Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive organizer who is challenging US Rep. Nancy Pelosi for the House seat she has held since 1987, was met with stone-faced stares and laughter on CNN when he spoke during a panel discussion Monday about the Trump administration national security memo that one journalist said amounts to a “declaration of war” on the president’s political opponents.
The memo has recently garnered outrage from Democratic lawmakers, more than 30 of whom signed a letter condemning Trump’s threats against progressive groups and organizers, but it has received little attention in the corporate media, and Chakrabarti’s fellow guests on CNN Monday displayed little recognition of what he was talking about when he raised alarm about NSPM-7.
Chakrabarti said the administration’s policy of bombing boats in the Caribbean—vessels that, Vice President JD Vance admitted, could very well be fishing boats—"to kill people the White House has claimed without evidence are “narco-terrorists,” raises alarm about the president’s push to unilaterally define who qualifies as a “terrorist.”
“Here’s what concerns me—Trump is saying, ‘I can define who’s a terrorist, and that means I can kill him.’ At the same time, we’re seeing executive orders defining whole parts of Democratic Party as domestic terrorists,” said Chakrabarti. “Here we’re seeing NSPM-7, which says any anti-American or anti-capitalist or anti-Christian speech, is extremist speech.”
While claiming to protect the US from drug traffickers, he added, the administration has created “a task force of 4,000 agents who are being taken off of drug trafficking and human trafficking, and the actual crime, and being put on prosecuting those people who are saying anti-capitalist things.”
“Do you think that’s okay?” he asked the other panelists. “Can you put two and two together about what’s going on here?”
None of the other guests responded, and Seat looked blankly at Chakrabarti before Sidner said the show was going to a commercial break.
“We will answer that question, coming up,” Sidner said, laughing. “We’re going to leave it there for that conversation.”
“This would be like if George W. Bush had said CodePink was al-Qaeda,” explained former national security official Miles Taylor, “or people protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were associated with the Islamic State.”
Like if? What do you mean if? That was, in fact, the Bush Administration's attitude: if you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.
And the Bush Administration gleefully used the new powers of the Patriot Act to go after protesters - when they could find time in their busy schedule of bugging mosques and defending Japanese internment and torturing random Afghan farmers they kidnapped off the street in Kabul and killing two million Iraqis because Saddam Hussein insulted Bush's dad. Does no one but me actually remember those fucking war criminals?