Just saw Punishment Park. Is the McCarran Act still legal today?

[robertpaulsen]

I read the reviews for the DVD of Punishment Park in USA Today & The New York Times and was very intrigued. However, every time I went into a video store I could not find it for rental or purchase. Twice I special ordered it only to have my order subsequently canceled. Finally, after five months of searching, I found a copy at Amoeba in Hollywood.

I must say it was worth the wait. This movie is like 1984 meets Blair Witch Project. It is 1970. President Nixon has declared a state of emergency and uses the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act to arrest student activists. They are convicted before a tribunal that gives them the choice of serving their sentence or spending a few days in Punishment Park. In Punishment Park they are required to walk or run over 50 miles through the California desert to reach an American flag. If they can reach the flag before the police, who give them a head start, can capture them, then they are set free. If they are captured they have to serve their original sentence.

I compare it to Blair Witch because it is filmed like a documentary. The director Peter Watkins is behind the camera posing as a European documentary filmmaker invited to film the proceedings so that the general public will know that everything in Punishment Park is being carried out fairly. What was actually filmed is so disturbing that, according to the director's introduction filmed in 2005, the Dutch government sent a message to the US government in 1971 lashing out against the treatment of US dissidents. It was only after the fact that they realized the movie was fiction.

But what is not fiction is the McCarron Act itself. I found this on wikipedia:

McCarran Internal Security Act
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The Internal Security Act (also known as the Subversive Activities Control Act, McCarran Act or ISA) of 1950 is a United States federal law that required the registration of Communist organizations with the Attorney General in the United States and established the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate persons thought to be engaged in "un-American" activities. Members of these groups could not become citizens. Citizen-members could be denaturalized in five years. It was a key institution in the era of the Cold War, tightening alien exclusion and deportation laws and allowing for the detention of dangerous, disloyal, or subversive persons in times of war or "internal security emergency". Congress overrode President Harry Truman's veto to pass this bill. Truman called the bill "the greatest danger to freedom of press, speech, and assembly since the Sedition Act of 1798."

Sections of the ISA were gradually ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Much of the Act has been repealed, however some portions remain intact. Violation of Section 797 of title 50, United States Code (Section 21 of "the Internal Security Act of 1950"), for example, may be punishable by a prison term of up to 1 year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarran_Internal_Security_Act


So my question is, were the sections that were ruled unconstitutional including the provisions allowing for the detention of dangerous, disloyal, or subversive persons in times of war or "internal security emergency"? Or are these provisions still around for the current * misadministration to exploit at their whim?

[Media_Lies_Daily]

1. Read the Patriot Act, and the portions of Patriot Act II that have....

...managed to become law as addendums to other amendments, as well as the so-called "quarantine" laws that have been signed into law over the last five years.

You might be horrified at what you find.

[robertpaulsen]

2. Watkins actually referred to the Patriot Act in his introduction...

as an example of how the themes of his film are still relevant today. If you can find the movie, I urge you to see it.

As far as other so-called "quarantine" laws that you mention, would this be a good example?


Quarantine laws being updated
By Toni Locy, USA TODAY
Growing fears of biological or chemical attacks by terrorists have led 14 states and the District of Columbia to update antiquated quarantine laws that allow governments to confine people against their will during a health crisis.

In revising laws that in some cases are up to 200 years old, states are recognizing the litigious nature of modern America. They are creating ways to appeal quarantine orders and are granting legal immunity to local officials, doctors and others who could be pressed into government service in a crisis.

Similar proposals are pending in 12 other states as officials grapple with fear of retaliation against the USA over the war with Iraq and frequent warnings by the Bush administration that al-Qaeda terrorists could use smallpox, bubonic plague or radioactive "dirty bombs" to attack the nation.

snip

"If (an attack) were to hit a state that had not done the planning, it's the population that will suffer," says James Hodge, deputy director of the Center for Law and the Public's Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2003-04-22-quarantine_x.htm

[robertpaulsen]

3. Kick

:kick: