War: How Freedoms Are Lost
by Larry Pratt

Hopefully the war against Al Qaeda and other similar networks of radical

Islamic terrorists will send them packing the way Thomas Jefferson
successfully spanked the Barbary pirates.

May they pass from the scene come soon, before what’s left of the
freedoms
we are supposed to be fighting for are completely shredded in the name
of
patriotic defense of the Fatherland.

Following on the heals of passage of the so-called USA Patriot Act, more

properly known as the Government War on the Constitution Act, comes a
measure for which we cannot even blame the Congress.

The talking heads and pundits are beginning to discuss the pros and cons

of torture, secret trials, military tribunals and anonymous detentions.
Now, all but torture has been declared by Presidential stroke of the pen

to be the law the of the land.

President Bush has, by executive order, established military courts
empowered to ignore important constitutional protections — protections
which apply to not just citizens, but to persons. That’s the language
of
the Constitution.

We are only one step from extending such unconstitutional authority over

citizens who are allegedly involved with a non-citizen accused of
terrorism. Why not, to use the logic of the anti-gunners, invent a
charge
of conspiracy to aid terrorism by selling firearms — something that
once
was a constitutionally protected act subject to no infringement
whatsoever.

A sign that maybe the march toward a police state has gone too fast is
the
opposition to the military tribunals coming from Senate Judiciary
Committee
Chairman, Democrat Patrick Leahy, along with Republican Senator Orrin
Hatch
of Utah and NRA Board member, Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia.

At the moment, suspected terrorists can be tried, convicted and
sentenced
to death by a non-unanimous vote of officers in a secret proceeding. It
has
yet to be satisfactorily explained to congressional critics why the
present
judiciary system is inadequate. In the conviction of the 1993 World
Trade
bombers, existing law enabled the government to keep certain evidence
secret in order to protect the identify of sources and informants.

We at Gun Owners of America have been outraged when the federal
government
managed to listen in on conversations between a GOA attorney and a
defendant
he was counseling. That will be par for the course if you are a
non-citizen charged with terrorism. It would not be a big jump to
include
gun owners and firearms dealers in the “terrorist” net so that their
attorney-client conversations could be monitored by Big Brother, too.

Question: When do we get to listen in on the government’s
deliberations?

The case has not been made for this piercing of constitutional
protections.
We had better say something now, or to paraphrase the lament of an
anti-Nazi resistance leader, “I didn’t say anything when they came for
the
middle eastern non-citizens, because I wasn’t one of them; I didn’t say
anything when they came for citizens accused of terrorism, because I
wasn’t
a terrorist; I didn’t speak out when they came for gun owners, because I

wasn’t one of them; nobody spoke out when they branded me a terrorist
and
came for me because all crimes had been labeled as terrorism and there
wasn’t anybody else left to speak for me.”

Senator Phil Gramm of Texas put it well when he warned us that “We
should
be changing the terrorists’ way of life, not our own.”

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