidance; personal needs for
order, structure, and closure; fear of death; and system threat.
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The US constitution is a statement of the rights and authority reluctantly ceded by the people to permit a functioning federal government. Are the penchant for "order" and "certainty" compatible with "reluctantly ceded"?
Isn't it possible that the republicans in authority are psychologically incapable of serving to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." ? |