Richard Raznikov : Battlefield America

"Dissent is terrorism." Art by Anthony Freda / Activist Post.
Battlefield America:
'We had to make some sacrifices...'

There are no more legal barriers to arrest without warrants, prison without lawyers, condemnation and even execution without trial.

By Richard Raznikov / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2012

There was a declaration in the Congress during the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, to the effect that in the "war on terror" the United States was a part of the field of battle.

This statement was made by Senator Lindsey Graham, among others. It was consequent to the continuing fantasy that we now live in a "post-9-11 world" which, presumptively, means that the laws which have protected Americans from their government for 200 years no longer apply.

Sorry about your freedom, but we had to make some sacrifices to keep you free.

Because of 9-11, we were told, we needed the grotesquely-named "Patriot Act" which took large pieces out of the Bill of Rights. In order to be safe from the "enemy" we had to give up the Constitution. The Patriot Act was passed as emergency legislation with no debate. The senators and representatives who voted for it did not read it. For that alone, they deserve impeachment and removal from office.

But betraying the country is no longer a crime when it’s done by the government.

It seemed at the time like an odd construction, the insistence that America’s own turf was now a part of the battlefield, but that’s what Graham and others insisted.

There were reasons for this.

For one thing, as the NDAA legislation makes clear, the protection afforded Americans from the use of the army against us, the so-called Posse Comitatus Act, has effectively been nullified. Last month, the army conducted "exercises" with Homeland Security operatives and the L.A. police force in a section of downtown Los Angeles.

For another, by calling the United States part of the battlefield, the president, any president, can direct the army to arrest and detain without trial any citizen "suspected" of actions in "support" of an "enemy." The person imprisoned with no rights, in violation of the most fundamental clauses of the Constitution, can’t get judicial review and may never be released because the "war" against "terror" is a war which will by definition never end.

Pretty neat trick, huh?

Last time I looked, only fascist countries and totalitarian regimes did these sort of things. I must’ve been mistaken.

A week ago, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Steven G. Bradbury, former acting assistant Attorney General, principal deputy for the Office of Legal Counsel, and one of the authors of the infamous Bush "torture memos," told Senators that an amendment to the NDAA which would exempt American citizens from indefinite detention without charge or trial would be a mistake.

...the evident purpose of the legislation is to prevent the President from detaining as an enemy combatant under the laws of war, without criminal charge, any American citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States who is apprehended in this country, even if the person is captured while acting as part of a foreign enemy force engaged in acts of war against the United States, such as a U.S.-based terrorist recruit of al Qaeda acting to carry out an armed attack within our borders...

Bradbury believes such a limit would hamper the President in waging the war against terror. America’s a battlefield, he believes, echoing the words of Graham and Chuck Grassley, the senator who brought him in to testify, and that means that anyone on the side of the "enemy" should not be able to count on the protection of the Bill of Rights.

According to an article on the hearing by Kevin Gosztola in Firedoglake, Graham, who was present, "contended the 'homeland' was part of the battlefield and reading Miranda rights is not the best way to collect intelligence. He firmly asserted that homegrown terrorism could be a problem and he wanted the legal system to recognize 'the difference between fighting a crime and fighting a war.'"

No, reading a suspect ‘Miranda rights’ was never the best way to get a confession, either. A rubber hose or simple, repetitive beatings, or simulated drownings, for that matter, could get people to confess to anything just to make it stop. The use of torture, which Obama claimed to oppose but which his administration continues to authorize, is good only for the purpose of satisfying the perverse, sadistic interests of the torturers; nobody in law enforcement thinks it extracts much truth.

Bradbury testified that since President Obama believes he has the authority to order the killing of American citizens in other countries -- such as the victims of U.S. targeted drones in Yemen -- it doesn’t make sense that such a target could become entitled to constitutional rights simply by “making it to the homeland.”

See where this is going?

If the "war" against "terror" is fought everywhere on earth, and if Americans can be legally killed by order of the President on foreign soil, then the President can order the killing of American citizens anywhere, including the United States.

Attorney General Eric Holder. Image from MSNBC.
That was the point of Lindsey Graham’s continued harping on the "battlefield" terms; that was the point of the NDAA and its lightning-swift passage through a somnolent and hopelessly corrupt Congress which barely raised any questions. If America is part of the battlefield, whatever may be legally done on a battlefield may be done here, right here, maybe in L.A. or Oakland, or wherever you live.

True, the use of drone attacks might have to be minimized; too much political fallout from killing a bunch of neighbors along with the "enemy" suspect.

A year ago, the idea that the President had initiated use of death lists, lists of people who were to be killed by the CIA, was considered fanciful or paranoid. Such a claim in the New Yorker by Pulitzer Prize winner Sy Hersh, drew little public response and no Congressional outcry. Now, it’s a conceded fact. And still very few object.

Now, Attorney General Holder, obviously speaking for Obama, tells Congress that the President has the right to order the assassination of whomever he wants. And if America’s now in a permanent state of war, and if that war is taking place right here, in the Fatherland, then there is nothing to prevent Obama -- or any future president -- from killing people, or simply letting the army do it.

That is the situation. It’s not exaggerated. Right now, the U.S. uses death lists. Right now, people are targeted for assassination not because of what anyone’s proven them to do but because of what they are said to have done, or even are said to be thinking of doing.

Obama and Holder are telling us that in plain English. Right now, with the Patriot Act and NDAA, the U.S. is considered part of the "battlefield," which means that the army may do to anyone suspected of wrongful behavior, or of planning such behavior, whatever it wishes. That gives the formerly proscribed act known as prior restraint a whole new meaning.

There are no more legal barriers to arrest without warrants, prison without lawyers, condemnation and even execution without trial. It is a situation so antithetical to what America has by law always been that it is beyond belief. Yet it is so.

Here’s Holder again:

Now, let me be clear. An operation using lethal force in a foreign country targeted against a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or associated forces and who is actively engaged in planning to kill Americans would be lawful at least in the following circumstances: first, the U.S. government has determined after a thorough and careful review that the individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; second, capture is not feasible; and third, the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.

The government “has determined.” “Careful review.” “Capture is not feasible.”

And this:

Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaeda or associated forces. This is simply not accurate. Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process. It does not guarantee judicial process.

If due process under the American system, under the Bill of Rights, does not consist of judicial process, of what does it consist? For Holder and Obama, it consists of their own judgment. Don’t worry. Your government will not mistreat you.

Holder:

Some have called such operations "assassinations." They are not. And the use of that loaded term is misplaced. Assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons that I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self-defense against a leader of al-Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack would not be unlawful, and therefore would not violate the executive order banning assassination or criminal statutes.

“Self-defense” against someone who has yet done nothing but who “presents an imminent threat” as determined by, well, by the government.

And Barack Obama, on the heels of drone attacks which have specifically targeted not only individuals, such as the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, but funeral processions and first responders, such as medical teams, had this to say:

I want to make sure that people understand, actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates. And we are very careful in terms of how it’s been applied.

So, I think that there’s this perception somehow that we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly. This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on. It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash.

People who have not attacked America but who “are trying to go in and harm Americans” based on the secret information that we have. The President wants people to understand.

I understand, all right. Here’s Hina Shamsi, an ACLU lawyer, on Democracy Now!:

President Obama has used more targeted killings than the Bush administration ever did. And we do not have the memos, the Office of Legal Counsel memos, that justify the targeted killing policy. And so, very disappointingly, we see the administration claiming a broad and dangerous authority without adequate public transparency, disclosure, and refusing to defend its authority in the courts.

We do not get to see the memos, the memos that "justify" murdering, that is using "lethal force" against Americans, drafted by a government agency. Thanks for the transparency, Mr. President, that you promised. But don’t worry, we trust you. You would never lie to us. You would never violate the constitution. You want to make sure that people understand.

I understand, all right, and so do plenty of other people. This Constitution means something to us, brother, and we're not giving it up just yet.

[Rag Blog contributor Richard Raznikov is an attorney practicing in San Rafael, California. He blogs at News from a Parallel World. Find more articles by Richard Raznikov on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman : Hell of a Way to Begin a Year

Image from DNY59 / iStockphoto / MNN.
Apocalypse now!
Death knell for civil liberties

It's a hell of a way to begin a year many believe will mark the end of the world.

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / January 23, 2012

In case you missed it, President Barack Obama has signed a death knell for the Bill of Rights. It's a hell of a way to begin a year many believe will mark the end of the world.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) makes a mockery of our basic civil liberties. It shreds the intent of the Founders to establish a nation where essential rights are protected. It puts us all at risk for arbitrary, indefinite incarceration with no real rights to recourse.

The Act authorizes a $626 billion dollar defense budget (which does not include the CIA, special ops, various black box items, etc.). Obama's signing statement says it does address counterterrorism at home and abroad as well as Defense Department modernization, health care costs, and more.

But it also includes Sections 1021 and 1022, bitterly opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, among many others. The New York Times urged Obama to veto the bill because of them. The UK-based Guardian said NDAA 2012 allows for indefinite detention of U.S. citizens "without trial [of] American terrorism subjects arrested on U.S. soil, who could then be shipped to Guantanamo Bay." The Kansas City Star was equally blunt, stating that the NDAA is "trampling the bill of rights in defense's name."

Section 1021 reasserts the President's authority to use the military to detain any person "who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners." It also includes the military's power to detain anyone who commits a "belligerent act" against the U.S. or its coalition allies under the law of war.

Despite widespread public pressure, Obama did not veto the bill. In his signing statement he said: "I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists."

Citing the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by the United States Congress on September 14, 2001, the NDAA states that those detained may be detained "without trial, until the end of the hostilities authorized by the [AUMF]." The NDAA also allows trial by military tribunal, or "transfer to the custody or control of the person's country of origin," or transfer to "any other foreign country or any other foreign entity." This last practice is known as "rendition."

It's been widely documented that the United States has used rendition as a way to let individuals be tortured outside of U.S. soil. "Extraordinary rendition" -- used during the second Bush administration -- is the kidnapping and transfer of individuals to a third country for purposes of "enhanced interrogation," otherwise known as torture.

An amendment to the NDAA offered by Senator Mark Udall forbidding the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens failed by a vote of 37-61. A compromise amendment to preserve current law concerning the detention of U.S. citizens and lawful resident aliens within the United States proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein passed, but only sparked more controversy.

Feinstein insisted the reference to current law meant that U.S. citizens could not be indefinitely detained, while Senators Carl Levin and John McCain argued that it does allow indefinite detention. Senator Levin cited the Supreme Court as stating that, "There is no bar to this nation's holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant."

Section 1022 of the NDAA deals with the "Requirement for military custody." Section 1022 requires that all persons arrested and detained under Section 1021, including those detained on U.S. soil whether held indefinitely or not, will be in the custody of the United States Armed Forces. Thus, Section 1022 of the NDAA 2012 clearly allows the U.S. military the option to arrest and indefinitely detain U.S. citizens.

The ACLU stated that, "The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision… [without] temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future Presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield."

Civil libertarians are calling for the specific repeal of Sections 1021 and 1022, asking elected officials to come out in favor of this repeal. Civil libertarian activists are also calling on local governments to pass ordinances and statutes declaring their municipalities and states "Bill of Rights Enforcement Zones" or "Rendition-free Zones."

The ACLU believes that "the breadth of the NDAA's detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured within the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war." Sections 1021 and 1022 pose a threat to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil who may be seized and held indefinitely because of so-called "belligerent acts."

For a long while we have been hearing apocalyptic predictions about the end of the world through solar flares, natural disasters, invasions from outer space, and the like. All that is believed to be slated for December 2012.

But what most of the nation doesn't realize is that the end of our basic civil liberties, in place since the December 1791, ratification of the Bill of Rights, has already taken place.

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books about election protection. Bob's Fitrakis Files are at freepress.org, where this article was first published. Harvey Wasserman's History of the U.S. is at HarveyWasserman.com, along with Solartopia! Our Green-powered Earth. Read more of Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis' writing on The Rag Blog.]

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9/11 : The Politics of Fear, Religious Fanaticism and Checks & Balances

'They've attacked us! Turn on your TV!!'
By Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog / September 11, 2008

I remember seven years ago today like it was yesterday: the phone call at 0545 pulling me from sleep to hear a friend outside NYC shout "They've attacked us!" Shaking my head to wake up "What is this? Who is this? What...." "It's Steve! Stumbling down the hall to the living room to turn on the TV and see the re-run of the second airplane hitting the north tower. Oh shit! Calling everyone I knew here in LA, many already awake from similar calls. Slumped in my chair the rest of the day, watching the unfolding disaster and telling myself it wasn't a movie. Where's the president? What will we do? Being willing to give Georgie the benefit of the doubt when he finally spoke. Singing all how-many choruses of America the Beautiful with Willie Nelson on the telethon. Wanting to see us do something. Understanding the old vet who was interviewed for "Band of Brothers" about why he joined up: "We were attacked!!"

And then everything else since. Losing what we were attacked for out of fear. Fighting the wrong enemy. Losing our allies. Wrecking our economy. To hell with those scummy bastards and their "patriotism."

It is now clear that 9-11 accelerated the decline in the political character of the United States.

What passes for political discourse in the United States is now riven by the politics of fear, religious fanaticism, and the insidious corruption of the information shaping that discourse, all fueled by intolerance, endemic lying by public officials, and a mainstream media more interested in sensationalism or boosterism than facts or analysis. The debasing effects of these kinds of pernicious influences have been commented upon by people as different from one another as H. L. Menchen, Hermann Goering, Franklin Roosevelt, Edward Gibbon, and James Madison. (see below).

On the seventh anniversary of 9-11, in the middle of a presidential election, facing the prospect of unending war abroad and economic trauma at home, instead of suckered into a trivial debates over questions like whether lipstick on the face of pig is a sexist remark, it might be more useful for Americans to think about what we as a people have become and what we want to be in a representative republic that purports to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

After considering the content of the quotations below, I urge you to carefully read and think about the larger meaning of the detailed information in the essay by Phillip Giraldi, below.

On the Politics of Fear:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” -- H.L. Mencken

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war...but, after all it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” -- Herman Goering at Nuremberg trial in 1946

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

On Religious Fanaticism:

”Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.” -- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

On the Central Importance of Information to Checks & Balances:

“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” -- James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822

Chuck Spinney / September 11, 2008

Feeding on Fear
By Philip Giraldi / September 9, 2008

The al-Qaeda attacks on New York City and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, truly changed the United States, and not for the better. National pathologies and suppressed xenophobia have been unleashed as never before, fanned by the belligerent rhetoric coming out of Washington and from the U.S. media. As James Madison put it, “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” That enemy has been terrorism.

It is arguable that nearly all the changes that have taken place in the United States over the past seven years have been driven by the fear of terrorism, which has been routinely exploited by politicians of both parties in pursuit of various objectives. As a result, today’s United States would be unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers. Americans now have to live with persistent government monitoring of their private lives, as exemplified by a huge and growing terrorist screening database that appears in various manifestations. The notorious no-fly list has a million entries, including more than 400,000 names of individuals, many of them U.S. citizens. The information on the list is secret and cannot be challenged.

And then there are the two versions of the PATRIOT Act and the Military Commissions Act, all of which combine to strip the liberties that Americans have traditionally enjoyed, including the right to associate freely, to be free from arbitrary detention or harassment, and to enjoy privacy in their personal affairs. The FBI has exploited its ability to investigate willy-nilly by issuing more than 30,000 National Security Letters annually, letters that compel the recipient to provide information on a target without any judicial oversight or due process. To those who argue that the government has not used its enhanced powers abusively to corrupt the judicial system, one need only point to the cases of José Padilla and Sami al-Arian, both of whom were detained without cause and held for years in extralegal limbo. Padilla may have been tortured to force him to confess. When the government was unable to convict him on terrorism charges, it was reduced to charging him with conspiracy and making its case based not on what he had actually said or done but on ludicrous testimony that he had been speaking in code-words to conceal his activities.

Overseas, the fear of terrorism has produced nothing but bad results. The United States has bullied friends and allies to enlist in a Manichean crusade to rid the world of terrorists. Some of the terrorists are more properly national liberation movements, like Hezbollah and Hamas, but Washington’s policy of one-size-fits-all means that there has been no attempt to divide and conquer through understanding that there are legitimate grievances and that all of the groups that the U.S. labels as terrorist are not the same. Fighting terrorism has been the justification of a series of disastrous wars, starting with Afghanistan and continuing with Iraq. It may yet result in a third and even a fourth war in Asia, against Iran and Syria, as some of the most persistent charges made against those countries by the U.S. government and media is that they are supporting terrorists.

Terrorism and terrorists were cited repeatedly in soundbites at both the Democratic and Republican conventions and by every candidate, but there never was any serious discussion of the problem of terrorism per se, so it probably would be useful at this point to look at a balance sheet on the issue. There has been no terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. That is surely somewhat due to improved border security and visa control that makes it more difficult for foreign terrorists to enter the country, but it might also be because there appears to be little sympathy for terrorist movements among Muslims living in the United States. There are many arrests on terrorism charges every year in the U.S., but most of the cases are budget-driven as there is a lot of money available to investigate “terrorists.” It is also career-enhancing for a law enforcement officer to make a terrorist case arrest. Most of the arrests are, however, plea-bargained into immigration offenses or quietly dropped. The successful prosecutions have been ridiculous, in many cases aided and abetted by an “informant” inserted in the group who may have served as a catalyst for proposed terrorist activity. The FBI net has swept up pizza delivery men, landscapers, truck drivers, and the unemployed. Not a single alleged terrorist arrested and convicted in the United States has had the actual capability to carry out an act of terrorism.

In spite of the fact that there is little or no evidence of terrorists actually operating inside the U.S., the federal government is spending in the neighborhood of $100 billion per year in its war against terrorism. Considerable sums are also being spent by state and local governments and the private sector. If one assumes that there are something like 5,000 full-time terrorists scattered around the world, that works out to $40 million per terrorist per year from the federal government alone. Obviously, there is a lack of any kind of accountability in the process. That lack of efficiency is there by design, as the terrorism business keeps many people employed, both among the contractors who feed off the budgets and the bureaucrats who man the vast, new anti-terrorism infrastructure. As the terrorism threat in the United States at least appears to be hugely overstated, isn’t it time to cut those numbers down to size? Europe had a major terrorism problem in the 1970s and 1980s that was defeated by superior police and intelligence work backed up by a judicial system prepared to try suspects without any wholesale dismantling of civil liberties. Terrorists were treated as the criminals they were, arrested, and send to jail. More recently, the last terrorist groups in Europe, ETA and the IRA, have withered away and are on their last legs, all due to effective intelligence and police work. If there are terrorists in the United States, they should have been handled in the same way, not through the creation of a vast, ineffective, and enormously expensive bureaucracy that erodes the rights of every citizen.

And then there is the terrorism problem overseas, the grandiose “global war on terrorism,” which the United States has undertaken as if the rest of the world had agreed that an international policeman was either desirable or necessary. U.S. heavyhandedness over the past seven years has created more terrorists than it has killed or captured, but many of the terrorists are no longer committed ideologues. Many resort to terror to resist the occupation of their countries while others seek revenge for the slaughter of family and friends in the numerous cases of collateral damage that have resulted from the U.S. industrialized military approach to defeat terrorism. Afghanistan is truly in danger of becoming a narco-state run by terrorists, but, Afghanistan aside, no country wants to have terrorists in their midst, and most have taken effective steps to deny them sanctuary and funding. This has forced terrorists to morph into national and local groups that no longer have the resources or reach of a central organization like al-Qaeda once had. The attacks in London and Madrid were carried out by local people using their own resources. This makes it more difficult to detect the terrorists as they are not reliant on money or associates from outside, but it also makes it possible to effectively deal with the problem locally on a case-by-case basis using law enforcement and judicial resources.

Hyping the fear of terrorism should be eliminated from our political discourse. Terrorism is undeniably a global problem, but it cannot destroy the United States unless we Americans do it to ourselves by overreacting to the threat. The terrorist menace has been grossly overstated for political reasons and because it is good business for the many entities that would have no other raison d'être. It is time to make terrorism go away. Constantly citing the terrorist problem empowers the terrorists by giving them free publicity and making them appear to be Third World Robin Hoods. It also is a distraction, making it more difficult to discern the simple and historically proven measures that can be taken to identify, arrest, and imprison terrorists as the criminals that they truly are.

Source / AntiWar.com

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Abbie and the Theater of the Flag

Abbie Hoffman, proudly attired.
What Would Abbie Hoffman Have Thought Of The Flag Lapel Pin Debate?
By Chris Weigant / July 4, 2008

I'd like to address, in as patriotic spirit as can be mustered, the wearing of United States flag lapel pins, and the inherent silliness this debate represents. Flag lapel pins are all the rage these days, but the battle over wearing the flag is older than you may have thought. Older than the battles in Congress over flag-desecration amendments to the Constitution (which stretch back to the 1980s ... and which even Democrats who should know better still occasionally vote for in Congress ... ahem).

In 1968, in the fading years of one of the most un-American chapters in our entire history, the "House Un-American Activities Committee" ("HUAAC" or "HUAC") still existed. This committee was set up to root out (as you can tell from the title) "un-American" activities ... which started out as "communism" but soon morphed into "anything the right wing didn't approve of." It was in this later incarnation that, in 1968, it was holding hearings on those unruly and upstart youngsters, the hippies.

These were not patchouli-reeking slackers (OK, well, maybe some of them were), these were the youth of America who were organized, seriously annoyed with the direction of a very unpopular war, and wanted to influence the political debate of the day. They formed their own "political party" in Chicago (at the Democratic National Convention), which they called the Youth International Party -- or, the "Yippies." At the forefront of this movement was the radical leader Abbie Hoffman. And in 1968, he was called before HUAAC to testify on his activities. His testimony followed fellow Yippie Jerry Ruben, who had appeared in front of the committee dressed in (as Hoffman later described it): "Beret by IRA. Black pajama bottoms by Viet Cong. Bandoleers borrowed from the mountains of Mexico were crisscrossed across the bare sexy chest of a yippie warrior -- his body slashed with lavish swatches of red paint."

Needless to say, political theater was very big, back in the day. Why don't we have committee hearings this entertaining today, one wonders ...

But the question remained, how could Abbie possibly top this opening act? Again, in his own first-person account (from his book, Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture):

"In exactly two hours I'd do more for the flag than anyone since Betsy Ross. As our star-spangled retinue approached the hallowed halls of Congress, a detachment of police summoned to the scene quickly encircled us. 'You are under arrest for the desecration of the flag. Come with us.' ... Instantly the steps became a swarm of cameramen, cops, and screaming yippies. ... I fought for life and shirt, swinging wildly. Rrrrrrrrrip! 'You pigs, you ripped my fuckin' shirt,' I screamed ... The next day I stood before the judge, bare to the waist. The tattered shirt lay on the prosecutor's table in a box marked Exhibit A. 'You owe me fourteen ninety-five for that shirt,' I mentioned. Bail was set at three thousand dollars. 'Get out of here with that Viet Cong flag. How dare you?' the judge intoned. 'Cuban, your honor,' I corrected [Hoffman had painted a Cuban flag on his body]. A few months later this same judge started letting his hair grow long, called for the legalization of marijuana, and began speaking out against the war."

When the trail was held, under a brand-new section of U.S. law (Abbie claims he was the first person tried under the statute, which carried a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $1,000 fine), the judge, whom Abbie reports "deemed it his duty to find me guilty," allowed him to make a statement. Big mistake, for anyone who knows Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman's response was: "Your honor, I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country."

The case, of course, was later overturned on appeal (since it was blatantly unconstitutional to begin with), and Abbie never had to serve the month-long sentence handed down. Abbie reports further: "By the time we had [won the appeal], over three dozen people had already been arrested for similar offenses. A vest in Virginia. A bedspread in Iowa. All with the familiar flag motif. In arguing for the government in defense of the law, Nixon's prosecutor stated, 'The importance of a flag in developing a sense of loyalty to a national entity has been the subject of numerous essays.' The first essay the U.S. government quoted was a lengthy passage from Mein Kampf, by history's most famous housepainter, Adolf Hitler."

Hoffman went on to wear a similar shirt on the Merv Griffin Show, which was the first example in television history of a show being broadcast with the video edited out. This proto-pixilation showed the entire screen as a deep blue, rather than subject America to an image of Abbie Hoffman with a flag motif shirt on.

Note that: flag motif. Abbie never cut up a flag to make a shirt, he bought these patriotic items from people who manufactured them. As Abbie relates his appearance with Merv (emphasis in original):

"I told him how I had just been given a thirty-day jail sentence, not for wearing the star-spangled shirt, but for the thoughts in my head; how Ricky Nelson, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Raquel Welch, and Phyllis Diller had all worn similar flag garb on television and in movies; how anyone could go to the fashionable boutique a few blocks from the studio where I had bought the shirt and get one just like it."

Get that -- it's not just wearing the flag that will get you into trouble, but your political beliefs while you wear that flag. Starting to sound a little bit familiar?

Abbie's appearance was aired the next night, but with the following disclaimer read by the vice-president of CBS before the broadcast (and before it was visually turned into a completely blue screen) [editorial note in brackets in original, by Hoffman, speaking in first-person]:

"An incident occurred during the taping of the following program that had presented CBS network officials with a dilemma involving not only poor taste and the risk of offending the viewers but also certain very serious legal problems. It seemed one of the guests had seen fit to come on the show wearing a shirt made from an American flag [not true; it was a shirt with a flag motif]. Therefore, to avoid possible litigation the network executives have decided to 'mask out'' all visible portions of the offending shirt by electronic means. We hope our viewers will understand."

Pioneering television. Elvis' pelvis was just kept off-screen, but the birth of what would develop later into pixilation had its origins not in hiding inadvertent nipples (a la Janet Jackson), or someone flipping the bird to the cameraman, but to hide a man wearing a shirt with a United States flag motif.

Abbie, however, got the last laugh, as he was so often wont to do:

"In all, 88,000 people were angry enough that night to call and protest the censoring. In the following days stores all over the country sold out their stock of shirts bearing the flag motif, demonstrations were held at CBS offices in three cities, and Merv Griffin publicly apologized, saying he had not been told of the censoring in advance."

The Yippies went on to nominate, during the tumult surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention, a pig named Pigasus to run for President of the United States. Like I said, it was the era of great political theater.

Jump forward 21 years. In 1989, the "Flag-Burning Amendment" was in its infancy, but tensions were high. Republicans were successfully using this as a "wedge issue" to show American voters how gosh-darned patriotic as all get-out Republicans were when it came to sanctifying the American flag (an idea which would cause every single one of the Founding Fathers to spin in their graves so severely that their long-dead neighbors in their respective cemeteries would have risen to file complaints about the resulting noise). But Representative Pat Schroeder, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives from the great state of Colorado, had this to say during a hearing of the Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, on the subject of U.S. Flag Desecration:

"Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I too join in thanking you for calling these hearings. Mr. Chairman, I am very pleased that we're looking at this because I've probably had a little longer experience with this whole flag issue than some of the others. After my exploratory race for the presidency in 1987, one of the women's magazines decided that they wanted to do a documentary about that and we thought about what kind of cover would dramatize my feeling about the process and about America.

And we decided to do one of myself wrapped in the flag in the Sylvester Stallone, Rocky II-type of thing and in the American hockey team type of thing showing the expansiveness of the American system and how exciting it was. We thought it was a very positive, upbeat, love of America type of thing.

Well, I can tell you a lot of people didn't. (Laughter) I got lambasted by all sorts of people for that. And as that little mini-debate raged in America, people started sending me all sorts of clips. Mr. Chairman, I won't bring all the clips but both the pros and cons would send me clips talking about what do we mean when we talk about flag desecration and what are we talking about in this whole area of how do we use the flag or who can use the flag.

Because of all of these clips, which anybody's welcome to look at, I probably have the world's biggest file on the American flag in Washington, and on public officials crying in public, but I won't bring them all out. But let me just show you some of the things that are interesting. We have here Barbara Bush at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial with a flag around her neck during the inaugural. We have someone who made a cashmere flag into a dress for $2500, and we have Abbie Hoffman wearing a flag.

Now, you know, that's a range of things, and it's interesting -- are some of those desecrations? Is the commercial use good or bad? Those are very difficult issues. Then we have the whole thing of what do you do with artistic renditions. Here we have the Washington Times, not exactly a leftist newspaper, putting the President in a flag. Is that proper? I'm not sure. If you look at the American Legion calendar for 1988, they were the first to criticize my use of the flag. I was on the February cover of 1988. Let me show you the January cover of the American Legion magazine's calendar, and I'm not quite sure what the difference is in all of this. It's a little puzzling, but maybe that's okay and I'm not. Again, I am -- have difficulty in knowing where all these lines are.

And finally, here we have an interesting thing where the top picture is one of the recent press photos that many people protested; women using the flag at one of their meetings. However, the bottom picture is the lady's auxiliary of the VFW marching. And I really wonder how we know which of these is desecration and which isn't. They're both women's groups. They're all American citizens and they're all talking about the flag.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, I find this a very complex issue. Do we allow commercial uses of the flag over used car dealers in magazines and advertisements? We've got all sorts of those that I could have brought on board and shown you. What about political parties use of the flag? Should one political party be able to hide behind it or isn't the flag big enough for everybody?

As I've seen America, it's been a wonderful country big enough for more than one opinion, and that flag is a symbol that's big enough to encompass it all. So as we talk about desecration, as we talk about intent, my experience has been these are very difficult issues, and I hope people tell us how we will know who's truly desecrating and who's not. Burning is a lot clearer. What about all these other things? And what does desecration really mean?"

That's right. Twenty-one years after Abbie Hoffman was prosecuted for wearing a flag, the First Lady of the United States appeared in much the same garb. Of course, she didn't face a court case for doing so, reinforcing Hoffman's claim that he was being persecuted, not prosecuted, and his claim that, "I had just been given a thirty-day jail sentence, not for wearing the star-spangled shirt, but for the thoughts in my head." But finally, Democrats were fighting back. The concept of outlawing flag-burning has died down somewhat since those days. With no help, I must admit, from another woman who recently ran for president.

It should be noted (back in the 1980s, when she became First Lady) that nobody arrested Barbara Bush. Or even suggested it. How times change.

Here is the appropriate federal law, still in effect, from (assuming I get this legal citation correct) Title 4, Chapter 1 of the United States Code, titled "The Flag." Paragraph 8 ("Respect for the Flag") reads:

No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America...

(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery...

(g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature....

(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.

(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart.

Whew! At least they left that loophole in there for lapel pins! One almost might think politicians wrote this particular piece of legislation, and left such a loophole for themselves. Ahem.

So -- according to this federal law -- every single car dealership, mattress discounter, tire shop, grocery store, electronics outlet, and other business who uses the flag in any advertising purposes "in any manner whatsoever" should be equally as culpable as Abbie Hoffman in the disrespect shown the American flag. And anyone who uses a paper napkin this weekend with a flag printed on it should be ashamed to call themselves an American. Any athlete participating in the Olympics wearing any part of the flag should be immediately arrested.

Or maybe not. Maybe the flag can survive on its own, as it has been doing nicely for over two centuries. And maybe the Bill of Rights actually means what it says, too. Tinkering around with it only invites turning the Bill of Rights into a political weapon to be used by one faction against another. Personally, I feel that if you give the government an inch, they'll take a mile. You go down this road, and pretty soon Congress will convene committees to determine what is "un-American" and what is not. Which, to me, is one of the most un-American concepts in our entire history.

Because once you start talking about what the "intent" of the flag-wearer is, you have jumped over the Constitution and are now attempting to prosecute Thoughtcrime. The cops would have to figure out whether wearing a flag pin really made you patriotic, or whether it was some sort of protest of some type. And we wouldn't want cops making these distinctions, would we? And we certainly wouldn't want such a silly debate to determine who became our nation's leader. One would think.

So happy Independence Day, for those that have stuck with this polemic to the end. And if you go to a parade today to celebrate our freedom, and see someone there dressed as Uncle Sam -- complete with red-white-and-blue flag motif clothes -- feel free to cheer. Feel free to wear a flag pin. Or not. Or even wear a flag-motif shirt yourself. Because freedom means being able to wear a flag motif in celebration of our 232nd birthday as a nation, and (even more importantly) freedom also means being able to do the exact same action to protest this nation's government. That's what freedom is all about.

Source. / The Huffington Post

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