Jon Christian Ryter

Eagle

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From The Mailbag

20 years

he debate on whether or not to suspend the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (18 USC 1385) is heating up in Congress with most Congressmen and Senators on both sides of the aisle favoring amending 18 USC 1385 to enable the President of the United States to use National Guard troops to police the streets of America when and if the nation comes under threat from terrorists—either foreign or domestic, and to use the “expertise” of the military to investigate paramilitary operations since the military has a more complete understanding of these things than civilian law enforcement personnel.
     Most Americans are not familiar with the Posse Comitatus Act. Surprising as it may sound, The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was the first of several reform laws passed to protect the people of the United States from its government when the power of the Jacobin Republicans in Congress finally began to wane at the end of the scandal-ridden Grant Administration.
     Few Americans realize that although he is “remembered” as a caring, compassionate president who was forced to fight a war against kindred spirits to free the slaves, Abraham Lincoln (the first of three successive Jacobin presidents) was the only President to ever successfully suspend the Constitution, declare martial law over the nation for four years (even though the impact of Lincoln’s wartime declaration of martial law was felt in the South until 1879), and assume absolute dictatorial powers over the people of the United States.
     Lincoln, who won the White House in 1860 with a “mandate” from 39.6% of the people is treated by historians as a man of unquestionable patriotic integrity who struggled tirelessly to preserve the Union. Lincoln is historically remembered as the joint heir—with George Washington—of expanding liberty and guaranteeing freedom to all Americans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Lincoln actually had no intention of freeing the slaves. His communiques with the political and military leaders of his day confirm that fact. The “ploy” to free the slaves in the Southern States originated not with Lincoln but with his military advisors who believed if Lincoln issued such a proclamation the slaves in the Southern States would rebel against their “masters” and start a second revolution deep within the South, wrecking havoc on the economy of the Confederate States (which, at the moment) was winning what the South believed was a war to protect the sovereignty of the States over the central government—a threat universally feared by all of the Founding Fathers except John Adams, John Jay, John Pickering and Alexander Hamilton when the Constitution was structured.
     In point of fact, Abraham Lincoln was the political pawn of the Jacobins who created the Republican Party from the Free Soil Party. During the election cycle of 1860, Salmon Portland Chase, the former Free Soil governor of Ohio and one of the Jacobin leaders of the newly created Republican Party, sought the presidential nomination of the Party but it was denied him by the Jacobin leadership in Congress, Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner who knew that Chase could not beat Stephen Douglas.
     The Jacobins desperately wanted one of their own in the White House. They were convinced that only Lincoln could beat Douglas. Chase, who conceded that the goals of the Party were more important than any one man, conceded the nomination to Lincoln but only after Lincoln agreed to grant Chase whatever cabinet post the former Ohio governor wanted.
     Stevens, Sumner, Chase and the Jacobin majority had been trying since 1854 to realign the balance of power between the States and the federal government by legislatively imputing the superiority of the federal government over the States in a clear and succinct violation of the Constitution. The Jacobins also attempted to ram legislation through Congress that would create a new privately-owned central bank in the United States—and they needed a President who would sign the legislation into law. They thought that man would be Lincoln, but they were wrong.
     As the Campaign of 1860 exploded into the nastiest political race since 1834, the Democratic Party splintered into three factional groups, each with a Presidential candidate. The Northern Democrats nominated Douglas and the Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckenridge. A third faction, fearing that several of the Southern States would secede from the Union if the superior federal attitude that was emanating from the Jacobin Congress was not crushed, split off and formed the Union Party in hopes of preserving the nation without conflict. In all, five political parties offered presidential candidates. With 39.6% of the popular vote but enough electoral votes to win the office, Lincoln became president.
     Because the Jacobin candidate, Lincoln, won the White House, South Carolina officially adopted Articles of Secession on December 20, 1860 in protest of Lincoln’s election. The Southerners were convinced that with a Jacobin puppet in the White House, nothing would be able to stop the Jacobins from usurping the Constitution and upsetting the balance of power between the States and the federal government. States’ rights, in their opinion, was lost. The Southern delegations knew that with Lincoln, the Jacobin’s candidate, in the White House and with the Jacobin’s control over both the House and Senate, the Jacobins would very quickly control the federal court system, and States’ rights would be subverted by a supra-federal system.
     The Ordinance was delivered to Congress and South Carolina withdrew from the Union. The Jacobins denounced the South Carolinian Congressional delegation and threatened to send federal troops into the State to “restore order.” The federal government insisted that South Carolina did not possess supra-sovereignty and had no authority to withdraw from the Union. In protest to the Jacobin edict, between January and May, 1861 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina also withdrew from the Union. Delegates from the first seven States to secede met in Montgomery, Alabama on February 4, 1861 and formed the provisional government of what they called the Confederate States of America.
     On March 4, 1861 Lincoln was inaugurated. Within days of Lincoln’s succeeding James Buchanan as the 16th President of the United States, Confederate forces seized all federal funds, property and munitions in the South. Lincoln sent a warning to Jefferson Davis (the newly installed president of the Confederacy) that if the Confederate States did not submit to the lawful edicts of the federal government, Union troops would be forced to restore order and arrest the belligerents for treason. In response, Confederate general Pierre Beauregard laid siege to Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12 and 13 and demanded the withdrawal of all Union forces and the surrender of the Fort to the Confederacy. After a two day siege, Major Robert Anderson, the commander of the arsenal, surrendered Fort Sumter and returned to Washington in disgrace.
     On April 15, Lincoln suspended Congress until July 4 and declared that a state of martial law existed. He called for 75 thousand volunteers to enlist for 90 days in order to put down the rebellion. A month later, with very few volunteers willing to take up arms against their neighbors (and many times relatives) in the South, Lincoln renewed his call for volunteers by demanding that 42 thousand men volunteer to serve 3 years (or until the end of the war). When Lincoln’s manpower-needs remained unfilled, Lincoln ordered the forced conscription of troops to fill the ranks of the Union army and the military “draft,” albeit illegal, was born.
     When Congress finally met on July 4 the Union was in dire straits. Lincoln’s strongarm tactics not only did not work, seven Southern States had, by that time, seceded from the Union. Thirty thousand Lincoln conscriptees were in uniform but they were largely untrained raw recruits. Under the command of Gen. Winfield Scott, the troops were assigned to protect Washington, DC. Facing Scott’s raw recruits were 25 thousand troops under Beauregard near the Mannassas railroad junction and another force under the command of Gen. Joe Johnson was in the Shenandoah Valley at Harpers Ferry. Seventeen days later, those forces merged and clashed with Union forces commanded by Gens. Robert Patterson and Irvin MacDowell at Mannassas in what history recalls as the First Battle of Bull Run. The Union troops were routed and scurried back to Washington like whipped pups.
     With two resounding defeats under their belts, morale in the North quickly disintegrated. Conscripted Union soldiers deserted faster than they could be replaced with newly conscripted “volunteers.” The army drafted new “soldiers” any way they could—many times virtually at gunpoint. In addition, those Americans unwilling to give up their sons to the military to fight other Americans were many times viewed by the Lincoln Administration as Southern sympathizers. In far too many cases, the property of those deemed to be sympathetic to the South (who in fact, in many cases, were simply God-fearing people who did not believe neighbors should be waging war against neighbors) was seized by the military on the orders of the Jacobins. Then, without due process, the seized property was arbitrarily sold at public auction. The proceeds were deposited into the US Treasury to help defray the cost of Lincoln’s War.
     Further revenues were raised by a Presidential Proclamation issued by Lincoln in August, 1861 that authorized the federal government to assess and collect a 3% flat tax on all incomes in excess of $800. In July, 1862 the Jacobin Congress “legalized” Lincoln’s action by passing the Legal Tenders Act that converted Lincoln’s flat tax into a graduated income tax and created the Internal Revenue Service which would be assigned the task of collecting taxes and seizing the property of those viewed by the Jacobins as disloyal to the Union. Later, the IRS would become the legal ‘enforcers” of the carpetbaggers during the “Reconstruction” of the South. A Jacobin bureaucrat on the staff of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Lafayette C. Baker, was given the military rank of Colonel and became the head of the government’s tax collectors. The “agents” used by the IRS to collect the assessed taxes were Union army soldiers.
     (The IRS became the first federal “police force.” The second federal police agency would be the Secret Service which was created in 1864 when the Jacobins tired of Lincoln. The Pinkerton Detective Agency, which had previously protected the President, was fired and the Secret Service was assigned the task of protecting the life of the president and vice president. The head of the White House protection detail was Col. Lafayette C. Baker. Baker was assigned the task of protecting Lincoln at the Ford Theatre the night he was assassinated. In his deathbed confession two years later, Baker specifically named Stanton as the ringleader of the plot to kill both Lincoln and Vice President Andrew Johnson. Named by Baker as conspirators were 11 newspaper publishers, 11 senior military officers, 11 bankers who put up $85 thousand for the assassinations, and 11 politicians that included Chase, Sumner and Stevens.) (NOTE: the deathbed confession of Lafayette C. Baker is [or, at least in 1985 was] on file in the National Archive. Missing is an addendum referred to in the confession that purportedly names the remaining conspirators. Missing also are approximately 20 pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary that detail his recruitment to assassinate Lincoln. According to the military officer who read those pages before surrendering the diary to the Provost Marshall who was handling the investigation, Booth named Stanton as the ringleader who recruited him to shoot Lincoln.)
     Baker’s IRS-Secret Service “Interrogation Center,” and the holding cells used to detain suspected “Southern sympathizers,” was in the basement of the Treasury building in Washington. Those suspected by the Secret Service of spying or those accused of collaborating with, or associating with, other rebel sympathizers, or those caught, or suspected of, dealing in Southern contraband, or those accused by the IRS of attempting to evade the payment of Lincoln’s tax, were arrested without warrants, denied their Constitutional rights, and held without bail until they confessed or could be successfully railroaded. Most suspects were beaten until they confessed to whatever wrongdoing they were accused. There was no habeas corpus. There was no due process. Lincoln totally abrogated the Constitution of the United States under the guise of a national emergency that demanded extreme measures to protect the Union.
     The military tax collectors from the IRS personally visited the factories, farms and shops in the North to collect the income taxes due the government. “Disputes” were settled by immediate seizure. Business owners had no legal recourse in actions reminiscent of a medieval high sheriff’s tax collector. By the time the Civil War ended the IRS had become very proficient in collecting taxes. (The wartime seizure tactics that the IRS developed during the Civil War and during Reconstruction were codified into the federal statutes and are still used today to arbitrarily seize the property of “suspected” tax evaders or those who simply cannot pay their “tax bills”—all without genuine due process. Compounding the irony of IRS justice, when American citizens who are accused of not paying their “fair share” go to court with the IRS, they are forced to defend their actions in an IRS court before a judge who is an IRS agent.)
     From 1865 to 1879 the Internal Revenue Service was used by Jacobin bureaucrats and opportunistic carpetbaggers who were greatly enriched by the patronage system by serving as the “administrators” of the military governors of the conquered rebel States. When the carpetbaggers saw an estate they wanted, the bureaucrats arbitrarily levied tax assessments against the bankrupt or nearly bankrupt plantation owners (usually former Confederate officers or statesmen who were still viewed as “belligerents” by the Reconstructionists even though the war was over). If the plantation owners could not meet the demands of the tax collector, their property was seized and sold at public auction. Many times, the only bidder at the auction was the carpetbagger who wanted the property, and whose actions initiated the tax lien that resulted in the forced sales.
     The unelected bureaucrats and the carpetbaggers who profited handsomely from Reconstruction wanted to promulgate the national emergency declared by Lincoln when the North and South went to war. The Jacobins wanted to create a permanent system of military governance in the South in order to punish the Confederacy. In addition, they wanted to create a supra-central government that could permanently abrogate the Bill of Rights since the Constitution continually got in the way of the “expedient management of the State.”

Wilson and Roosevelt Used National Emergencies to Temporarily Suspend the Bill of Rights

     Both Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt used national emergencies fueled by world wars to “temporarily” suspend the Bill of Rights. The first 20th century abrogations of the Bill of Rights occurred as the United States entered the war that had engulfed the entire European continent. Congress passed the Selective Service Act on May 18, 1917 allowing the official conscription of 9,586,508 young men between the ages of 21 to 31 into the army. A year later the law was amended, expanding the draft to include all males between the ages of 18 and 48. By the end of 1918 a total of 23,815,527 men—young and old—would be registered for the draft.
     Where Lincoln used the military to enforce his conscription mandate on those who did not wish to shed their blood in a war against other Americans, Wilson did an end run around the Constitution to accomplish the same objective. Due to an acute “manpower shortage” to enforce the Selective Service Act (and later, the Alien Deportation and Sedition Acts of 1918) Wilson’s attorney general, Thomas W. Gregory agreed to a plan concocted by a Justice Department clerk named J. Edgar Hoover that entailed deputizing 100,000 mail order “detectives” from the American Protective League into the fledgling Bureau of Investigation to spy on their neighbors in order to ferret out draft dodgers (called slackers). (APL “detectives” received an official APL/BI badge and official-looking ID for 25 cents). The government agreed to pay a $50 bounty to any APL vigilante who apprehended a slacker and a $500 bounty was offered to any of the quasi-official vigilantes who uncovered a spy or enemy agent.
     Encouraged by Hoover, assistant Attorney General John L. O’Brian authorized what became known as the “Slacker Raids.” The first raid was conducted by 35 federal agents from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. Aided by 500 local law enforcement officers from Brooklyn, New York and Newark, 2,500 vigilantes from the APL and 2,500 soldiers (in a direct violation of The Posse Comitatus Act) the BI did a “slacker sweep” through the New York metro area searching for draft dodgers. In addition, the vigilantes, without warrants, raided the 24 regional offices of the International Workers of the World (the Wobblies) which was threatening several New York area manufacturers with strikes. The slacker raids took place beginning on September 5, 1917.
     Without warrants, reason, or provocation, the vigilantes accosted men of all ages on the streets, in pool halls, in taverns, in hotels and even in the offices where they worked, demanding that each present a draft card or proof that they were younger than 18 or older than 31. Those with neither were immediately arrested and incarcerated. Those who resisted or argued with the “vigilantes” were beaten into submission and dragged away.
     During the congressional investigation that followed, A. Bruce Bielaski, the Director of the New York Bureau of Investigation office reported that the 50,000 American males in New York and New Jersey had been arrested and detained because they did not have the proper identification. Of those, he reluctantly admitted, his “men” had falsely arrested 33,495 Americans. Under oath, one of Bielaski’s assistants testified to Congress that out of every 200 arrests, 199 were mistakes. In total, the government paid “bounties” on less than 250 “slackers.” However, to justify what they did, the government drafted 16,000 of those who had been “arrested” in order to make their actions appear justified, thereby further compounding their “crime.” Clearly, many of those who were drafted merely to justify the Slacker Raids to the public were killed in European battles they should not have been in.
     When Congress passed the Sedition Act and the Alien Deportation Act, J. Edgar Hoover, who was now on a career fast track, continued to use the APL believing that “citizen spies” would ferret out those committing seditious acts against America, or enemy agents intent on committing sabotage in the United States. The citizen vigilantes were encourage to violate the Constitutional rights of their neighbors by spying in their windows, opening their mail, and even searching their property without the benefit of search warrants.
     Throughout World War I, the Justice Department used the US army to assist the government in breaking strikes and keeping order. This use, although minimal, violated The Posse Comitatus Act.
     Franklin D. Roosevelt even more blatantly violated the constitutional rights of American citizens when he issued an executive order requiring the “arrest” and internment of all American citizens of Japanese ancestry.
Again, in a direct violation of The Posse Comitatus Act, Roosevelt used the US military to expedite the “round-up” of American citizens whose loyalty was, without any tangible evidence, suspect. The homes and businesses of this group of Americans were seized without due process and sold by the United States government. Without evidence of wrongdoing, or trials to establish their guilt, this group of citizens was incarcerated in detention centers where they remained throughout World War II. Adding insult to injury, Congress (claiming, under the 9th Amendment, that the compelling need to violate the constitutional rights of this group of Americans was triggered by the national emergency that resulted from the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor) enacted legislation to “legalize” FDR’s usurpation of the Bill of Rights after-the-fact.
     Wilson and Roosevelt used the US military as an adjunct federal police agency, in violation of federal law, to deny over 100,000 Americans their civil rights. Just imagine what would have happened had either of those presidents had either the current Bill of Rights-busting Homeland Security Act or the rejected version of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1995.

The Anti-Terrorism Act of 1995

     Even before the rubble from the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City was cleared away, the Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 was making its way through Congress. Before the American people knew what was in it, it flew through the US Senate on a 91-8 vote. At that point, it stopped. When H.R. 666 was still being quietly debated in the House Judiciary Committee an inkling what was contained in it leaked out, and efforts on the part of the House leadership on both sides of the aisle to push the bill to a quick floor vote came to a screeching halt as an unlikely coalition that included the American Civil Liberties Union, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Gun Owners of America, the National Black Police Association and the National Rifle Association aligned to stop it.
     The Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 would have legislatively abolished the following rights under the 1st Amendment: loss of freedom of religion, loss of freedom of speech, the right to petition the government to redress issues, and under certain circumstances, freedom of the press. H.R.666 would have legislatively abolished the right of citizens to own firearms. Abrogating both the 3rd Amendment and The Posse Comitatus Act, the government would be allowed to use military troops as local police officers. H.R.666 also eliminated the 4th Amendment right to privacy from unreasonable search and seizure, and the repeal of habeas corpus. The right to due process under the 5th Amendment would also be suspended. Further, those accused of “terrorism” would no longer be granted their 6th Amendment right to face their accusers. Anyone accused of a crime could be held for an indefinite period, allowing the government to slowly and meticulously build a case against the accused whose assets would immediately be seized and disposed of, rendering the accused penniless and without the financial means to retain adequate counsel. Finally, H.R.666 would have legislatively abolished the 10th Amendment giving the federal government total dictatorial power over every aspect of life in the United States.
     The legislature would have allowed the federal government to wiretap any American citizen’s telephone without a court order. (That aspect of the 1995 Act rushed through Congress like a marathon runner in the Olympics shortly after 9-11.) The politicians who clearly understood that the Constitution could not be amended legislatively used a 9th Amendment argument in the preamble of H.R.666 to justify their blatant disregard for the Bill of Rights. The legislation argued that, during national emergencies, the government has a compelling interest to protect the people and property of the United States and, thus, extreme measures may sometimes need to be taken that might otherwise be viewed as unconstitutional.
     The public outcry was so loud that H.R.666 never got out of the Judiciary Committee. A compromise bill, H.R.2703, was finally enacted. The Bill of Rights would remain fairly secure until the Homeland Security Act began making its way through Congress.

Homeland Security Act

     When President George Bush stunned not only Congress but the American people when he announced that he asking Congress to create a new cabinet level department, the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] that would ultimately employ some 170 thousand workers, it was learned that the strategy was developed in complete secrecy in the White House over a nine month period. While the White House argued that the initial planning was done in secret to prevent “bureaucratic tinkering” by the 4th branch of government (the unelected bureaucracy which has never seen a good idea it could not prostitute), it is more likely it was done to keep the content of the “plan” from being examined too closely by Bush’s own conservative allies in the think tanks and political action arena.
     The Bush plan--utopianism in its purest form--calls for a high tech national identification system in the form of a uniform drivers’ license that is standardized with the other nations of the world (i.e., will contain a universal personal identifier that has already been adopted by the European Union nations and is currently being used by the Internal Revenue System to identify individual tax payers in the United States and was used by the US Census Bureau in 2000). While George Bush credited Homeland Security Czar Tom Ridge as the strategist who put together the plan he presented on July 16, in reality many of the features of the plan came directly from the Diebold Group recommendations that were secretly incorporated into Hillary Clinton’s failed Health Security Act of 1994 (including the biometric national identity card that poses as a standardized drivers’ license and the tracking of both domestic and international travelers by global positioning satellites by way of a biometric tracking chip).
     The Homeland Security plan incorporates the standardization of foreign travel documents and the use of holograms, special inks, and other high tech printing materials to make United States passports hard to forge. While this sounds good, and in the mind of many, might suggest this will make it more difficult for foreign terrorists to enter the United States, the reality is that foreign terrorists do not generally enter the United States carrying American passports, they customarily enter the United States carrying Saudi or Egyptian passports.
     Then reaching back to Woodrow Wilson’s APL days, the Homeland Security Act included a provision to fund the Terrorist Information and Prevention System [TIPS] that would utilize hundreds of thousands if not millions of overzealous, if not outright nosy, Americans to spy on their neighbors that would include not only the man and woman on the street, but would encourage letter carriers or bulk freight deliverers, utility company linemen and home repair service personnel, route salespeople like the milkman (if such still exists) and anyone else who would commonly come into contact with people in their home environments as “citizen spies” to report any suspicious activity on a TIPS hotline.
     That is not to say that Operation TIPS is not a common sense approach to potentially preventing a horrific crime from taking place. Many times, after a terrible crime has been committed, those who knew the perpetrator suddenly recall suspicious telltale “signs” or activity that should have warned them that their friend, relative or neighbor might have been up to something. Crime, even in its early stages, seldom goes unnoticed. But most people who see the unrelated elements of a crime being “assembled” in someone’s garage, basement, or kitchen table, seldom recognize it as such since most of us don’t believe we could have a terrorist or potential mass murderer as a neighbor and not know it or, conversely, some of us believe our neighbors--who are completely innocent of even so much as thoughts of wrongdoing--are “up to something” because they object to our nosy prying into their lives or privacy. And, that is the argument against Operation TIPS. It encourages Americans to snoop on their neighbors, and to many, that smacks of Big Brotherism.
     Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge defended the program to Congress and to the media. “The last thing we want is Americans spying on Americans,” he said. “That’s just not what the president is all about, and not what the TIPS program is about.” In the mind of Homeland Security it is all about catching would be terrorists before the damage is done since the new Homeland Security Act will allow the government to charge, and convict, would-be terrorists for what they were planning to do instead of being forced to wait for them to actually commit a crime before they could be arrested. (The precedent for “preventive legislation with teeth” is found in The Smith Act of 1940 which allowed the FBI to arrest communists in America for planning the overthrow of the government without the need for them to commit an overt act. The Smith Act came before the US Supreme Court in Dennis v. United States (341 US 494) in 1951 after the leaders of the American Communist Party were convicted of conspiracy to commit sedition on October 14, 1949.) The US Supreme Court ruled that The Smith Act was upheld because the high court agreed that “...the leaders of the communist party...intended to initiate a violent revolution whenever the propitious occasion appeared...” will allow the government to charge, and convict, would-be terrorists for what they were planning to do instead of being forced to wait for them to actually commit a crime before they could be arrested. (The precedent for “preventive legislation with teeth” is found in The Smith Act of 1940 which allowed the FBI to arrest communists in America for planning the overthrow of the government without the need for them to commit an overt act.
     The Smith Act came before the US Supreme Court in Dennis v. United States (341 US 494) in 1951 after the leaders of the American Communist Party were convicted of conspiracy to commit sedition on October 14, 1949.) The US Supreme Court ruled that The Smith Act was upheld because the high court agreed that “The leaders of the communist party...intended to initiate a violent revolution whenever the propitious occasion appeared...”
     Supporters of the Bush Administration Homeland Security initiative argued that the TIPS program is aimed exclusively at encouraging people in certain jobs (those which take the worker into residential neighborhoods on a regular basis) to be alert to suspicious activity or unusual behavior from people they regularly interact with. When the flack started flying, Barbara Comstock, spokeswoman for Attorney General John Ashcroft said the agency did not intend that those people would enter, or have access to, other people’s homes or property. TIPS, she said, was about using people whose jobs take them through America’s neighborhoods on a regular basis to observe, and report, on unusual or suspicious behavior. Although the Homeland Security Act has not been passed by Congress or signed into law by Bush, the Operation TIPS website was already actively “recruiting” citizen spies during the dog days of August who, like the bored housewives and factory workers attracted to the APL during World War I, may want a little excitement in their lives and need only a minimal amount of encouragement to spy on their neighbors.
     Civil rights groups, including the extremely liberal American Civil Liberties Union and the conservative Rutherford Institute both argued that “...Operation TIPS could turn ordinary citizens into government-sanctioned Peeping Toms.” The U.S. Postal System, an independent albeit government agency that now competes head-on with FedX and UPS said it would not allow its letter carriers to be involved in the TIPS program.
     Suddenly finding themselves under the same “the-eyes-of-America-are-on-you” scrutiny that caused the House of Representatives to kill H.R.666 in 1995, House Majority Leader Dick Armey [R-TX] temporarily shelved Operation TIPS (except that it had already been implemented) by inserting “language” in the markup of the 216-page bill that was theoretically designed to prevent the Justice Department from initiating the TIPS program. However, since the legislation had not yet cleared Congress, that “language” was meaningless rhetoric that served only as an election year ploy to deflect blame when conservatives protest the fact that Ashcroft’s Justice Department had already launched an extensive email program to enroll “citizen spies.” The TIPS program provides weekly updates to thousands of American citizens who have agreed to report anything going on in their neighborhoods that seems to them to be either unusual or outwardly suspicious. In addition, Armey has also shelved the National ID Card (which will, once again, merely assume a more benign face when it appears as a standardized national drivers’ license that contains a biometric chip that can be tracked by global position satellites—the same type of standardized biometric driver license that is now being used in all of the European Union nations).
     The most critical aspects of the Homeland Security Act for the government’s war on terrorism are those specifically denied the federal government by the Bill of Rights. And, contrary to the view of most Americans that the re-structuring of the various law enforcement and security organizations within the various branches of government to create this new cabinet-level department was devised by Ridge since September 11, 2001, the reality is that the proposed Department of Homeland Security is based on over two decades of intensive research not only by the current government bureaucracy but by several key political think tanks--both liberal and conservative--as well.
The reality is the United States government has never hesitated to use either man-made or natural calamities to nibble away at the edges of the Constitution by passing what they know are unconstitutional laws that restrict the liberties which are guaranteed every American under the Bill of Rights. As he examined the restrictions of liberty that are immediately apparent in the Homeland Security Act, Cato Institute defense expert Ted Galen Carpenter noted that the rhetoric coming from the White House clearly indicates that the war on terrorism is likely to become a permanent event whose reality “...makes civil liberty considerations even more important than in previous conflicts...[because]...whatever constitutional rights are taken from us...will not be restored after a few years. In all likelihood, they will be gone forever.”
     Everyone inside the beltway knows that to be true simply because everyone who “is” anyone inside the beltway knows Congress, the White House and the world’s wealthiest foundations have been trying hard to accomplish that objective since 1913.
     World government cannot be created until the United States Constitution is thwarted since all of the nations of the world will be forced to surrender their “external” sovereign to the New World Order. That will not happen until the “walls” of the Bill of Rights are successfully breeched and the special protection it affords each and every American is eliminated. The Bill of Rights itself cannot be repealed until the 2nd Amendment and its inherent rights is successfully nullified. Once the right of the American citizen to possess firearms is taken from them, their remaining liberties will quickly follow.
     That is the reason why, even before the rubble was cleared from the site of the Murrah Building bombing that the Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 which would have legislatively killed the Bill of Rights, was speeding through Congress. It was not the zeal to protect Americans that caused “patriotic” Congressmen and women and Senators to promulgate unconstitutional legislation and attempt to blindside America when they were grieving. Nor was it caring for children that motivated the utopians in Congress to attempt to legislate an end to the 2nd Amendment after Columbine. It was, and is, the knowledge that, as long as the American citizen possesses the legal right to own guns, they cannot be subdued by a tyrannical government.
     In 1861 the men of the South saw the encroaching federalization of the States and the abrogation of State supremacy. Because they had the firearms to do so, they resisted that tyranny. But because they lacked the industrial strength found in the Union, it was a struggle they were doomed to lose. And, when they lost, America lost. From the conclusion of that conflict, the federal government was deemed to be the superior government, with the States subservient to its whim.

All that is now left is the Bill of Rights that protects the people, individually, from ever-encroaching federal regulations that are redefining our rights--and by whose benevolence they exist. If America experiences one more Oklahoma City, one more Columbine, or one more September 11, the Bill of Rights will no longer exist and the American citizen will be obligated to march, lockstep, the beat of the utopian drum into the world governing body of the New World Order.