Liberty's Last Stand by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online Page A

session, and announced an indefinite stay on all cases before the courts in which the government was a defendant. His announcement of press and media censorship “until the crisis is past” met with outrage, especially among the talking heads on television, who went ballistic. Within thirty minutes, the listening audience found out what the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus meant: FBI agents arrested select television personalities, including some who were literally on camera, and took them away. Fox News went off the air. Most of the other networks contented themselves with running the tape of Soetoro behind the podium making his announcement, over and over, without comment.
    During the day FBI agents arrested dozens of prominent conservative commentators and administration critics across the nation, including Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, George Will, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ralph Peters, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Matt Drudge, Thomas Sowell, Howard Stern, and Charles Krauthammer, among others. They weren’t given a chance to remain silent in the future, but were arrested and taken away to be held in an unknown location until Soetoro decided to release them.
    Senators and congressmen, from both sides of the aisle, were told in no uncertain terms that they too would be arrested if they publicly questioned the administration’s methods and motives.
    Plainly, life in America had just been stood on its ear. All the usual suspects who had supported Barry Soetoro for seven and a half years, no matter what, through thick, thin, and transparent, rushed to find a reporter with a camera so that they could say wonderful things on television about their hero, the self-proclaimed messiah who had said when he wasfirst elected that he would lower the level of the sea and allow the earth to heal.
    While all this was going on, Jake Grafton was fired as director of the CIA. Two White House aides arrived in Langley with FBI agents in tow and delivered a letter from the president. Grafton was summarily relieved and the assistant director, Harley Merritt, was named acting director.
    As Grafton departed with the FBI agents, the two White House aides remained for a talk with Merritt about what was expected of him.
    The FBI took Grafton to a federal detention center that had been set up at Camp Dawson, a National Guard facility near Kingwood, West Virginia. Grafton should have been surprised to find that the holding facility had concertina wire, kitchens, latrines, and a field full of erect army tents containing a dozen cots each, but he wasn’t. Obviously someone had done the staff work to have facilities ready and waiting, with only the date that they were to be used remaining to be selected.
    Grafton arrived in time to shuffle through the lunch line, which contained about forty people. Most were men in their twenties and thirties, with here and there a few women salted in. The women huddled together. Everyone was in civilian clothes. He recognized several of the other detainees, or prisoners: two army four-star generals and a couple of former cabinet members. He picked up an aluminum tray from the stack, and a soldier in uniform spooned out mashed potatoes, mystery meat, and corn. At the end of the food line, he could select paper napkins and plastic tableware. No one trusted the detainees with real knives or forks.
    Afterward Jake was given a plastic Walmart bag for his stay, one containing a disposable razor, soap, a towel, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. The tube of toothpaste was small, TSA size, and he hoped that was an indicator of how long he would be here. He suspected it wasn’t.
    He still had his cell phone, but he had no charger, so he turned it off in the car on the way here. He had managed a call to Callie before he left the Langley facilities, so she knew he wasn’t coming home this evening, even if she didn’t know where he was.
    He sat on the side of the cot he had