Sunday, November 04, 2007

More Horror Stories from Naomi Wolf

In a comment on the previous post, Phil linked to this piece by Naomi Wolf on another blog. These stories sound so unreal that I'm sure many will say, "It can't be true" or "She must have done something suspicious" but that's what they said as the Nazi's took over. We have the advantage of knowing about Nazi Germany, something those living in Germany in the 30s didn't have. Here are a couple of excerpts from her post:

Here in Australia I hear from the nation’s best-know feminist activist, and former adviser to Paul Keating, Anne Summers, who was also at the time this took place Chair of the Board of Greenpeace International. Summers was detained by armed agents for FIVE HOURS each way in LAX on her way to and from the annual meeting of the board of Greenpeace International in Mexico, and her green card was taken away from her. `I want to call a lawyer’, she told TSA agents. `Ma’am, you do not have a right to call an attorney,’ they replied. `You have not entered the United States.’

Apparently a section of LAX just beyond the security line is asserted to be `not in the United States’ — though it is squarely inside the airport — so the laws of the US do not apply. (This assertion, by the way, should alarm any US citizen who is aware of how the White House argued that Guantanamo is not `in the United States’ - is a legal no-man’s land — so the laws of the US do not apply.) Toward the end of her second five-hour detention she asked, `Why am I being detained?’ `Lady, this is not detention,’ the TSA agent told her. `Detention is when I take you to the cells out back and lock you up.’

Last week in Boston, while attending Bioneers by the Bay, I heard that one of the speakers for our event, an environmentalist named Gunter Pauli, was going to miss the time of his scheduled speech; he had been physically taken OFF THE PLANE by TSA agents and had to take a much later flight. More chillingly, the camerawoman doing my interview said that another well-known environmental writer found that his girlfriend was effectively `disappeared’ for three days as she sought to enter the US from Canada. Lisa Fithian, an anti-globalization activist, was denied entry across the Canadian border in 2001 and was offered the choice of turning back or being arrested.

– Is building a US Embassy in Baghdad the size of eighty football fields and at a cost of well more than half a BILLION dollars evidence of short- or long-term thinking?


In a June post, I created a vision of a military coup in the US to set up a scenario to imagine the choices that Iraqis must face daily. If Wolf is correct, Bush and company have been using the presidency and the power of the US government to set up the base for taking over the country - with Blackwater as their private military.

Many Jews perished in Germany because they didn't leave when they could. If you read this report seriously, you can get a sense of how it must have felt. Can you give up your home, your job, whatever savings you have because some people are saying this is going to happen? I don't know that Wolf isn't seeing things that aren't there, but I don't know that she is wrong either.

3 comments:

  1. And of course protesting is simply a way of asking to be put inside these things.

    Would a Democrat be any different? We look at those in Germany and ask why no one fought and we realize that they couldn't.

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  2. We've given up both our security and our freedom since 911, all in search of "national security". What a joke that is. TSA is out of control, as are all the other parts of the new Dept of Homeland Security. (It does rather sound like Nazi Germany, doesn't it? The good old homeland - )
    Elaine

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  3. Anon - Not sure what you mean. 'inside these things' means what, concentration camps? There are other things than protesting. People did go underground in Germany and France and gathered information for the allies, helped people escape over the borders, etc. And people did leave Germany while they were still able - including my mother and father.

    'Would a Democrat be any different?' Not clear what you mean. Than Bush/Cheney? Absolutely. So would probably many of the Republicans.

    And there are things we can do now. The more people pay attention to what is going on with TSA and in the no-man's land on the other side of customs at airports, the more likely we can get Congressional candidates to pledge to do something about this. I know I'm going to try to get through to the Murkowski staff.

    Elaine, nothing much to add to what you said.

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