Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
April 4, 2011
In response to the idiotic and pointless burning of the Koran by a Florida pastor and the deadly riots that followed in Afghanistan, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has proposed limiting the First Amendment.
“I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war,” Graham told CBS’ Bob Schieffer on Sunday.
Graham mentioned government censorship of the First Amendment during the Second World War. FDR signed Executive Order 8985 in December of 1941 and established the Office of Censorship. The order gave a legion of bureaucrats “absolute discretion” over the exercise of the First Amendment and the free speech of all Americans.
In the years following FDR’s decree, the government attempted to squelch free speech a number of times for political reasons, most notably in regard to the Pentagon Papers. During Bush Senior’s invasion of Iraq in 1991, the Pentagon revisited wartime censorship and prevented journalists from independently reporting the news. Bush and Reagan tightly controlled the flow of information during the invasions of Panama and Grenada.
In 2004, then vice president Dick Cheney outlined what Americans should expect henceforth – a war against shadowy enemies that will last generations.
President Bush went so far as to tell NBC’s Matt Lauer it was possible the war could never be won, while Democrat John Kerry said terror would probably never be done away with, but that it might be reduced to a “nuisance.”
Graham reminded us that our rulers have in mind a forever war not unlike the one envisioned by Joe Haldeman in his Hugo-winning 1976 novel by the same name. It is said Haldeman wrote the science fiction novel in part as an antiwar response to Robert Heinlein’s fascistic Starship Troopers. Haldeman served in Vietnam.
It seems Graham and his neocon fellow travelers are in agreement with Heinlein’s premise in the novel that social responsibility requires being prepared to make individual sacrifice, especially when humanity is engaged in a never-ending “Bug War.” A character in the novel, Colonel Dubois, specifically criticizes the Declaration of Independence as naïve and unrealistic.
According to neocon globalist faction, our once proud heritage of liberty and its reflection in the Bill of Rights has “no contemporary relevance,” as Georgetown University law professorRandy Barnett noted in 2007. “Sure it was fine that persons should be secure in their papers and effects back in the old days when there wasn’t a danger of terrorism and mass murder,” said the professor in regard to the Fourth Amendment. It is “archaic [and] we don’t need it anymore.” Strangely, Mr. Barnett is considered a libertarian.
Sen. Lindsey Graham’s cavalier attitude regrading the First Amendment and its imagined subservience to the dictates of an undeclared war against enemies largely manufactured by government is once in vogue now that a Democrat president has attacked yet another faction of officially designated Muslim enemies.Installed puppet Hamid Karzai – a former advisor for the transnational Unocal – has demanded our representatives draft a resolution condemning the free speech of Florida pastor Terry Jones, who unwisely burned the Koran in order to make a political statement.
The First Amendment was drafted specifically to protect political speech. The cherished idea of true sovereigns free to speak their minds, however, soon withered under attack – beginning with the Alien and Sedition Acts passed in 1798 by the Federalists – and has continued on and off until this day.
“Ten to 20 people have been killed,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “We’ll take a look at this of course. As to whether we need hearings or not, I don’t know.”
It is wholly predictable that the government will spend its time and our money – or the money they borrow – to condemn an individual who has managed to offend the medieval religious sensibilities of people who kill Christians and burn churches. Seven UN workers in the Afghan town of Mazar-e Sharif died Friday during riots. Mr. Jones may have outraged millions of people, but he did not kill anybody.
Congress has yet to condemn Muslims in Afghanistan who have burned the U.S. flag and torched an effigy of Obama. According to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, who filled in for Chris Matthews the other day, burning the Koran is far worse than burning the U.S. flag.
Of course, Muslims have all the right in the world to burn the U.S. flag and burn Obama in effigy – so long as they own the flag and the materials they used to patch together Obama’s likeness.
Terry Jones, according to no shortage of Congress critters, does not have this right, even though his country has a Constitution its Congress has sworn to uphold and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
