JERRY BROWN ON COUNTER-TERRORISM AND ABUSE OF POWER
"THAT'S THE WAY I SEE IT"
Pass a law-don't think-act in the haste of emotion! This
is the program, folks- to make this a nation of sheep, running from one
side of the field to the other on cue, on whatever excitement, whatever
crisis they're going to throw at us next. Politics runs on fear-fear of
crime, fear of minorities, fear of the underclass, fear of dope, fear of
the immigrants across the border, fear of terrorists. That's what I see
as so tragic. Our media- instead of sharpening our intellects and our ability
to see and argue and debate and come to conclusions that we've tested and
refined-gives us this soupy tapioca that we wallow in as a kind of soporific
for our brains. This is the dumbing down of America!
Please notice what's going on since the Oklahoma bombing. Congressman Henry
Hyde says that the anti-terrorism bill, which has been hung up in the Senate,
will now speed through the full house without additional hearings. Rep.
Schumer of New York predicts, "After this horrible attack I think this
anti-terrorist bill will move like lightning through Congress." Mr.
Schumer, are you talking about the deliberative process and saying it's
going to operate like lightning? That absolutely betrays the essence of
a representative body, which is conscience, debate, reflection, and careful
deliberation before writing a new chapter in the central state's coercive
power. Anything that can create lightning and speed, where there's supposed
to be deliberateness, I say, watch out! Don't let people use the suffering
of little children for their own collateral and ulterior motives. When you
speed through Congress a bill several hundred pages in length, which none
of the Congressmen read, which alters the basic liberties that for 200 years
have been the basis of the promise of America-is that censorship and propaganda,
or isn't it?
Let me be more precise. The Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Act of 1995 was introduced
into the Congress a few months ago. It's been around the Justice Department
and the FBI for several years. The bill would allow the President, without
any other authority, to label any foreign organization as terrorist. Once
that is done, any person assisting that organization commits a crime. If
they say you're affiliated with it or you're sympathetic with it-they've
got a new tool, a handle, a club. The ANC, led by Nelson Mandela, could
have been designated a terrorist group because it was an insurrection against
the apartheid government in South Africa. If you gave some money for a feeding
program for the ANC in South Africa, you could be branded a terrorist and
arrested and put in prison for ten years. The bill also allows for deporting
resident and lawful aliens. If you are a foreign citizen in the United States,
and they want to say you are connected to a terrorist, they do not have
to reveal their evidence if they claim national security would be affected.
Without even making that claim, they can haul you into court and give only
a summary of the evidence against you, not a confrontation with your accuser
as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. And if the judge should require the
government to say who your accusers are, the government can appeal to a
secret appeals court and you have no right to have your lawyer represent
you. That is the Omnibus Counter Terrorism Act of 1995.
Be careful! Tragedy enables scoundrels to grab more power! This deportation
proceeding with the secret court affects foreigners, but when you authorize
a judicial proceeding with censored evidence, you set in motion a procedure
that can be used in some other context with respect to American citizens.
Remember, as far as we know the bombers of Oklahoma City are not resident
or illegal aliens, but are decorated American ex-GIs, who were born American
citizens. This bill does not relate to what actually happened in Oklahoma
City. When the President says he needs new authority to bug and tap the
phones of suspected terrorists, he is lying. The federal and state agents
already have the power to tap and bug suspects in terrorist investigations.
There are 40 different types of federal crimes that can be used as a basis
for electronic surveillance. What the President is asking for is the ability
to eavesdrop for any suspected federal crime. Why doesn't he just say, "What
we want now is to give the state even more power than it has"! Listen
to what I am saying here. The President is lying to us. He is manipulating
the suffering and the tragedy of Oklahoma City. Most of the proposals he
is connecting to the tragedy have nothing to do with that kind of crime.
Nothing!
The wiretapping proposal, the bugging, means that the government can tap
your telephone for any suspected federal crime. An investigator can tap
your phone without a warrant if he says he thought he was acting in good
faith. In 1914, the Supreme court said the government cannot use illegally
obtained evidence in a criminal trial. Now we say it can be used if a government
agent gets on the stand and says, "I thought I had probable cause.
Now I see I didn't, but I acted in good faith." Then the judge has
to let in the evidence. That is a hole in the Fourth Amendment protection
against the invasion of our homes and personal effects that you could drive
a Ryder truck through. This is happening because we are lulled into some
kind of emotional stupefaction and our critical faculties are turned off.
I want you to turn them back on! The Oklahoma tragedy is being exploited
to attack our rights and liberties. It's a manipulation of crisis to expand
the power of the national government. If that isn't tyranny, it's certainly
on the road to tyranny!
President Clinton also wants to use the army in domestic crime fighting.
He says, don't think about it, hurry it through, don't quibble! Hey, Mr.
Clinton, the constitutional protections of the American citizenry are not
a quibble! They're basic to curtailing the overarching power of an arrogant
state! People are getting a little nervous here. The NRA referred to federal
agents as "jack-booted government thugs who seize our guns, destroy
our property, and even injure or kill us." The folks of the NRA and
the militia crowd are mostly white folks, yet they're saying that the police
are doing to them exactly what the Black Panthers and some of the Latino
groups said twenty years ago about the FBI. If you talk to people in East
L.A., to people in minority communities, you'll find that poor people often
feel pushed around by police authorities, but now these red-blooded American
NRA types are talking like the Black Panthers used to talk-an incredible
evolution in thinking!
I see these militia groups as expressions of profound alienation and disaffection.
There's a great deal of concern in the country about the loss of sovereignty
because of the Trilateral Commission, the new World Trade Organization,
the globalized economy. People who are liberals say it one way; people who
are in the militia and the right wing say it another way, but they're all
pointing to a reduction in the capacity of the United States to control
its own destiny and a parallel reduction in the ability of individual citizens
to control their lives.
Is American sovereignty being undermined by something that you could fairly
call a "new world order"? George Bush coined the phrase, but can
we use it meaningfully about a new dimension in American sovereignty wherein
many of the important decisions are now made-not in the Congress, not even
by American bankers or industrialists-but by those who are involved in some
larger universe, who do not owe any loyalty to what we call America? A lot
of people, myself included, were against GATT and NAFTA because we believe
it was a diminution of American sovereignty. Ralph Nader took that position.
Noam Chomsky took that position. So did Buchanan. So did Phyllis Schlafley.
Letting the corporate structure breed into mega-monumental, gigantic international
structures of private power is at the heart of the alienation and the distrust.
Unless you get at those larger issues, more laws on wiretapping and another
thousand agents will do nothing except intensify the very fear that we are
supposedly being protected from.
Now Congress wants to look into the Waco disaster. They would like to know
how Janet Reno and Mr. Potts, the deputy FBI chief, gave the order to charge
the compound. Janet Reno said if she had known that 80 people would die
at Waco, she wouldn't have done it. What does that mean? What was her decision-making
process? What information did she have? What were the considerations, the
options, the assumptions? Were those assumptions verified or were they just
assertions by Mr. Potts? Was there any systematic bias, any facts the FBI
distorted or withheld? Was there ever an alternative not to go in, to just
sit out there and wait, keep negotiating, keep talking? Janet Reno said
they waited 51 days-they had to move! Why did they have to move? One allegation
was that there was child abuse and that was the reason they went on the
raid. Obviously for the little children to be burnt to death was a hell
of a lot worse than the alleged child abuse. Then it turned out there was
no credible evidence of child abuse. So that seemed a rather questionable
rationale.
How does power operate in a free country when decisions are made that end
up killing 80 American people, including almost two dozen little children?
We can't know if new laws are needed unless we know how existing power works.
When the government has power to watch our credit, to bug our phones, to
basically create a Gestapo-type police force, we have every reason to be
suspicious and demand a high level of accountability and public review.
The Congress did a little investigation into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms in July 1979 and April 1980 and held a hearing on the Constitution
in the subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 1980. Here's
one of the conclusions based upon these hearings: It's apparent that enforcement
tactics made possible by current federal firearms laws are constitutionally
illegal and practically reprehensible. These practices, amply documented
in hearings before this subcommittee, leave little doubt that the Bureau
has disregarded rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United
States. It has trampled upon the Second Amendment by chilling exercise of
the right to keep and bear arms by law-abiding citizens. It has offended
the Fourth Amendment by unreasonably searching and seizing private property.
It has ignored the Fifth Amendment . . .
Remember, this is the government that last year had 32,000 well paid bureaucrats
generating 19 million pages of secrets that we don't know about. Yes, I
said 19 million secret documents! That news was broadcast without our members
of Congress rising up and asking what all that secrecy is covering up, and
who we are guarding the truth from-other than the American people! When
you put a veil of secrecy around concentrated national power, you are inviting
abuse. To add to it with more legal weapons for the government to use against
the people is foolhardy.
Before we throw our rights out the window, let's know more about Waco and
a few other instances. For example, the shoot-on-sight procedure employed
by the ATF in the Randy Weaver case, when the sniper put Weaver's wife and
child in his sights and killed them-just like that! That was considered
such an appropriate procedure that Mr. Potts, the deputy FBI chief, got
promoted. Is that the way it's supposed to be?
Let's take another case. The American, Michael Devine, was killed by the
Guatemalan military, according to the man who participated in the murder,
because Mr. Devine was thought to have bought a stolen army rifle. A group
of soldiers were sent out to get Mr. Devine, torture him, decapitate him,
and then take the gun. The person in charge was getting some CIA money.
Bush made a big deal out of cutting off American assistance to Guatemala,
but kept millions going under the table to the same people. You think you
know what's going on? You think your government is leveling with you?
Here's another one. It seems that Janice Hart in Portland, Oregon, pulled
up in front of her house with her daughters to find her house being ransacked
by eight ATF agents. They'd kicked in the door and were searching her home,
throwing dishes around, pulling clothes off from hangers, and emptying drawers
on the floor. They interrogated her in the basement for an hour before reading
her her rights. She asked to call an attorney and the agents refused. When
they finally asked her if she was Janice Marie Harrel, she told them, no,
she was Janice Hart. Then the ATF agents mocked her, accused her of selling
firearms and cocaine, and arrested her. The Portland police took her downtown
for booking and within 30 seconds of fingerprinting realized that the ATF
had the wrong person!
An isolated case? A lot of these things are going on! Now the FBI has infiltrated
a domestic gay rights organization, ACT-UP. This group causes public disturbances
in order to get attention to the issue of AIDS, but it's certainly no threat
to the United States. If they have a right to go in after ACT-UP, then they
can go after anybody! Before we give more authority to the investigators,
let's get some answers to the cases that are already on the record. And
let's create conditions of justice and stability that really depress the
roots of terrorist thinking and therefore of terrorist activity. If we can
learn anything from the Oklahoma tragedy, it's that the stability, the prosperity,
the coherence of communities have to be the focus of reform in terms of
our political future. The enemy is not outside of America; it's the growing
inequality and the crime that is bred as a result. We need to be in it together
and all have a stake, not this systematic accumulation of wealth on the
part of one-fifth at the top and a systematic deterioration, impoverishment,
of tens of millions of people at the bottom. We need to craft a real plan,
a revolutionary turn in American politics, not the claptrap coming out of
the "Contract with America" or the Democratic Party, because they
are both bankrupt. It's going to take a depth of experience and reflection
and debate. That's what We the People organization is working on-a real
plan for this country, based on caring and on justice, a different kind
of America, a different kind of government, a different scale, different
principles.
We ask your help. We need your support, both for the radio show
and for this endeavor. Our number is 1-800-426-1112. Give us a call.
Material for this article was excerpted and edited by Doret
Kollerer from Jerry Brown's "We The People" radio broadcasts.
North Coast XPress, June/July 1995
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