- (EIRNS) -- LaRouche in 2004, the campaign of the Democratic
Party Presidential candidate, today started printing and circulating a
million leaflets to with the following text. Leaflets may be downloaded
from www.larouchein2004.com.
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- Imagine!
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- The United States' war-machine invades Iraq. Baghdad
is bombed simultaneously with thousands of cruise missiles. Violent anti-American
demonstrations break out around the world. Bloody rioting threatens to
topple several Middle Eastern governments. Then, a series of terrorist
incidents hit U.S. facilities and personnel abroad. Television screens
around the world brutalize the eyes of viewers with images of dead children
in Baghdad. Around the world, the unrest and rioting builds up.
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- Imagine?
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- What will happen next? Imagine!
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- Attorney General John Ashcroft is on television to announce
that the FBI has foiled a major terrorist plot inside the United States,
a plot which he alleges would have killed thousands of Americans. He paints
a picture of something on a scale equal to the Sept. 11, 2001 events. Ashcroft
declares that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies require strengthened
powers to prevent terrorist attacks under these wartime conditions. Today
the President will submit new emergency anti-terrorism legislation to Congress
for immediate passage.
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- That evening, President Bush will address the nation,
to demand that Congress immediately pass the "Domestic Security Enhancement
Act of 2003," or members of Congress will be held accountable for
the deaths of thousands of Americans, in attacks which he says terrorists
are now planning on U.S. soil.
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- Panicked members of Congress will rush through the new
anti-terrorist legislation. Only a handful of dissenting votes will resist.
Most members have been too terrified to read the bill that they just passed.
The new law gives sweeping new powers to the Justice Department and FBI,
the same kinds of powers which Carl Schmitt's "Notverordnung"
doctrine delivered to Adolf Hitler on February 28, 1933. After that, the
members of the Congress will never vote against any bill which Ashcroft
demands.
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- The connection is not accidental. Attorney General Ashcroft
was indoctrinated in this by disciples of Chicago University professor
Leo Strauss, who owed his own career to that same Carl Schmitt. Ashcroft,
like Vice President Dick Cheney, uses the exact same, Leo Strauss-copied
arguments of Carl Schmitt, the same arguments which transformed Hitler
into a dictator on February 28, 1933. With the passage of that Act, the
United States would have given rebirth to Nazi Heinrich Himmler's police-state/concentration-camp
system inside the U.S.A. itself.
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- None of the above is fiction; it is real, and ready to
go. For months, staffers in John Ashcroft's Justice Department have been
drafting and putting the finishing touches on a sequel to the 2001 "USA/Patriot
Act"--which has become known as "Patriot II, " better named
"Heinrich Himmler II." When members of the Senate Judiciary Committee
inquired as to rumors that a new anti-terrorism bill was being drafted,
the Justice Department lied, denying that any such legislation was in preparation.
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- Don't be surprised! In January 2001, during the fight
to block the confirmation of John Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General, Lyndon
LaRouche warned that, under crisis conditions, Ashcroft would be used to
force through dictatorial measures comparable to the 1933 Nazi emergency
laws in Germany--the infamous {Notverordnungen}. LaRouche warned that it
was not simply Ashcroft's role as head of the Justice Department that would
be so dangerous, but his role as a leading member of a crisis-management
team in the Administration as a whole.
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- That has been borne out, by, for example, Ashcroft's
role in crafting the Pentagon's "enemy combatant" justification
for holding terrorist suspects--including U.S. citizens--incommunicado
in military custody, removing them from the jurisdiction of the civilian
courts. Likewise, Ashcroft's role in the unwarranted spreading of panic
and hysteria by the new Department of Homeland Security, as in Nazi Germany.
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- Ashcroft is aiming at you.
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- Don't think for a moment that the new powers being sought
by Ashcroft are only aimed at foreign terrorists and immigrants. While
the first, post-9/11 round of dragnets and secret detentions chiefly targetted
Arabs and Muslims in the United States, the proposed "Patriot II"
would give the Justice Department the power to wield those same powers
against all U.S. citizens. For example:
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- 1. It loosens the present requirements of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) pertaining to "national security"
wiretaps and break-ins. Currently it is required that the target be shown
to be an agent of a "foreign power" or organization. In the new
bill, the definition of "foreign power" can include unaffiliated
individuals who are {not} shown to be acting on behalf of a foreign government
or international organization.
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- 2. Individuals could be subject to FISA surveillance
simply if they are suspected of gathering information for a foreign power;
the existing requirement that the activities potentially violate Federal
law, is eliminated.
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- 3. Purely domestic activity could be the subject of secret
"national security" investigation. A new category of domestic
security, or domestic intelligence-gathering, is created, which allows
secret surveillance; this includes "conspiratorial activities threatening
the national security interest"--a category so incredibly broad that
political activity could be easily fall under it.
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- 4. The standards for "pen registers" (obtaining
a record of phone numbers called by an individual, and records of Internet-mail
addresses used or web-sites visited by an individual) are enormously loosened,
so that the target need not have any connection to terrorism. All that
is necessary is that it be used "to obtain foreign intelligence information."
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- 5. An American citizen could be stripped of his citizenship
and expatriated, if the Justice Department "infers" from his
conduct that he is giving material support to an organization designated
as "terrorist" by the government--even though the person believed
he was supporting legitimate activity.
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- The "Patriot II" bill would also wipe out some
traditional due-process guarantees, invade personal privacy, and further
throw a blanket of secrecy over legal proceedings:
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- 1. The use of secret arrests and detentions, and the
exemption of records of arrests and detentions from public disclosure,
will be expanded.
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- 2. In cases involving classified information, the use
of "ex parte" and "in camera" proceedings--in which
prosecutors can secretly submit information to the court--is allowed upon
a prosecutor's request. Thus, an accused person or his lawyer is unable
to challenge the goverment's information, because it is given to the judge
in a closed, back-room proceeding.
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- 3. The use of so-called "Administrative Subpoenas"
and "national security letters," allowing the government to obtain
financial and other types of records without a court order, will be expanded,
and disclosure of such a non-court subpoena is prohibited.
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- 4. Presently, a person receiving a grand jury subpoena
and testifying before a grand jury is permitted to publicly discuss the
fact that he has been subpoenaed and what happened in the grand jury. The
new bill would gag such witnesses, and prohibit them from responding to
false information or smears leaked to the press by prosecutors--a common
occurrence. A witness could not talk to his family, friends, news media,
or even his Congressman.
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- 5. The new law will instantaneously wipe out a number
of court orders limiting spying and surveillance of political activity,
which were the result of lawsuits arising out of unconstitutional, "Cointelpro"-type
police and FBI programs in the 1960s and '70s.
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- Do you wish to see into the strange mind of Attorney
General Ashcroft? What ticks there? Look at the late Chicago University's
leading fascist ideologue, Ashcroft's Professor Leo Strauss.
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- The state-of-mind behind such proposals, is indicated
by the following background, here presented only in bare outline. (For
more background, see articles recently posted on www.larouchein2004.org
and www.larouchepub.com/eiw).
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- Recent news stories in Germany and the U.S.A. named John
Ashcroft as one of a number of prominent protégés of the
late philosopher Leo Strauss. Others named were: now-Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz (a leading advocate of war against Iraq for the past 12
years), Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, neo-conservative warhawk
William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, former Secretary of Education William
Bennett, and National Review publisher William Buckley.
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- Although Strauss was nominally a Jewish refugee from
Nazi Germany, he was actually one of a network of Frankfurt School Jews,
such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, who, lacking the prerequisites
of a Nazi Party card, left to spread their decadent philosophy against
the United States which they hated as "The New Weimar." Strauss
came to the United States in the 1930s under the personal sponsorship of
Carl Schmitt, the "Crown Jurist of the Third Reich," who provided
the legal rationales for the devolution of Weimar Germany into the dictatorial
Nazi state.
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- Strauss, in his long academic career in the United States,
never abandoned his fealty to the three most notorious shapers of the Nazi
philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Schmitt. Carl Schmitt,
in his 1932 book {The Concept of the Political}, contended, as do the Straussians
today, that it is essential to define an "enemy" for the population
to fight; only a belief in a mortal enemy can unify the population, and
invest the regime with meaning. Today, for John Ashcroft, not only do the
"terrorists" constitute that required enemy, but also, those
who complain about his police-state methods. Recall Ashcroft's statement
during a Senate hearing in December 2001:
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- "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms
of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists,
for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition
to America's enemies...."
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- Ashcroft's "Himmler II" legislation would give
draconian, Gestapo-type powers to the Justice Department, to deal with
those whom the Attorney General defines as giving aid to terrorists, by
opposing the Administration's war drive, or by complaining of "lost
liberty."
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- While you are still a citizen, make the Congress stop
him, now!
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