‘Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death’
The Loss of Our Freedoms in the Wake of 9/11
By John W. Whitehead
“Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of
oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that
we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took
our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where
their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the
slaughterhouse.” ― Alan Moore,
V for Vendetta
September 08, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Rutherford
Institute" -
What began with the
passage
of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the
eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach,
corruption and abuse. Since then, we have been terrorized,
traumatized, and acclimated to life in the American Surveillance
State.
The bogeyman’s names and faces change over time,
but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence
to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the
phantom promise of safety and security has transitioned us to
life in a society where government agents routinely practice
violence on the citizens while, in conjunction with the Corporate
State, spying on the most intimate details of our personal lives.
Ironically, the 14th anniversary of the
9/11 attacks occurs just days before the
228th
anniversary of the ratification of our Constitution. Yet while
there is much to mourn about the loss of our freedoms in the years
since 9/11, there is virtually nothing to celebrate.
The Constitution has been steadily chipped away
at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to
such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of
the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Most of the
damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights—the first ten
amendments to the Constitution—which has historically served as the
bulwark from government abuse.
Set against a backdrop of government surveillance,
militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent
domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body
scanners, stop and frisk searches, roving VIPR raids and the
like—all sanctioned by a corrupt government run by Congress, the
White House and the courts—a recitation of the Bill of Rights now
sounds more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of
rights we should possess.
As I make clear in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American People,
the Constitution has been on life support for some time now and all
efforts at resuscitating it may soon prove futile.
We can pretend that the Constitution, which was
written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing
document. However, the reality we must come to terms with is that in
the America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants,
freedom be damned, and “we the people” are seen as little more than
cattle to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.
Consider the state of our freedoms, and judge for
yourself whether Osama Bin Laden was right when he warned that “freedom
and human rights in America are doomed,” and that the “U.S.
government will lead the American people in — and the West in
general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”
Here is what it means to live under the
Constitution today.
The First Amendment
is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and
protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It
also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to
worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans
should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of
America was a free speech zone.
Yet despite the clear protections found in the
First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant
assault. Increasingly, Americans are being arrested and charged with
bogus “contempt
of cop” charges such as “disrupting
the peace” or “resisting arrest” for
daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive
practices. Journalists are being
prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing
legislation to
muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices.
Religious ministries are being
fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters
are being
tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech
zones.” And under the guise of “government
speech,” the courts have reasoned that the government can
discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes
place within a government forum.
The Second Amendment
was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear
arms.” Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S.
Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain
powerless to defend themselves against SWAT team raids and
government agents armed to the teeth with military weapons better
suited for the battlefield than for a country founded on freedom.
Police
shootings of unarmed citizens continue to outrage communities,
while little is really being done to demilitarize law enforcement
agencies. Indeed, just recently, North Dakota became the
first state to legalize law enforcement use of drones armed with
weapons such as tear gas, rubber bullets, beanbags, pepper spray and
Tasers.
The Third Amendment
reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are
superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering
any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the
police increasingly training like the military, acting like the
military, and posing as military forces—complete with military
weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what
the founders feared most—a
standing army on American soil. Moreover, as a result of SWAT
team raids (more than 80,000 a year) where police invade homes,
often without warrants, and injure and even kill unarmed citizens,
the barrier between public and private property has been done away
with, leaving us with armed government agents who act as if they
own our property.
The Fourth Amendment
prohibits the government from conducting surveillance on you or
touching you or invading you, unless they have some evidence that
you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth
Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the
Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years
and been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police
powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal
searches of citizens, surveillance and intrusions justified in the
name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise
illegal activities to
private contractors. Case in point: Texas police forced a
21-year-old woman to undergo a
warrantless vaginal search by the side of the road after she
allegedly “rolled” through a stop sign.
The use of
civil asset forfeiture schemes to swell the coffers of police
forces has also continued to grow in popularity among cash-strapped
states. The federal government continues to strong-arm corporations
into providing it with access to Americans’ private affairs, from
emails and online transactions to banking and web surfing. Coming in
the wake of massive leaks about the inner workings of the NSA and
the massive secretive surveillance state, it was revealed that the
government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 every day for failing
to comply with the NSA’s mass data collection program known as
PRISM.
Meanwhile,
AT&T has enjoyed a profitable and “extraordinary, decades-long”
relationship with the NSA.
The technological future appears to pose even
greater threats to what’s left of our Fourth Amendment rights, with
advances in biometric identification and microchip implants on the
horizon making it that much easier for the government to track not
only our movements and cyber activities but our very cellular
beings. Barclays has already begun using a
finger-scanner as a form of two-step authentication to give
select customers access to their accounts. Similarly, Motorola has
been developing thin “digital
tattoos” that will ensure that a phone’s owner is the only
person who may unlock it. Not to be overlooked are the aerial spies—surveillance
drones—about to take to the skies in coming years, as well as
the
Drive Smart programs that will spy on you (your speed,
movements, passengers, etc.) while you travel the nation’s highways
and byways.
The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth
Amendment work in tandem. These
amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven
guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life,
your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a
fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect
society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these
fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the
government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your
property (money, land or possessions) under government asset
forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights. That’s the crux of a
case before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the government’s
use of asset forfeiture to strip American citizens of the funds
needed to hire a defense attorney of their choosing.
The Seventh Amendment
guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. However, when the
populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education
has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that
inevitably translates to an
ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law
from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing
number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to
nullify the government’s actions—and thereby help balance the scales
of justice—is not to be underestimated.
Jury nullification reminds the government that it’s “we the
people” who can and should be determining what laws are just, what
activities are criminal and who can be jailed for what crimes.
The Eighth Amendment
is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights
of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment.
However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes
“cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards
of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us
with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals
altogether. For example, a California appeals court is being asked
to consider “whether
years of unpredictable delays from conviction to execution”
constitute cruel and unusual punishment. For instance, although 900
individuals have been sentenced to death in California since 1978,
only 13 have been executed. As CBS News reports, “More
prisoners have died of natural causes on death row than have
perished in the death chamber.”
The Ninth Amendment
provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are
nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief
that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than
downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment.
However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized
federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues
to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the
pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.
Thus, once the government began violating the non-enumerated rights
granted in the Ninth Amendment, it was only a matter of time before
it began to trample the enumerated rights of the people, as
explicitly spelled out in the rest of the Bill of Rights.
As for the Tenth Amendment’s
reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that
is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a
system of government in which power is divided among local, state
and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the
centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and
the courts. Indeed, the federal governmental bureaucracy has grown
so large that it has made local and state legislatures relatively
irrelevant. Through its many agencies and regulations, the federal
government has stripped states of the right to regulate countless
issues that were originally governed at the local level.
If there is any sense to be made from this
recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual
freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could
be expanded, while reducing us to a system of slavery disguised as a
democracy.
The film V for Vendetta is a powerful
commentary on how totalitarian governments such as our own exploit
fear and use mass surveillance, censorship, terrorism, and
militarized tactics to control, oppress and enslave.
As the lead character V observes:
Where once you had the freedom to object, to
think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems
of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your
submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly
there are those more responsible than others, and they will be
held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for
the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did
it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror,
disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to
corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got
the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high
chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you
peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient
consent.
How will you have it? Will you simply comply while
the train heads down the track to a modern-day Auschwitz? Or will
you become a free person and resist? To quote Patrick Henry, “Is
life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! — I know not what
course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me
death!”
John W. Whitehead is an attorney and author who
has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of
constitutional law and human rights. Whitehead's concern for the
persecuted and oppressed led him, in 1982, to establish The
Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights
organization whose international headquarters are located in
Charlottesville, Virginia. Whitehead serves as the Institute’s
president and spokesperson, in addition to writing a weekly
commentary that is posted on The Rutherford Institute’s website (www.rutherford.org)
Copyright 2015 © The Rutherford Institute