{"id":183635,"date":"2013-01-06T21:08:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T02:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/01\/06\/god-bless-america-4\/"},"modified":"2013-01-06T21:08:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-07T02:08:00","slug":"god-bless-america-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/01\/06\/god-bless-america-4\/","title":{"rendered":"God Bless America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The US Treasury is now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.warisboring.com\/2013\/01\/03\/i-got-caught-in-the-feds-terror-finance-net\/\">freezing the accounts of cartoonists of mass destruction<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">I went to Congo to write a comic book about a terror group \u2014 and ended up being labelled a terror supporter myself by the Treasury Department.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The bizarre tale of my graphic novel Army of God, the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army in Congo and Treasury\u2019s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a window inside a little-known counter-terrorism campaign that captures more than a few innocents in its wide net.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Nearly 12 years since the massive expansion of federal powers in the wake of the 9\/11 attacks, OFAC\u2019s collateral damage \u2014 myself included \u2014 is a reminder that defeating terrorists can come at the cost of our freedom.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">It began two years ago. In the fall of 2010 I spent a month in the Democratic Republic of Congo reporting on the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army, a brutal Ugandan rebel group that was chased from its homeland and has spent the last decade hiding out in the forests of eastern Congo. Led by charismatic madman Joseph Kony, the LRA pillages farming villages for supplies, kills or mutilates the adults and enslaves the children.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">In early December our agent wired <span style=\"color: black;\">[artist Tim]<\/span> Hamilton his share of the advance, but the money never reached the artist\u2019s account. After a few weeks the agent made some calls. \u201cHe was told that the party holding the funds was the federal wire fraud unit which suspected that they were laundering funds for a terrorist organization,\u201d Hamilton says.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: blue;\">On<span style=\"color: blue;\"> one level, it may seem <span style=\"color: blue;\">as if it is not a big deal, but it is.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: blue;\"><span style=\"color: blue;\"><span style=\"color: blue;\">Basically, th<span style=\"color: blue;\">is means<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span> that they can take everything you have with out any recourse at any time, and if they are wrong, or if they are malicious, it does not matter, because they are above the law, because if anything goes wrong, all they need to do is go, &#8220;Yadda, yadda, terrorism.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We have deliberately created a lawless national security state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The US Treasury is now freezing the accounts of cartoonists of mass destruction: I went to Congo to write a comic book about a terror group \u2014 and ended up being labelled a terror supporter myself by the Treasury Department.The bizarre tale of my graphic novel Army of God, the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army in Congo &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,1004,1076],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-finance","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183635"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}