Former Congressman labels ‘liberty lovers are terrorists’ study “frightening,” “bizarre,” “insidious”
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Former Congressman Bob Barr has slammed as “frightening,” “bizarre,” and “insidious” a new study funded by the Department of Homeland Security with lists ‘liberty lovers’ as right-wing terrorists, noting that the federal government is determined to re-define legitimate political beliefs as thought crimes.
As we reported last week, a study produced by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland with the aid of $12 million dollars in DHS funding characterizes Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority,” and “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists.
The report lists numerous other political ideologies which would normally be considered as American as mom and apple pie as extremist beliefs, including people who consider themselves “anti-global,” Americans who believe their “way of life” is under attack, those who consider themselves “fiercely nationalistic,” and people who “believe in conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty.”
Former Georgia Congressman and staunch liberty advocate Bob Barr responded to the story by warning that it provides a “frightening” and “bizarre” example of how “government officials seem to have become increasingly distrustful of individual liberty.”
Barr pointed to a previous document produced by the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) which listed his own supporters, as well as Ron Paul voters and people who display political bumper stickers as potential terrorists, to illustrate how framing constitutionalists and conservatives as extremist radicals is a disturbing meme being circulated by the political class.
“The report may appear innocuous, but it is not. It offers a carefully scripted but insidious analysis of Americans who happen to hold certain philosophical or political views, many of which are common among conservatives and libertarians,” writes Barr, quoting the Infowars story which highlighted how the study was all part of the “rush to denounce legitimate political beliefs as thought crimes.”
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“It is deeply disturbing that the executive branch of our federal government continues to demonize and delegitimize political beliefs, particularly those challenging the “conventional wisdom” or the status quo. It is even more distressing that neither the U.S. House of Representatives nor the Senate has moved to put a stop to such efforts, which they could if their members possessed the understanding and the backbone to do so,” concludes Barr.
After our article on the study was picked up by the Drudge Report, the story took on a life of its own, prompting scorn from conservatives across the spectrum, including a Washington Times report by By Wesley Pruden entitled The new terrorists — they’re all of us.
In the article, Pruden also tackles other reports issued by the FBI which characterize purchasing a cup of coffee with cash or making bulk food purchases as potential terrorist behavior, which he identifies as part of an effort to “cast conservatives as nuts.”
“Who could have guessed that Costco or Sam’s Club, where everybody loads up hot dogs, pizza, sides of beef, fruit, vegetables and toilet paper by the ton and fruit juice and root beer in 60-gallon drums, are hotbeds of terrorist scheming. One program, under the aegis of the FBI, even calls using cash to pay for a cup of coffee suspicious, even though most coffee-shop cashiers frown on a customer paying for a $1.50 cup of coffee with a credit card,” writes Pruden.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
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