Freedom

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The American Freedom Campaign Agenda

Editor’s Note: The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (H.R. 3835), which addresses most of the issues outlined below, was introduced by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul on October 15, 2007. Click here to read the text of the bill.

At critical moments in our history, Americans have been called upon to protect our Constitutional guarantees of liberty and justice. We face such a moment today. The American Freedom Campaign is a non-partisan citizens’ alliance formed to reverse the abuse of executive power and restore our system of checks and balances with these ten goals:

  1. Fully restore the right to challenge the legality of one’s detention, or habeas corpus, and the right of detained suspects to be charged and brought to trial.
  2. Prohibit torture and all cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
  3. Prohibit the use of secret evidence.
  4. Prohibit the detention of anyone, including U.S. citizens, as an “enemy combatant” outside the battlefield, and on the President’s say-so alone.
  5. Prohibit the government from secretly breaking and entering our homes, tapping our phones or email, or seizing our computers without a court order, on the President’s say-so alone.
  6. Prohibit the President from “disappearing” anyone and holding them in secret detention.
  7. Prohibit the executive from claiming “state secrets” to deny justice to victims of government misdeeds, and from claiming “executive privilege” to obstruct Congressional oversight and an open government.
  8. Prohibit the abuse of signing statements, where the President seeks to disregard duly enacted provisions of bills.
  9. Use the federal courts, or courts-martial, to charge and prosecute terrorism suspects, and close Guantanamo down.
  10. Reaffirm that the Espionage Act does not prohibit journalists from reporting on classified national security matters without fear of prosecution.
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We The People Stimulus Package (Video)

Bob Basso author of “Common Sense” plays the role of Thomas Paine to ignite the fire of change in America. Patriotism and Pride for America lead Thomas Paine to help take back America (9,356,576+ views on YouTube)!

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Freedom Force International

G Edward GriffinBy G. Edward Griffin

Freedom Force International is a network of men and women from all parts of the world who are concerned over loss of personal liberty and expansion of government power. They are not mere complainers. They have a plan to do something about it. They also share a common belief in The Creed of Freedom, which is a statement of principles that guide them in their mission to build a better world.

Totalitarianism is on the rise everywhere because advocates of big government have taken leadership control of the power centers within every society. Power centers are organizations and social groupings – such as political parties, labor unions, church groups, media centers, and professional societies – that hold political power based on their claim to represent their members and on their ability to lead public opinion. It has taken many years for them to achieve this dominance over society, but they have succeeded. It does no good to complain or to theorize about what should be done. As long as advocates of big government hold the power, nothing will change.

WE MUST NOT BE LIKE CATS
One of the most profound differences between dogs and cats is that cats focus on effects while dogs focus on causes. If you toss a pebble at a cat, it will look at the pebble. If you toss it at a dog, it will look at you.

In this respect, too many people are like cats. They are preoccupied with the details of their loss of security, freedom, and privacy, and they flutter like wing-clipped pigeons, complaining about this and that without knowing why these things are happening. By contrast, members of Freedom Force focus on the cause and work to eliminate it. The degeneration of civilization is not the result of blind forces of history operating beyond comprehension or control. It is planned and caused by a small but well defined group of people who believe this decline is necessary for what they fondly call The New World Order but which we recognize as high-tech feudalism in which mankind will be condemned to live in perpetual subservience to elitist rulers.

edgriffindoorhanging-288The identities of these elitists are known. They have names. They belong to organizations. They meet together to create strategies and they work jointly to implement them. They dominate the power centers of society. We will not escape their plans by looking only at what they are doing. We must focus on them and remove them from their present positions of power. Any other plan of action is doomed to failure.

That, however, is not enough. If we focus solely on the identities and personalities of those who are promoting the decline of liberty, we will be stumped by the fact that, even if we should succeed in removing them from their positions of influence, there are many more just like them waiting to step into their places. In the final analysis, it’s not the names and identities or political party affiliations of these individuals that matters as much as what they believe, what ideology they hold. Their ideology has a name. It’s called collectivism, a concept that government is master and people must obey. It’s to no avail to remove one collectivist from power only to replace him with another one – which has been the pattern for all too many years. It is time to stop acting like cats, stop being forever fascinated by the personalities and deeds of our leaders. We must be more like dogs and focus on the ideology of our leaders, because that is the cause of their deeds.

The solution is simple. It is to take back control of the power centers of society, one-by-one, just the way they were captured in the first place. Replace the collectivists with people who have no personal agendas except to defend freedom. This will unleash the vast human potential for prosperity and happiness that can be realized only in the absence of government oppression. However, to reach that goal, it will be necessary for those who cherish freedom to do more than complain and far more than just casting a vote every few years. They must reach for power. That is the reason for the motto of Freedom Force: Impotentes defendere libertatem non possunt, which is Latin for “Those without power cannot defend freedom.”

The Freedom Force strategy can be summarized as:
Don’t fight city hall when you can BE city hall.

eaglewflagbest-288The mission of members of Freedom Force is to shape public policy within their respective countries in favor of personal and global freedom. The method is threefold: (1) dissemination of ideological and issue-related information, (2) instruction in how to become influential within community and national organizations, and (3) instruction in how to lawfully and constitutionally convert that influence into public policy. Members seek to become change agents so they truly can make a difference in the world.

Freedom Force is a global brotherhood of the most enlightened and dedicated people in the world. We are building an international network of leaders who, in spite of differences in nationality and culture, are in solidarity with the principles expressed in The Creed of Freedom. We now have members in sixty countries, and the number continues to grow. (See flags below.) Nothing like this has happened before in history. It is a powerful force that cannot be stopped. Welcome to the Brotherhood of Freedom.

Source: Freedom Force International

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When Laws and Liberties Test Each Other’s Limits | NY Times

By Stephen Holden

“The End of America,” an unsettling documentary polemic about the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of 9/11, brings up matters many of us would rather not contemplate in the middle of a financial crisis and on the eve of a new administration. Federal laws enacted during the last seven years that threaten our constitutional rights, it reminds us, remain in effect.

The pointedly inflammatory film, adapted from Naomi Wolf’s book “The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,” compares the Bush administration’s attempts to discourage dissent and to wield increasingly unchecked power to the events preceding the establishment of 20th-century dictatorships in Germany, Italy, Chile and elsewhere. Without explicitly invoking the word, it implies that since 2001 the United States has drifted toward fascism in the name of fighting terror.

Tightly constructed and fiercely one-sided, “The End of America,” directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern (“The Devil Came on Horseback”), interweaves excerpts from a lecture in New York given by Ms. Wolf with film clips and interviews illustrating her contention that the rise of those dictatorships created a “blueprint” that the Bush administration, consciously or not, has followed.

According to Ms. Wolf, the first and fundamental tool for acquiring power is the manipulation of fear. In the shell-shocked post-

9/11 climate, the overwhelming public reaction to the Patriot Act of 2001, which gave law enforcement agencies expanded powers of surveillance, was mute acceptance of whatever was deemed necessary to keep us safe. Since then, she says, a color-coded system of terror alerts has been effectively wielded to keep us on edge.

From here, Ms. Wolf describes a 10-step program toward authoritarian rule that includes the creation of secret prisons where torture takes place; the deployment of a paramilitary force (Blackwater, which the film calls a contemporary American variation on Mussolini’s private army of “black shirts”); the development of an internal surveillance system; the harassment of citizens’ groups; and the arbitrary detention and release of ordinary civilians.

The film’s most disturbing moments are its accounts of James Yee, a United States Army chaplain at Guantánamo, who was accused of espionage and held in solitary confinement for 76 days before being released, and Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian telecommunications engineer, who was detained at Kennedy International Airport, then later deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured. He was eventually cleared of charges of terrorism.

The seventh step, selecting key individuals for harassment, cites the Dixie Chicks and Dan Rather as prominent cases. The eighth step, the restriction of the press, focuses on the case of Josh Wolf, a journalist jailed for 226 days for refusing to turn over videotapes he made of police brutality at a July 2005 demonstration in San Francisco.

The ninth step, the equating of political dissidents with traitors, fleetingly examines the Bush administration’s floating of the word “treason” to describe The New York Times’s publication of classified information about the government’s monitoring of overseas telephone calls. All these middle steps might be described as examples of selective intimidation intended to inhibit dissent. The case histories are glossed over.

The final step in Ms. Wolf’s Top 10 is the suspension of the rule of law. She cites the refusal of Bush administration insiders subpoenaed to appear before Congress to testify in the United States attorneys scandal. The film ends on a note of stern warning: the 11th step might be the imposing of martial law.

If the film’s vision of the steps leading toward a homegrown fascist state qualifies as paranoid, there is still enough here to make you shiver. Could it happen here? Maybe. A little fear — not the collective panic that followed 9/11 — can be a useful thing.

Source: New York Times/Movies

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State of Jefferson – USA

Indigenous peoples were the earliest known settlers of this diverse and bountiful land – and others followed.

One individual, Gilbert Gable from Port Orford and others, including, members of the 20-30 club in Yreka, the Yreka Chamber of Commerce, the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors, State Senator Randolph Collier and Judge John L. Childs of Crescent City made the most successful and most publicized attempt at creating a new state from the bottom portion of Oregon and the top portion of California.

There have been many attempts at forming a new state comprised of northern California and southern Oregon, but none has gained so much attention and retained it as the secession movement of 1941.

The abundant supply of minerals and timber in this region was largely inaccessible due to the lack of sufficient roads and bridges into the rugged mountain border country. The local pioneering people grew weary of unfulfilled promises from Salem and Sacramento to help fund sufficient highway projects in the region while building campgrounds in the cities where there were more votes.

Representatives from the mountain border counties involved met in Yreka, CA on November 17, 1941 to form an alliance to obtain federal aid for the construction and repair of bridges and roads. The Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors voted to allocate $100 to research the possibility of seceding from the state of California and joining the other counties to form a new 49th state. The Yreka Chamber of Commerce was very instrumental in persuading the Board.

The local newspaper ran a contest to name the new state and the winning entry was Jefferson. The winner of the contest pocketed $2 for his efforts. Yreka was designated the temporary state capital where the ‘State of Jefferson Citizen’s Committee’ was formed.

They proceeded to stop traffic on Highway 99 outside of town and handed their ‘Proclamation of Independence’ out to travelers.

Jefferson made the papers nearly every day, competing with headlines of Germany’s ravaging of Europe. The San Francisco Chronicle sent a young reporter, Stanton Delaplane, to cover the events. He traveled the rain-soaked roads to speak with locals to get a feel for the secession movement from their point of view. He got stuck in the mud down the Klamath River but that did not stop him from writing a series of colorful articles on the rebellion which earned him the coveted Pulitzer Prize.

On December 4, Judge John L. Childs of Crescent City in Del Norte County was elected governor. A torchlight parade complete with horses, marching bands and sign-carrying young people riding in trucks was held in Yreka followed by a ceremonious inauguration held on the courthouse lawn.

Hollywood newsreel companies were present to record the events, including the highway barricades. The State of Jefferson was off to a banner start.

The newsreels were to air nationally the week of December 8, but tragically on December 7th Pearl Harbor was bombed and the State of Jefferson rebellion of 1941 came to an end. The people of the region went to work for the war effort and good roads were eventually built into the backcountry to access strategic minerals and timber. These same roads have helped countless numbers of rural families make a living from the land that continues to produce abundant, quality natural resources.

The State of Jefferson ‘state of mind’ remains in the hearts and minds of people everywhere.

Source: Jefferson State

Resources:
Siskiyou History
State of Jefferson Website & Archives

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Fiji: “Draconian Prosecution” of press

FijiBy John Liebhardt

For the second time this month, Fiji’s military government has threatened to send a newspaper editor and its publisher to prison for publishing a letter to the editor alleged to be in contempt of court.

In mid-October, the Fiji Times and Fiji Daily Post printed a letter from a certain Vili Navukitu of Queensland, Australia complaining about a recent high court ruling that legitimized the actions of the country’s president in dissolving the Parliament, and the elected government of Laisenia Qarase, immediately following the December 2006 coup that brought into power Commodore Frank Bainamairama.

The letter (which has been reprinted in this post) pointed out that Bainimarama had undue influence on the jurors because he had previously removed the court’s chief justice.

After the letter was published, Fiji’s Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum accused the Fiji Times of being in contempt according to Fiji’s laws because it casted doubts on the integrity and independence of the courts. The Fiji Times printed a front-page apology admitting contempt and offering to pay all court costs.

The Attorney General, unimpressed with the apology, has asked the court to jail the editor and publisher of the paper and apply stiff fines to the paper. The case is in recess until December.  The editor and publisher of the Fiji Daily Post, where the letter also appeared, could meet the same fate, the Attorney General declared this week. Both newspapers have been asked to provide full details of the letter writer.

The scandal comes at the heels of the announcement that press freedom group Reporters Without Borders ranked Fiji 79th for press freedom out of 173 countries, a large leap from the previous year, where it was 107.

Fiji’s bloggers have largely expressed outrage at the case against the two newspapers.

Source: Global Voices Online

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Taiwan: Defending Rights to Protest

taiwanBy I-fan Lin

Following David’s article on “The Phantom of Police State” coming back with Chen Yun-lin (陳雲林)’s visit to Taiwan on 3 of Nov, I have collected some visual materials showing the conflict between the protesters and police with brief translation.

Since Nov 3rd, many protesters wearing pro-Taiwan T-shirt or banners or waving the ROC national flag have been harassed by the police, and some of them were wounded. To the extent that people playing Taiwanese songs (Sunrise records, 上揚唱片) were disrupted with force, and a cup of coffee became all too dangerous.

Source: Global Voices Online

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Remembering the fallen: To those who paid the ultimate price for their journalism

Frontline Club logo

By Robert Fox, 22 Jun 2008

The dedication of Jaume Plensa’s giant glass vase ‘Breathing’ on the roof of the BBC at Portland Place as a memorial to all who have fallen in the cause of news and reporting  was moving, fitting and strangely remote.

It is fitting and timely because reporting is an increasingly dangerous business. The grim numbers of the killed and wounded and disappeared among reporters and news people of all kinds in conflicts from Iraq, Afghanistan, to Darfur, Zimbabwe and the Caucasus are testimony enough to this.

The sense of remoteness of the BBC memorial ceremony was encouraged by the fact that the giant sculpture is way up on a roof. The public can’t see it close-up to read the names and James Fenton’s verses on the fallen of  the ranks of journalism.

In some ways this is a metaphor. We all see the fruits of journalism in increasing volume and intensity, through TV and radio, print, the blogosphere, telephone text and video, Youtube and MySpace. But the essence of what is going on in, say, remoter Zabul, Bulawayo, the water wars of the Fergama valley and Darfur is perennially baffling. As Gordon Burn writes in his wonderful fable ‘Born Yesterday’ (last year’s news a novel) of “the feeling we all increasingly have of seeing everything but of being able to do nothing.”

Remembering the fallen and the wounded in body and spirit of the craft and calling of news reporting touches the core of  Frontline. Prominent in our memory are our fallen friends and comrades, Rory Peck, intrepid cameraman and Kurt Schork, king of the agency correspondents, Nick della Casa, who with his wife Rosanna and Charles Maxwell were murdered by their guide in northern Iraq in 1991, Carlos Mavroleon died in his Peshawar hotel in 1998, Roddy  Scott, ambushed and killed by Russians in  Chechnya (2002), James Miller cut down by the IDF in Gaza in 2003, and Richard Wild, murdered in Baghdad in 2003.

Most of these were not salaried, insured and protected correspondents of a large news organisation, but worked by the piece and day, freelance or on short contract. They did what they did because they believed in what they were doing, and telling a story that was vital.

They were prepared to go to the dark and dangerous places, on the map of the world, and into the darker inner map of human minds. So much of the news coverage in the most difficult but crucial zones of conflict depend on the freelance going the extra mile, or in most cases extra hundreds of miles, to get to the story.

In this motley crew of the non-staffers the vital links, the turn-keys of the whole enterprise, are the fixers, drivers, interpreters and helpers. They have no insurance policies, or regular income to support them when one of theirs is killed or wounded – and of course there is no safety in hazardous environments procedure, or health and safety regulation to protect them. Nearly all of us owe our lives, and our stories, to this strangely uplifting band – who do not seem  to know the meaning of the word ‘whinge’.

Some 21 years ago I was wandering the shores of the Mediterranean for a book when I went down to Tyre, to look, among other things, at the remains of the Roman circus (which was used in the Charlton Heston movie of Ben Hur). Under one of the arches of the auditorium I interviewed a bunch of ‘soeurs Islamiques’ supporters of Amal, when my companion and driver Abed spotted some Hezbollah gunmen going down for a spot of target practice. Realising they hadn’t seen me, he neatly diverted them with a torrent of  aimless conversation. Abed and his family worked for the BBC for decades, particularly for Jeremy Bowen. He was killed when Israeli gunners deliberately targeted his car in southern Lebanon a couple of years ago.

The Frontline Club’s Fixers Fund is a vital line to the families, often pretty extended, of those stringers and fixers  who are killed and injured – or simply never come back.  I would hope something can be done for educational facilities, just things as simple as books and DVDs are welcome, both for the young interpreters and their families.

As the news world becomes an ever expanding and fragmenting universe, we should remember the pioneers and bold spirits who did, and said something new – though their bosses didn’t want it. Ernie Pyle lived the life of a soldier on the frontline in Normandy, Belgium and the Pacific, telling the story through the words of his archetypal hero, GI Joe. He was killed in Okinawa in the last weeks of the Pacific war in 1945 – when the Japanese took back the island recently, his was one of only three American memorials they allowed to stay.

We should remember other bold spirits who showed courage in a different way in bringing us the news deemed unfit by the bosses  to print or broadcast, yet they believed it should – people like I. F. Stone and Ed Murrow.

From the roof opposite Jaume Plensa’s memorial sculpture Murrow made live broadcasts in the Blitz to a reluctant audience in America.

Source: Frontline Club

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Beijing 2008 – Olympic Prisoners

Scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human rights activists were arrested, put under house arrested or expelled from Beijing before and during the Olympic Games. The Games have now finished and we call for their release.

Hu Jia

Hu Jia was sentenced to three and a half years in prison on 3 April 2008, for posting articles on websites and giving interviews to foreign journalists. He had criticised the poor state of freedom of expression before the Games. Hu was arrested on 27 December 2007, for “inciting subversion of state power” before being tried by a Beijing court on 18 March. He was transferred on 8 May to Hubai prison in Tianjin, 200 kilometres east of the capital, where he is being held in harsh conditions. His wife, Zeng Jinyan, and their young daughter are under house arrest in Beijing.

Sign the petition for his release.
Yang Chunlin

Main mover of the campaign “We want human rights not Olympic games”, Yang Chunlin was sentenced on 24 March 2008 to five years in prison, followed by two years loss of civil rights by the intermediate court of Jiamusi, in the north-east, for “inciting subversion of state power”. He was maltreated during the early period of his detention.
Yu Changwu and Wang Guilin

Activists Wang Guilin and Yu Changwu are in custody for having taken part in Yang Chunlin’s campaign “We want human rights not Olympic Games”. Wang Guilin was sentenced on 28 January 2008, to 18 months re-education through work, while Yu Changwu continues to be held secretly.
Dhondup Wangchen and Jigme Gyatso

Dhondup Wangchen, director of a documentary on Tibet, and Jigme Gyatso, his friend and cameraman, have been held since March 2008 for interviewing Tibetans, particularly in the Amdo region. The film about the work of Dhondup Wangchen and Jigme Gyatso is a 25-minute short entitled Leaving Fear Behind (www.leavingfearbehind.com), which was shown during the Olympic Games. In it, Tibetans in the Amdo region gave their opinions about the Dalai Lama, the Olympics and Chinese law. Dhondup Wangchen is believed to be held in Ershilipu prison, in the city of Xining, where his brother-in-law tried without success to see him. Jigme Gyatso was reportedly seen for the last time in a detention centre in the town of Kachu, in Ganzu province.
Chen Guangcheng

Blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng is serving a prison sentence of four years and three months in Linyi prison in Shandong province in southern China. He was sentenced for bringing a law suit against the local authorities in connection with a campaign of sterilisation and forced abortions. On the eve of the Beijing Paralympics, the Chinese authorities blocked the mobile phones of Chen’s associates and family members. This police action affected the residents of his village and his lawyer, Li Fangping. Several foreign journalists were prevented from meeting his family.
Du Daobin

Writer Du Daobin was arrested in Yingcheng on 21 July 2008 by the authorities in Hubei province, central China. Local police were apparently reacting to his stance ahead of the Games. He was found guilty of “inciting subversion of the state” and sentenced on 11 June 2004 to three years in prison, followed by four years house arrest. Du Daobin posted a number of pro-democracy articles online and some urging greater freedom of expression in China. He actively called for the release of Liu Di, a young student imprisoned in 2003 for pro-democracy articles she posted on Internet forums.
Wang Guilan

Petitioner and human rights activist, Wang Guilan, was sentenced to 15-months re-education through work on 28 August 2008 for agreeing to a telephone interview with a foreign journalist the previous month. Wang had been arrested in Beijing on 28 February 2008, after writing an open letter on human rights ahead of the Olympic, which attracted more than 12,000 signatures. From 17 April, she was placed in a prison in Hubei to prevent any activities during the Olympics. She is currently being held in Enshi, Hubei. She has been arrested several times since 2001.
Zhang Wenhe

Pro-democracy activist Zhang Wenhe waved a banner in Beijing streets in October 2007, that read, “We want human rights and democracy and not the fascist Olympic Games” that led to his arrest and forced incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
Zheng Mingfang

Human rights activist, Zheng Mingfang, was sent to a re-education through work camp for two years at the beginning of April 2008, because of an open letter she wrote about the Olympics. She was arrested by the authorities in Beijing on 29 February 2008, shortly before a parliamentary session. She is reportedly being held in Xian district in Tianjin, east of the capital. She is beginning to go blind and was reportedly ill-treated during her period in detention. Her husband has spoken about the methods used by the authorities since her arrest to prevent her from communicating with foreigners “a central condition of Zheng’s release”, according to district police officials.

Source: Reporters Without Borders

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Johnny Liberty’s “Are You Sovereign” Presentation | Granada Forum (1995) | YouTube Videos

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