Open letter to the Idaho delegation

The Editor's desk column this month is my rather lengthy and impassioned response to the Idaho congressional delegation and 402 other House members' decision to pass HR 1955 on October 23, 2007. The bill may as well be called the "Thought Crimes Act of 2007" because it identifies anyone who disagrees with the policies of government as potentially violent homegrown terrorists. By extension, those deemed guilty of crimes created by the act would be subject to the unwarranted searches, seizures and indefinite detainments and torture techniques the Bush administration terror warriors are notoriously capable of inflicting on its prisoners. Never has such a vote in Congress affected me so deeply. It represents the moment most of us have been anticipating for some time: Government injustice has become so blind that an American majority has been damaged by it. Government's legislative response to growing dissent is not to correct the injustices but classify those who complain about them as "terrorists."

This, I believe, is government making a fatal mistake. How long can a minority, no matter how well armed, continue projecting power once it begins persecuting the majority as enemies of the state? It has finally become apparent why I have been witness to the full spectrum of city, county, state and federal abuses since June, 1995. For almost 13 years, regular folks have been coming to me with their stories and documents proving how and why government abusers stole their property and/or destroyed their lives. With clarity uncommon to other aspects of my life, I can recall every person and every horror story, in chronological order, from 1995 to present. What does that portend for our future? God only knows. But we can be certain that the horror stories are real and they were told to me for a reason. It is my dream that every government-induced abuse become public, that every government or private-sector abuser be exposed and that justice prevails here on earth. As each injustice is paraded before the court of public opinion, I want to see the damaged made whole and the innocent set free. It is also my belief that the eternal universe exacts its own temporal form of poetic justice: When the laws of God, nature and man align themselves properly, we will discover that "they" have commissioned the construction of the exact number of prison beds needed to house themselves. Amen.

Rep. Bill Sali
Rep. Mike Simpson
RE: HR 1955 (and everything else)

Gentlemen:

Four-hundred and four members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including the two-member Idaho delegation, voted to pass HR 1955, The "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007." It was the sense of Congress on October 23, 2007, that the U.S. government needs a law to address the "violent radicalization" of "homegrown terrorists" who desire "political, religious or social change" in America. It is not logical or proper for Congress to conclude that Americans are spontaneously and without cause becoming violently radicalized, homegrown terrorists. Therefore, if homegrown Americans are radicalizing into violent terrorists, logic and parliamentary procedure demand that Congress first identify a cause before criminalizing an effect. Since Congress did not identify a cause before passing HR 1955, but did include a provision expressing an interest in finding out what could be causing Americans to "violently radicalize," (sic) allow me to enlighten you:

This country has changed dramatically since we were in kindergarten during the 50s and 60s. While our parents and grandparents were in charge and we were growing up, the government first had to prove that crimes had been committed before people could be arrested for them. Now, while our generation is in charge, on our watch, people can be arrested on hearsay, or nosay, for crimes (or even non-crimes) that may or may not be committed in the future—and detain us indefinitely without due process. The government has also decided it can torture those whom it takes into custody. The conditions above alone qualify as "cause."

But there is more. Government policies have us perpetually at war with enemies imagined and manufactured, have generated a level of public debt greater than our combined assets, are the root cause of widespread personal bankruptcies and home foreclosures, are responsible for the over-taxed fiat dollar’s rapid devaluation against world currencies and have precipitated epidemics of chronic illnesses and neurological anomalies. Government waste, abuse, warmongering, perversion, racketeering and corruption, at every level in America, is so well-reported as to be global common knowledge. Cause (singular) is now causes (plural).

In the interest of "homeland security," the government justifies tracking Americans’ movements, listening to our conversations and monitoring our financial transactions. Curiously, the same government has allowed an estimated 12-40 million undocumented aliens cross the southern border to live in our country illegally. These illegals are causing tremendous social tension in America and they are giving birth to an estimated 500,000 "anchor babies"/government entitlement recipients each year, straining public resources to their limits.

In the minds of millions of those whom the House claims to be representing, cause and causes have crossed into betrayal because our right to privacy has been trumped by government’s sadistic obsession with entrapping us into acts of saying or doing something in violation of one or more of its millions of laws so it can punish us. With regard to government’s inability or refusal to manage the southern border, cause has either become nationally disastrous incompetence on a historically shameful scale or cause has become probable enough to seek indictments against certain individuals on charges of treason.

Rep. Sali and Rep. Simpson: Americans are not spontaneously "radicalizing" into "violent homegrown terrorists." They are, however, becoming justifiably angry because government has proven itself innumerable times over to be insensitive to our needs and the primary cause of our misery. Americans are increasingly desperate for change because their freedom is diminishing, their solvency is tenuous, their country is dying and justice in America is, at best, illusory.

My opinions on these matters are well qualified. For the last 15 years, my understanding of America and what is becoming of her has been formed by the stories of people and mountains of legal documents proving how Americans’ land, assets, children, businesses and freedom are being stolen and their lives lawlessly destroyed by government—often in cahoots with its privileged, private sector friends. The thousands of pages of official documents I have reviewed prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that government actors are systematically violating the American people, almost at will now. Because our system of checks and balances has failed so consistently and so utterly, violated Americans turn to me, the editor of a small alternative press, as a last resort, in their search for justice because nobody in government or the corporate media seems to care.

Following is a picture of contemporary America as it has been shown to me:

1. Newborns are assigned SSNs at birth and government policies mandate them be injected with toxin-laden vaccines some 36 times (with 116 antigens) by age six. Many die, many more are severely damaged and Department of Education data shows that one in 67 American kids (ages 6-21) are now autistic.

2. Our food supply is laced with government-approved, flavor-enhancing poisons like aspartame, MSG and entire menus of toxic additives and preservatives; government polices prefer that municipal water supplies be contaminated with known toxins such as fluoride and chlorine when nontoxic, fiscally-viable alternatives could be used instead.

3. Government-approved pharmaceutical drugs have maimed and killed millions of Americans. These drugs are the underlying cause of epidemic chronic illnesses in this country and directly perpetuate the "medical" marketplace for more drugs and surgeries. As people discover naturopathy to heal the damage done to them by government-approved and mandated drugs and vaccines, government is attempting to pass laws that protect drug companies from liability for the pain, suffering and even death their products cause. Government is simultaneously attempting to regulate (eliminate public access to) beneficial yet harmless vitamins, herbs and supplements.

4. Government-approved and administered toxic chemicals are poisoning our lakes, atmosphere, lands, rivers, parks, schools and roadways; government subsidized industries are feeding us genetically-modified food grown with toxic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.

5. Evidence is routinely manufactured into existence so that the property, children, assets, businesses and freedom of innocent people can be "legally" stolen through government courts that "presume" all government plaintiffs are honest public servants and civilian defendants are guilty liars. Half of America’s 2.2 million prisoners were convicted of nonviolent, consensual, victimless or nonexistent crimes; 10 percent of American prisoners can be proven completely innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. Prisoners in state and federal custody are, as a matter of policy, subjected to physical and psychological torture, denied due process, intentionally starved on insufficient rations and non-nutritive foods, made to drink contaminated water, used as unwitting subjects for biochemical and psychological experimentation and routinely suffer medical neglect and medical malpractice. Government employees enjoy almost total immunity in government courts for death and damage they inflict on civilians (and prisoners). Conversely, civilians can go to jail or even be "justifiably" tasered and shot by cops for not wearing bicycle helmets, stating their opinions, asking questions or just standing there doing nothing at all.

6. Declassified government documents prove that the government has lied about the pretexts for every war, including the present wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which Americans have been asked to fight and die. You now support an expansion of war into Iran under pretexts that are just as provably fraudulent as the previous wars. Declassified government documents prove that the government uses military personnel, civilians, prisoners and even retarded children as lab rats in medical, chemical, biological and behavioral experiments without their knowledge or consent; the government intentionally abandons its own soldiers when taken as prisoners of war and maltreats its surviving and often severely damaged veterans.

7. The government is admittedly seeding the atmosphere with chemicals and metals of known toxicity as platforms for communications, virtual imaging, cloaking and weather modification technologies. Every military base in America is a permanently-contaminated, toxic waste dump; every country where the U.S. military machine is deployed becomes permanently contaminated with a variety of the world’s most toxic chemical substances.

8. Nearly half the kids in government schools are "medicated" with highly-addictive, government-approved psychotropic drugs and many graduate into adulthood as self-absorbed, biochemically-imbalanced, neurologically-crippled, functionally illiterate "victims" with limited critical thinking skills but heightened understanding of sexual deviance and substance abuse. Today’s youth believe that government is here to control and punish our behavior, not protect our rights.

9. The government pays state agencies millions of dollars each year to kidnap children, with or without cause, and place them in government foster homes where they are routinely abused and/or neglected; government courts make it nearly impossible for qualified, loving and distraught families to regain custody of children suffering government-sanctioned sexual, physical and psychological abuse.

10. Better and safer technologies are routinely regulated out of the marketplace by government—and their inventors ruthlessly persecuted, even killed—thereby retarding social progress and perpetuating environmental degradation to protect the interests of status quo industrialists.

11. Government limitlessly borrows paper notes into circulation from private bankers who imagine it into existence and charge interest on its use. Government allows the Federal Reserve bankers to manage the economy in such a way that Americans’ wealth is being transferred out of their hands and into the hands of Federal Reserve bankers. The government also allows a private collection agency called the Internal Revenue Service to wrongfully, and at gunpoint, collect taxes on the wages and salaries of Americans under the guise they are "incomes," hastening the process of their insolvency by government-approved and government court-sanctioned thievery.

12. Government uses the taxes it collects to pay interest on the money it borrows to pay itself excellent wages and perks, buy things for itself, finance (often both sides of) wars all over the world and throw a few crumbs to people it enslaves through "entitlement" programs. Government spending is not limited to available funds but limited only to government imagination and the tolerance of its creditors, which, to date, tolerate over $9 trillion of "public" indebtedness. As if the American people aren’t being fiscally abused severely enough, federal, state, county and city governments have made trillions of dollars investing the money it taxes out of people, storing this illegally-generated "income" off budget, in highly liquid assets, stocks, bonds and in bank accounts to ostensibly finance government employee retirement funds. While government employees retire into middle and upper middle class on privately-managed government retirement plans, private sector workers on government-mismanaged Social Security retire into abject poverty.

13. Government policy favors the ruthless greed of global corporations at the expense of community-based family businesses and sole proprietorships, a policy that has destroyed the American middle class and insures the flow of money (wealth) out of communities and into offshore corporate accounts. Government’s concept of "free trade" promotes the use of third-world slave and child labor and is leading to the imminent dissolution of our national borders while the American people are secretly being robbed of our sovereign nation and its laws without our consent.

14. The national corporate media lies, deceives, misinforms and misdirects Americans’ attention to preserve and promote the interests of an unholy alliance between government and select industrialists.

The list below highlights a few things your fellow former kindergartners don’t like or want:

1. We don’t like government assuming we are criminals by tapping our phones, tracking our movements and monitoring our every financial transaction.

2. We don’t like it when government tortures people.

3. We don’t want to live in a state of perpetual war or live in a state of perpetual fear.

4. We don’t want ourselves or our children to be poisoned or abused in any way.

5. We don’t like it when our children are taught to be mindless, malleable tools of the state.

6. We don’t like being unjustly accused, maliciously prosecuted and wrongfully convicted/imprisoned.

7. We don’t like being regulated out of business.

8. We don’t want to be unjustly taxed.

9. We don’t like it when good deeds are punished while bad deeds are rewarded.

10. We don’t want our sovereign borders erased without our knowledge or consent.

11. We don’t like police brutality.

12. We don’t like being lied to.

And now Congress wants to make it a crime to desire "regime" change in America? I know for a fact that Rep. Sali is personally aware of the issues raised in this letter. If either of you require a refresher course on how badly the state and federal governments are abusing their citizens, then spend an afternoon with me and I will show you the isolated cases and the nationwide patterns they represent; I will show you the chronology of events that brought us from there to here and; I will explain the role each of them has played in transforming the American dream into the nightmare many of your constituents and the great majority of the American people have been living for quite some time now.

Give me a few more hours of your public official/official public time and I will show you how U.S. foreign policy has caused the murder, maiming, misery and displacement of millions of innocent people while concurrently poisoning their lands and deforming their children; I will show you how the world has lost its patience with this country’s foreign policies and how your insistence that we continue this campaign of mass murdering innocents and wanton destruction of their homes, without cause, is the real threat to our national security.

Are you and the 400-odd other members of Congress so far removed from the people, history and the natural rhythms of life that you don’t understand what happens when commoners are beaten, abused, muzzled, impoverished, enslaved, fraudulently accused, maliciously prosecuted, wrongfully convicted and unjustly imprisoned by their governments? Are you so unqualified to represent us that you believe us commoners are terrorists for silently suffering or publicly complaining about provably abusive government? Why didn’t you ask us about what is happening in our lives and then act on our behalf based on what you discovered instead of making it a crime to even tell you that we are literally dying for this country to change?

Can you explain why you voted to pass HR 1955 when "violent radicalism" and "terrorism"—if it destroys or damages property or person, be it homegrown, commercial or imported—is already against the law? Was HR 1955 passed so the classes of people who can be treated like terrorists could be expanded to silence those who have just cause to complain and want government to change its ways?

I urge you to consider this letter a hint that, if Congress really wants to understand why the voices of Americans clamoring for change are getting so loud, it should ask them. Of course, Americans would be more candid with Congress if their candor were not considered by the government to be "thought crimes" punishable by fines, imprisonment, seizure of original documents, torture or the electric chair. If Congress were to objectively investigate qualified claims of government abuse, it would discover, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Americans have, indeed, been the targets of incessant, trans-generational, omni-partisan, poly-faceted, government-enforced assaults on their bodies, minds, children, property, assets, businesses, freedom and lives. Congress would then understand that Americans who are complaining about government abuse are not the terrorists—we are the terrorized.

If this country’s leaders governed according to the needs and desires of ordinary people per their lawful authority, what would they be doing differently? For starters:

1. They would leave people alone unless they harm others or their property.

2. They would collect just and lawful taxes only; taxes would be used to build and maintain vital infrastructure not expand government, finance retirements, subsidize pet industries or provision standing armies.

3. They would not be allowed to borrow money and use the people and our assets as collateral.

4. They would protect food and water supplies, not poison them.

5. They would protect public health, not undermine it.

6. They would enforce common, natural and constitutional laws only and they would be applied equally to everyone.

7. They would provide honest money.

8. They would not meddle with the marketplace, compete with private enterprise, own property or hold securities.

9. They would function in the open; there would be no secrets.

10. They would hold honest elections and lawfully-requested recounts would be immediate and accurate.

11. They would secure the borders against invasion but never invade sovereign nations.

12. They would trade fairly with foreign nations, not steal their resources under military occupation, economic blackmail or by meddling in their internal affairs.

Proof that the list above is valid can be found at www.ronpaul2008.com. Quickly growing numbers of Americans and people from all over the world—Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, young people, old people, military personnel, foreigners, Americans living abroad, men, women, professionals and wage-earners—are supporting Paul’s run for the presidency with a passion that is unprecedented in recent times. On the 5th of November (Remember, Remember), 2007, more than 36,000 people donated over $4.3 million to the Ron Paul campaign. Why? Because they want peace, they want justice and they want safe, decent places to raise their families; they see Ron Paul as the only White House hopeful who wants what they want and; their instincts tell them that the "Ron Paul Revolution" is the last chance to rescue America and restore the Constitutional Republic.

Considering the field of Republicans vying for the party’s nomination to run for president in 2008, which one has a chance of defeating the likely Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton or possibly Al Gore? Is it McCain? Guiliani? Thompson? You know better than I that not one of them would prevail over either Clinton or Gore. You could safely say that a vote for any of the Republican "frontrunners," is a vote for Clinton or Gore. So, why not support Paul? Would he not be the best omni partisan choice for your constituents, the future of America AND the Republican party?

You are undoubtedly aware of Paul’s platform and that support of his prescription for change in America is increasing daily. Rep. Paul has introduced a bill reflecting his desire to restore the Republic which, so far, has no co-sponsors. It is called the American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (HR 3835). It would do away with a few of the things that people don’t like—torture, warrantless surveillance, unwarranted arrests, star chamber tribunals, presidential signing statements and executive fiat. The bill would also restore the sacred writ of habeas corpus which has been suspended though the Constitution (to which everyone involved swears an oath) commands that it "...shall not be suspended."

History shows that, as societies attempt to correct themselves by restoring the proper balance between people and governments, conflicts between the two opposing forces—tyrannical governments and those who have been left with no option but to oppose tyranny—inevitably result. Indeed, it is the solemn and lawful duty of Americans, members of the U.S. House of Representatives included, to resist tyranny.

Finally, this is a letter. In this letter, which are just my thoughts as I attempt to respectfully transfer them to you via the U.S. mails with ink on paper, I submit a partial list of the government-sanctioned atrocities that are being committed, as a matter of government policy, against the American people every single day, as they have been for several decades now. I also listed a few things the American people don’t like and a few things our national leaders would be doing differently if they were truly serving the interests of the people. I then foreshadow, as historically inevitable, a confrontation between tyrants and the people who are left with no recourse but to resist them. Does that make me, a fellow former kindergartner, class of 1968, who has dedicated his life to truth, justice and the American way, a criminal? What about the millions of other fellow former kindergartners who can prove that they have been lawlessly abused by agents and agencies commissioned to enforce the policies of a notoriously corrupt and ruthless government—are they criminals, too?

If you desire to represent the people, withdraw your assent to HR 1955 and co-sponsor HR 3835; work with Rep. Paul and amend it to include removing the blanket of immunity government officials currently enjoy when their abuses of authority trespass on Americans’ constitutionally protected rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Should you be interested in discussing the issues raised in this letter, I am at the service of my country and her people on a moment’s notice.

Don Harkins
The Idaho Observer