Well what can you say when the very government that says if you harbor or aid terrorists like Al-Quaeda then you are one of them. As George W. Bush said, “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists.” OK, then what do you do when that very government jumps in bed with those same terrorists. We were paying Osama bin Laden as a CIA agent during the 1980′s in Afghanistan. We in essence armed him and funded him.
Lately Barack Obama has helped this same terrorist organization in Libya and now we are helping them in Syria. So could we say our government is now aiding terrorists? What should happen to them? Should they not be held accountable?
Oh no says the Department of Homeland Security. In fact, while we know that our government is doing this and doing it illegally I might add, they are not even considering the people who have been involved in the “terror attacks” in the past. No, no. they are out for conservatives and with a vengeance.
A recent study, funded by DHS, characterizes Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority,” and reverent of liberty” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists. In the study titled Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970 to 2008 produced by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, it omits, for the most part, any mention of Islam. In fact, it doesn’t even count the the 1993 WTC bombing!
But it does take time to focus on Americans who hold beliefs shared by both conservatives and libertarians and calls them radical extremists.
As a side note and to have full disclosure, this organization (START) that did the report was established in 2005 during the Bush administration with an initial grant of $12 million from DHS.
Several of the characteristics they lay out to define terrorists are:
- Americans who believe their “way of life” is under attack;
- Americans who are “fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)”;
- People who consider themselves “anti-global” (presumably those who are wary of the loss of American sovereignty);
- Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority”;
- Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty”;
- People who “believe in conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty.”
- People opposed to abortion and “groups that seek to smite the purported enemies of God and other evildoers” as terrorists
Former Congressman Bob Barr responded to the study writing,
The report may appear innocuous, but it is not. It offers a carefully scripted but insidious analysis of Americans who happen to hold certain philosophical or political views, many of which are common among conservatives and libertarians. For example, Americans who “believe that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack” or who are “nationalists, anti-global, [or] suspicious of centralized federal authority, [and] reverent of individual liberty” are painted in a negative light. Of course, Thomas Paine, John Adams, James Madison, Ronald Reagan and many other American icons have held such views.
As Paul Joseph Watson notes at InfoWars.com, this is all part of a “rush to denounce legitimate political beliefs as thought crimes.” And though the report is meant to document acts of terrorism inside the United States, there is only a passing mention of 9/11 and Islamic extremism.
It is deeply disturbing that the executive branch of our federal government continues to demonize and delegitimize political beliefs, particularly those challenging the “conventional wisdom” or the status quo. It is even more distressing that neither the U.S. House of Representatives nor the Senate has moved to put a stop to such efforts, which they could if their members possessed the understanding and the backbone to do so.
So now conservatives and libertarians, people that believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, liberty and real freedom are now the terrorists in the eyes of our own government. And that same government wonders why we oppose their deal making with the UN and their cries for gun control. Sorry, but I don’t recall conservatives or libertarians flying planes into buildings, bombing US naval ships, shooting soldiers coming back from war at Ft. Hood or any myriad of incidents that were performed by the one group this stupid bit of propaganda called a “study” barely referenced: Muslims.
