Nightmare on Main Street: More on Bush's Anti-Dissent Order

EV_Ares

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Fri Sep-07-07 07:42 AM
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Nightmare on Main Street: More on Bush's Anti-Dissent Order

Edited on Fri Sep-07-07 08:17 AM by EV_Ares

We wrote recently here of Bush's new executive order granting himself and his minions the arbitrary power to seize the entire assets of any American citizen � without warning, without any criminal charges whatsoever � solely by declaring that their victim somehow poses an unspecified threat to "the peace or stability of Iraq" or else is "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq." In other words, Bush now claims the power to strip you of your assets if you oppose American policy in Iraq.

This latest tyrannical outburst from the Outrager-in-Chief has passed largely without notice. Even some of the Administration's fiercest critics have downplayed its significance. The always-admirable Dave Neiwert at Orcinus has been among the skeptics, on the reasonable grounds that right-wing militia groups were forever reading vast conspiracies into ordinary government decrees in the 1990s, and that one should wait for more informed legal analyses before leaping to scarifying conclusions. Fair enough � although Dave himself has done as much as anyone out there in detailing the extremism of the Bush Regime and its supporters. To his credit, Dave has kept an open mind on the question, and co-blogger at Orcinus, Sara Robinson, has taken a far darker view of the executive order.

Now Dave has featured a long � and highly disturbing � piece of informed legal analysis of the order from one of his regular commenters, attorney Den Valdron. who draws out the very dangerous implications of the order's wording in convincing detail. Perhaps most disturbing is Valdron's insight that the executive order doesn't even have to be formally invoked in order to have a chilling effect on political dissent. Just its mere existence � and the ever-present threat of social and legal obliteration that it represents � will be enough to quell all but the hardiest opponents of the Leader's criminal rampage in Iraq.

You should scoot on ever to Orcinus and read "That Executive Order" in full, but below is an excerpt about the "chill factor" that Valdron identifies:

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/07/that-executive-order.html

Essentially, in this Executive Order the President is assuming unbelievably vast powers to simply sidestep normal criminal or civil procedure, and to operate quite explicitly on the basis of guilt by anticipation, guilt by pre-emption, guilt by association and guilt for any reason in the mind of the decider. There is literally no limitation on authority, except that the person's actual physical being is unaffected.

However, a person so designated by this Order could be rendered into a non-person literally instantaneously. They could be stripped of every asset, have every financial or commercial opportunity denied to them. Worse, this literally creates a power to shun. Anyone who employs this person, who hires them, who pays them for work, lends them money to tide them over, who rents them an apartment, or allows them to sleep on the couch, who drops them a few coins as they panhandle would be liable to becoming subject to this order. The only protection would be to fire this person, to not hire them, to not pay them, to not lend them money, evict them from your apartment, kick them off the couch, and look away if you see them begging on the street.

If the potential implications of this make you think of Jews in Nazi Germany, think again. The Jews pre-war had it good compared to the potential of this.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1241/135/