‘Single-issue extremists’

May 28, 2007

The Alabama Department of Homeland Security maintains a website of groups suspected of including terrorists. I haven’t seen the page, but on the surface, the site seems a little odd — if officials had reason to believe certain groups had terrorist ties, the state a) should arrest them; and/or b) conduct some kind of intelligence gathering operation without the suspects’ knowledge. Putting up a website seems kind of strange.

Regardless, in Alabama’s case, the problem isn’t just the list itself, but rather who’s on it.

The Alabama Department of Homeland Security has taken down a website it operated that included gay-rights and antiwar organizations in a list of groups that could include terrorists.

The website identified different types of terrorists and included a list of groups it suggested could spawn terrorists. The list also included environmentalists, animal rights advocates and abortion opponents.

The director of the department, Jim Walker, said his agency received calls and e-mails from people who said they felt the site unfairly targeted certain people because of their beliefs. He said he planned to reinstate the website but would no longer identify specific types of groups.

The whole thing is just bizarre. Apparently, officials in Alabama identified what they called “single-issue extremists,” considered possible threats by state law enforcement. In most cases, the list included regular ol’, garden-variety liberals with no history of violence or criminal behavior, and no radical agenda to speak of. For example, Equality Alabama advocates gay rights, so it was added to the list.

“Single-issue extremists often focus on issues that are important to all of us,” the website explained. “However, they have no problem crossing the line between legal protest and … illegal acts, to include even murder, to succeed in their goals.”

Far-right activist groups, maybe. But war protestors and gay-rights advocates? I don’t think so.

Much of what the government does down here is strange and unexplainable. It’s as close as it gets to charming;>

  • I blame the Democrats for coming up with the idea of Homeland Security and I blame the Republicans for making it the fascist big brother wannabe that it is becoming.

    If the righties want to go all Red Dawn then the Homeland Security Department is our own little bit of Nazi-ism.

  • Single-issue extremists, huh? I don’t suppose the Ku Klux Klan or the National Socialist White People’s Party made it onto the list, did they?

    And pigs might fly someday….but I doubt it.

  • What Dale said.

    Freedom and democracy isn’t “taken” from people. It’s usually just “scared” out of them.

  • Seems like the Alabama Department of Homeland Security should be on its own list.

  • After Bloomberg locked up peaceful protesters and kept them incommunicado for three days, no one should expect any other government agencies to behave differently. One group of protesters who were locked away in NYC were playing instruments – flutes, clarinets, guitars. The protesters got to watch the police who arrested them destroying their instruments.

    Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot guy, spent $1.3 million to try to get a lawyer working for Homeland Security, Mike Wiggins, elected to the Georgia Supreme Court. Wiggins ran as a Republican for a non-partisan position. Prior to this election, supreme court races usually took about $400,000 to run effectively. Wiggins BTW was soundly defeated statewide.

    Power abuses whatever it touches.

  • You forget. It’s Alabama, where 40 years ago people who believed in civil rights and racial equality were “communist terrorists” bent on tearing down all the “good” in society. Their DHS is operating on “Alabama intelligence.”

    Being considered “the enemy” by the single-digit IQs you find in Alabama is sort of a mark of honor. So I’ll just say that this “multi-single issue extremist” (democracy, animal rights, environmentalism, gay rights) proudly lists “Enemy of the State of Alabama” on that list.

    There’s a reason that placde is #50 for education and intelligence.

  • included gay-rights and antiwar organizations in a list of groups that could include terrorists.

    I’ve no doubt the lame-brains at AL DHS are terrified by the very thought of gay people. Especially those with rights. [Shudder!] You know, showers, terrorist attacks, etc.

    In addition to the KKK and other white supremacy groups, I wonder if anti-abortion people made the list.

  • …and I’m glad to see that articles have taken a holiday also. I feel so Russian…

  • The director of the department, Jim Walker, said his agency received calls and e-mails from people who said they felt the site unfairly targeted certain people because of their beliefs.

    Any bets that the site closed because of those e-mails? From the *one* group which is known for its terrorist tactics but which resents being called on it? (The list also included environmentalists, animal rights advocates and *abortion opponents.*) The rest of us could protest till we’re blue in the face and nobody would pay a blind bit of attention to it.

  • Homeland “Security” has decided that WE THE PEOPLE are the enemy.

    This from a country that sanctions torture, runs a chain secret prisons, spies on us without warrants and lies to justify the ongoing carnage of our soldiers in an endless occupations of a country that most Americans can’t find on a map.

  • I suggest that anybody who objects to this behavior by the state government of Alabama should make sure that any organization or business into whose operation they have input never attends any meetings or conventions in Alabama. Hotel taxes, convention fees, sales taxes and other revenues from meetings go to fund state governments, and you have no other input over how they are used. I’m not going to go there any more.

  • Facist America, in 10 Easy Steps

    1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
    After 9/11 We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. Rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat invokes even more fear.
    .
    2. Create a gulag – Say hello to Guantanamo Bay.
    Anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantanamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
    .
    3. Develop a thug caste – Coming to Your Town –> privately contracted ‘security’
    .
    4. Set up an internal surveillance system
    In 2005/2006 the NYT revealed a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions. It should be clear to ordinary Americans that they too, could be under state scrutiny.
    .
    5. Harass citizens’ groups
    The Alabama DHS ‘list’ is one such example. However, watch out for the secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense.
    .
    6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
    This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. On such example of this is the no-fly list, which stops people moving around the country. How do you get on the list? Who knows. It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.
    .
    7. Target key individuals
    Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. Fire civil servants who speak out.
    .
    8. Control the press
    You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America – it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal wrote, “a steady stream of lies polluting the news well”. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth.
    .
    9. Dissent equals treason
    Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”.
    .
    Since Sept 2006, the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
    .
    10. Suspend the rule of law
    The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency – which the president now has enhanced powers to declare – he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.
    .
    Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”

  • R. Vasey: Sorry, but this McCarthian twisting of Niemöller’s quote is a pet peeve of mine. The communists were the first target of Hitler’s, since they were his main political opponents.

    “First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

    http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Niemoller_quote.html

  • Sorry, I’m with Alabammer on this one…

    If you see a buncha long haired teenagers climb out of a Volkswagen van with mutli-colored posies painted all over it and that circle with the chicken foot on it…

    RUN!!!! Run for your lives!!!!!

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