Uncle Jeff Hollers:The Slippery Slope

June 5th. This drone strike on I-96 near the Brighton exit

killed James Leon Smith, 49 of South Lyon. Mr. Smith was 

known to be in a leadership position in the People For Peace

or PFP movement. In recent months, the PFP has launched 

several massive demonstrations in major US cities 

protesting the President's intervention in North Africa. The

Pentagon had no comment on the attack but 

sources have indicated that the government now considers

the PFP to be a threat to national security. This was the

first death of a PFP leader. Mr. Smith was married and 

had 3 children.

You think this can't happen here? Well, listen up and pay attention: the current attorney general went to great lengths to squirm around intensive questioning by congress today: neither he, the President nor anyone else in the Administration will say in plain English, that the government of the United States WILL NOT use drone strikes or other military LETHAL force against NON-COMBATANT AMERICAN CIVILIANS INSIDE THE UNITED STATES. 

They're leaving the door open, my friends. Just in case. Maybe not in the next few years but down the road-well, they want to leave their options open. 

Remember, our laws are based on precedent. Of course,  interpretation of what the precedent means depends on how many oily Scalias and Roberts we have the misfortune to be on the Supreme court. But here it is folks. What if down the road ,things go south in this country. And, what rears its ugly head but another Nixon or Mitchell or Hoover or Cheney? You can bet that if there were drones back in the day, Nixon would have droned the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers and anyone else who disagreed with him back into the Stone Age. National Security. Along with plenty of collateral damage and countless innocents who were at the wrong 
place or knew the wrong people or said the wrong thing.

This cannot be allowed to happen. Our employees in Washington must be told that this is unacceptable. They can already track us with  satellites,  security cams,  cell phones. Who knows how many gigabytes of info they have on all of us. Everything we buy, everything we watch, every time we log on, every word we email and, yes, blog. To allow the government the option to kill us for whatever happens to be the nebulous National Security crisis of the moment is something we cannot do. We have to think about future use, future consequences. 

Homework for the following weeks: see how the media covers this. Check out NPR, the New York Times. What does Rush say? How about the Tea Party who are so concerned about us becoming slaves of the bad,bad government. Are your friends talking about it? Make a mental list. See if it's time to be really, really scared.

Get out on a limb and add data to your file. Get a special file made just for you in some little known shadowy government agency because you sent an email to your legislator or the president denouncing the lethal option. 

Shameless emotion tug- do you want your grandchildren when they are grown to have this experience: sitting at home watching the tube and the house 4 doors down explodes. Oh, they say, musta been a drone. Yeah, I heard they were involved in something. Guess they were.