Link to video at this URLHarry Belafonte’s Tirade of Hate Against Bush Allowed on CNN (VIDEO)Transcript via Hugh Hewitt:
Wolf Blitzer: The new Gestapo. You know, those are powerful words, calling an agency of the US government, the Department of Homeland Security, with what about 300,000 federal employees, the new Gestapo. Do you want to take that back?
HB: No not really. I stand by my remarks. I am very much aware of what this has provoked in our national community, and I welcome the opportunity for us to begin to have a dialouge, that goes other than where we have been having one up until now. People feel that I talk in extremes, but if you look at what’s happening to American citizens, a lot is going on in the extreme. We’ve taken citizens from this country, without the right to be charged, without being told what they are taken for, we have spirited them out of this country, taken them to faraway places, and reports come back with some consistency that they are being tortured, they are not being told why, what they have done, and even some who have been released have come back and testified to this fact.
WB: But let me interrupt for a second. Are you familiar and I am sure you are because you are an intelligent man, what the Gestapo did to the Jews in World War II.
HB:: Absolutely.
WB: And you think that what the Department of Homeland Security is doing to some US citizens suspected of terrorism is similar to what the Nazis did to the jews?
HB: Well, if you are taking people out of the country, and spiriting them someplace else, and they are being tortured, and they are being charged or not being charged so they will know what it is that they have done, it may not have been directly inside the, inside the Deaprtment of Homeland Security, but the pattern, the system, it is what the system does, it is what all thses different divisions have begun to reveal in their collective. I mean, my phones are tapped, my mail can be opened. They don’t even need a court warrant to come and do that as we once were required to do.