As if trying to make the most of the last days of the Bush/Cheney administration, the Supreme Court whacked another chunk out of our Constitution, stripping us of yet another of the protections the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us because they knew all too well why we need them.
Down at the bottom of page 2A in my state’s major daily, "The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette," on January 15 was a short article that opens, "The Supreme Court gave prosecutors more ability to use evidence obtained in violation of the Constitution" (Herring v. United States, 07-513). A warrant for the arrest of Bennie Dean Herring had been "recalled," but not removed from all police computers, so it still looked active when he was arrested and searched.
Mistakes do happen. The police most likely acted in good faith and Bennie Dean may well have been guilty as charged. But permitting him to be searched on a warrant that had been dropped sets a dangerous precedent that threatens us all. Too many people believe that as long as they are doing nothing wrong, they are not threatened. This belief is as dangerous as the precedent.
When we loosen legal and constitutional restraints on police power and due process, we open the door to baseless and hysterical accusations like those that Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunters used to destroy people’s careers—often on no more than someone’s say-so—during the 1940s and 1950s. The neighbor woman I stayed with after school was one of the innocents who were hounded and slandered in the anti-Communist hysteria that followed World War II, and that led to the Vietnam War a generation later. Remember that good ole "domino theory" that if the Communists took Vietnam all the countries around it would fall, like a row of dominoes, until the Commies reached Hawaii and then our West Coast.
During the Vietnam War, those of us who spoke out against it were likely to be hounded and slandered. This was particularly true for an unprecedented organization that shook the Nixon administration. Never in US history had our combat veterans—many of them gung-ho volunteers—massed together to protest continuation of the war in which they had served as they did in Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). These vets spoke truths that could not be denied. As a World War II veteran and pro-war hawk told me, "I’ll listen to any man who’s had his face in the mud over there."
To continue the war, VVAW had to be silenced. Although I am not a veteran, I had the honor of working with the fine men in VVAW during the organization’s 4 most dynamic and persecuted years—as I relate in my recently published book, COMBAT by TRIAL: An ODYSSEY with 20th CENTURY WINTER SOLDIERS. I began by filming their first two major actions, then I lived and worked with a VVAW regional coordinator, and finally I was a member of the defense team for the Gainesville 8—7 VVAW leaders and a conscientious objector—who were falsely accused of plotting to provoke riots at the 1972 Republican convention. I saw and experienced for myself the means used to shut the vets up
One method was to discredit VVAW by publicly accusing the vets of being frauds who were trying to discredit real veterans. We saw a repeat of this tactic by the Swift Boat Vets for [what they called] Truth during John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.
Another method was to intimidate VVAW’s supporters. I know of at least 3 people who were arrested to discourage them from working with the vet I lived with. Not even the lawyer for one of them was told either the charges against or the whereabouts of his client until his arraignment, on a bogus charge. The other two were our neighbors who asked the men searching our apartment for their warrant. There were no warrants, either for the search of our apartment or the arrest of our neighbors. Such are a couple of the stories—along with accounts of a few scares I had while working with VVAW—that I tell in COMBAT by TRIAL. Exciting reading, or so I’ve been told. "A page turner."
Another method used to discredit VVAW was to set the vets up, or frame them, or simply accuse them of serious crimes. These tactics were used most egregiously against Florida regional coordinator Scott Camil. Once he and his partner were arrested for kidnapping and extortion—capital offenses. The alleged kidnapping allegedly took place when they were out of town so not even present to commit the alleged crime. The alleged extortion was allegedly the ransom paid for the alleged release of two young men. The evidence was a receipt for the ransom. A mere $100. And a receipt for ransom money? Get real. The receipt was for payment of a debt.
Another time Scott and his partner were arrested for supplying drugs at a party. Although both admit to partaking of the illegal substances, they were not the suppliers of them. Undercover officers were.
All these charges were eventually dropped, but not until months and hefty legal bills later, and not until after Scott and his lady had spent time in jail. And not until after Scott had been indicted as one of the Gainesville 8. I was drafted by their defense attorneys to help them cross examine two of the FBI informers—whom I had the misfortune to know personally—whose lies were used to construct the case. A third FBI informer was a man Scott trusted as his best friend and confident, until the man took the stand to testify against him. This is all in COMBAT by TRIAL, along with quotes from the jury foreman explaining why the jury saw through the government’s fabrications and needed to take only one vote to acquit the 8 on all counts.
More than a year of false charges, and the government still wasn’t through with Scott. A couple of DEA agents tried to set him up on a cocaine deal. When he refused to cooperate, one of them shot him in the back. The bullet narrowly missed his heart, but he survived. To this day, what is generally remembered is not that he was being set up, but that he was shot in a drug deal gone bad.
In COMBAT by TRIAL—which you can order from amazon.com—I take readers inside VVAW to help them understand why gung-ho combatants become peace activists, how far beyond the law our leaders were prepared to go, and what it was like to live under such pressures. The Founding Fathers were all too familiar with them from their British overlords. That is why they added the Bill of Rights to our Constitution. Those rights begins with our freedom of speech and assembly. The Bush/Cheney administration has systematically been stripping away these protections with the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and self-proclaimed exemptions from the law and Constitution.
We the people don’t just have the right to know the truth, we need to know it. We need to know what our leaders are doing in our name. And we need to understand what the effects are of abuses of our rights. Only with knowledge and understanding can we protect ourselves and our way of life.
Question authority. It’s the American way.
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I have taken an oath "to defend the government and constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic." What do I do when my government becomes the greatest enemy of the constitution?
--John W. Kniffin, Sgt, USMC
Vietnam Veterans Against the War and one of the Gainesville 8
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