Posted on 08/03/2002 1:27:14 AM PDT by Razz
Tales of the Garrison State
During the period known as Reconstruction, when defeated Southern states were ruled by military dictatorships, President Andrew Johnson declared: "Whenever you hear a man prating about the Constitution, spot him as a traitor." In our current environment, those engaging in loose talk about the Constitution are likely to be branded as "terrorists."
While boarding a recent flight out of the Traverse City, Michigan airport, James R. Otteson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama, was threatened with arrest, detention, and being permanently banned from air travel within the United States. Otteson, a law-abiding U.S. citizen, had provoked the wrath of airport security personnel by offering mild complaints about the violation of his person and property when his family was subjected to a "random" search at the departure gate.
Writing in the July 2002 issue of Ideas On Liberty, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, Otteson recalls that after he removed his sport coat and belt and surrendered his wallet, he "made [his] usual protest about protections from unreasonable searches and seizures. `We’re just following orders,’ I was told. That was the defense Nazi war criminals used, I said. Following orders does not relieve you of responsibility for your own actions." This comment provoked one of the airport security drones to bellow: "Are you calling me a Nazi? … You call me a Nazi again and you’re never getting on that plane!"
"Whose orders are you following?" Otteson asked the time-server. "The FAA’s," came the reply. Otteson pointed out that it makes little sense to treat a family of five – including three children ages eight and younger – as a pool of potential suspects. By this time the local "homeland security" contingent had been notified. Otteson narrates:
"I was surrounded by approximately half a dozen security guards and several armed National Guardsmen. I was informed that if I did not `Shut up,’ I would be made to `go Greyhound the rest of [my] life.’ I asked whether I was suspected of a crime. I was informed that asking so many questions `about the Constitution and all’ was making me suspicious."
"This is America now, buddy," blustered the cut-rate checkpoint Commissar. "You better shut up and get used to it!" When Otteson asked if, in addition to unlawful searches and seizures it was now standard "security" procedure to suppress free speech, "I was then told – through clenched teeth – that they were going to `lock me up’…. `I have that power,’ one security guard growled at me ominously."
With his wife and children reduced to tears, and under the threat of missing an important flight, Otteson relented. The triumphant guardians of airport security conducted a particularly thorough search, during which their grimy hands pawed through his wife’s intimate apparel.
There’s nothing particularly surprising here to anyone who understands what happens when open-ended powers are invested in people with large-caliber egos – and small-bore intellects. It is worth pointing out that the ever-expanding "homeland security" apparatus is being filled with countless individuals of the sort Otteson’s family encountered: Petty, officious little dictators eager to impose their will on others; spiteful, arrogant martinets who think nothing of literally making a federal case out of a perceived personal slight.
From Washington State comes another instructive vignette regarding the relentless encroachment of the "homeland security" garrison state. One afternoon in mid-July, with temperatures in Yakima reaching 117 degrees, Elizabeth Myer was pulled over by a policeman for having an expired tag on her Chevy Suburban (the result of an oversight, rather than criminal intent or misplaced political zealotry). During the routine stop, the officer noticed that there was an unloaded ammo magazine for a semi-automatic rifle on the dashboard. The officer asked for permission to search the vehicle, presumably to check for weapons. Elizabeth declined permission, assuring the officer that the magazine was empty and that she wasn’t carrying any other weapons.
The officer, determined to search the vehicle, detained Elizabeth and her four young children (all of whom are six years or younger) in the Suburban for over an hour and a half. Insisting that the young mother posed a "flight risk," the officer refused to allow her to turn the ignition key to run the air conditioner. Jim Myer, Elizabeth’s husband, told Review of the News Online: "It was 117 degrees that day, and in other circumstances a mother who left her small children out in that weather for an hour and a half would be charged with child abuse. But I guess it’s just fine when government people do it." Myer reported that all four of their children had to be treated for heat stroke.
What distinguishes this story from other – unfortunately common – accounts of government abuse of citizens is the "homeland security" rationale invoked by law enforcement officials as justification. According to Jim Myer, while his wife and tiny children were illegally detained and being tortured, the traffic stop was being examined as a "homeland security" matter by a Washington Tri-Agency Counter-Terrorism Task Force. Supposedly they were concerned that Elizabeth Myer was somehow involved in a nearby incident involving illegal fully automatic rifles. Under normal circumstances, an officer making a traffic stop involving a young suburban housewife and her four tiny children would be able to exercise better judgment – but in this instance, the rationale of "homeland defense" became irresistible.
Jim Myer, it should be noted, is a world-class sport shooter who provides marksmanship training to local, state, and federal law enforcement agents. He is exceptionally well versed in firearms laws and fastidiously obeys firearms laws, however asinine or opaque their provisions may be. Nonetheless, shortly after his wife’s punitive detention, Myer received a visit from the ATF. "They were all over our house, demanding to see every gun we have," Myer told Review of the News Online. When Myer asked about the visit, he was told repeatedly that it was being treated as a matter of "homeland security."
As this commentary is being prepared, Myer and his family are still under investigation. Because of arcane provisions in laws governing public disclosure of such investigations, Myer will not be able to learn the details of the case being compiled against him until the case is closed. (Parenthetically, the National Rifle Association, which was contacted by Myer for legal help, told him that they are only interested in "sporting firearms law" – and that his case didn’t qualify.)
In both of these cases, the subject of official abuse by agents of the embryonic "homeland security regime" were white, middle-class, law-abiding families. They fit no conceivable terrorist profile. They were engaged in travel as part of peaceful family pursuits. In both incidents, security and law enforcement personnel, invoking the threat of armed violence, browbeat innocent parents in front of their children. The Yakima case involved what could be characterized as illegal arrest and torture – including the torture of children.
Bearing all of this in mind, the prospect of a vast, centralized, militarized, and unaccountable "homeland security" apparatus should fill freedom-loving Americans with mortal dread. The Bush administration has already claimed the power to subject individuals – including American citizens – to open-ended military detention, with no judicial review, as "enemy combatants." It is seeking to abolish the Posse Comitatus statute forbidding the military to carry out domestic law enforcement missions. It is seeking to recruit tens of millions of Americans as informants for the regime precisely because private citizens will be able to enter private homes and inspect them for "suspicious" items and activities – and it’s a safe bet that firearms will be high on that list.
If these measures were being carried out by Bill Clinton, the Republican right would be screaming itself hoarse. But because the amiable dullard who occupies the White House occasionally gives voice to a few conservative platitudes – provided, of course, they are written out in advance, in small words spelled with large letters, by one of his handlers – the Republican right has swallowed its tongue. Some of those people, in fact, are among the loudest voices proclaiming: "This is America now – shut up and get used to it!"
it's been two or three decades, i think, since i last did that, but somehow, the phrase: "this is america," in light of current events, causes me to do something similar.
i am having trouble, though, i find, with the third word of the phrase. not quite sure i know what that means, anymore.
Perhaps the shoe fits all too well.
Scary.
Let me help in whatever small way...The problem begins with referring to our country as America.
It should be called The United States of America, The United States, or The US for brevity.
Referring to our country as America is the beginning of socialism.
It's sort of an intelligence test: I figured someone else would eventually post the correct link, but in the meantime, I thought it might engender a more rational discussion by removing the ad hominum attacks from the mix.
How do you figure?
This doesn't track with what I've heard about Johnson. I seem to recall that the Radical Republicans thought he was too soft on the South (he was a Tenneseean), and that the act providing for martial law in the South was the first instance in which Congress overrode a Presidential veto. Or maybe he was speaking sarcastically?
As soon as we start thinking excessively of these United States as a single entity, "America," it feeds the fascist (socialist) notion that "democracy" is our essential characteristic, and in fact feeds the fascist and socialist notion that a simple majority of people at any time may properly vote to do do whatever they want. False, muddled thinking greatly facilitates pulling the wool over the eyes of We the People. Such errors of thinking greatly facilitate the rampant and continuous illegal government behaviors, which accelerated greatly after 1860 and especially because of FDR, that comprise much of the discussion here at Free Republic.
in fact, you startled me, reminding me that i, too, have become a little sloppy in my thinking.
nevertheless, and not intending to take issue in any way with what you say, i do know for a fact that this country, by whatever name, stood for something/meant something/represented something when i was growing up in the fifties and sixties.
take, for example, the civil rights movement during that time. that movement was successful because the majority of people in this country (whites, especially) knew that the treatment and condition of blacks in this country was wrong, and they were unwilling to have government perpetuate it in their name.
(yes, that is theory, and i doubt the movement would have recieved such widespread support had most understood where it all would have led us.
the anti-war movement of the sixties, too, was tolerated because we, either as a nation, or an aggregation of individual states honestly believed in the freedoms guaranteed by the first amendment. ("this is america, and people can say what they want, and all that.")
as any fool knows, those things alone mightily distinguished this country from others. i knew a girl who went and studied in spain when franco still ruled, and i was stunned to hear her say that one was not permitted to criticize him in public.
growing up on a diet of post world war ii television and movies, i thought we had won the war, and the world was safe for democracy, and all that. a bit naive, i now realize, but nevertheless i grew up with those ideals solidly in my heart that i believe people fought and died for during the first couple hundred years of our country's history.
all of a sudden, i find myself wondering whether the nazis didn't win, after all.
it is said that we are a nation of laws, and not of men. well, maybe that's true, and maybe it's not.
but look at who is making those laws: hitlery clintoon, tom-tom dasshole, ruth buzzy ginsburg. ugh. and the current crop of republicans are nothing to be proud of. ugh. ugh.
and look at those laws: laws that celebrate homosexuality, and denigrate normal religious values, especially christianity. laws that allow the lazy and corrupt to live better than our children, and at their expense (and ours). confiscatory taxes. petty government employees with guns who can break down your door in the middle of the night and shoot you dead with impunity, even if you are innocent of any crime. government authorized to snoop on every aspect of your life. an ongoing invasion of this country that government refuses to do anything about.
i don't WANT to speak spanish.
i went to law school about 20 years ago. a decade or so later, when all of a sudden drunk driving checkpoints, seat belt check points, child safety seat check points, etc. were proposed, i laughed - such things were PLAINLY unconstitutional based on the constitution, two hundred years of jurisprudence, and what any fool knew.
huh.
last night, i watched collateral damage (arnie flick). in columbia, there was the obligatory road block scene, shaking down and harrassing the peasants. a couple shot dead just 'cause, etc.
well, yes ... i've always had a flair for the dramatic, but i see what is going on in america's airports (and elsewhere) right now as being a lot more like that, than the america i recall.
I stand corrected, most correct. Sovereignty of the several states
is exactly what I was thinking of.
Some times I am not sure either. To me, though, America is what we, as individuals, will make of it. I shall personally try to shine her up again and capture the gleam of old.
Some times I am not sure either. To me, though, America is what we, as individuals, will make of it. I shall personally try to shine her up again and capture the gleam of old.
ah ... yes. the movie "being there," starring peter sellers (?)
"life is what you make it." and all that.
probably true.
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