Belafonte: Homeland Security the 'new Gestapo'

Just days after he called President Bush the "greatest terrorist in the world," singer-turned-activist Harry Belafonte has called the Department of Homeland Security the "new Gestapo."

In an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer last night, Belafonte defended his remarks, saying the Bush administration is acting in the "extreme" in its prosecution of the war on terror.

"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," he said.

"We've taken citizens from this country without the right to be charged, without being told what they're taken for, we've spirited them out of this country, taken them to far away places, and reports come back with some consistency that they are being tortured, that they're not being told what they've done," Belafonte said. "And even some who have been released have come back and testified to this fact."

During the interview, Blitzer challenged Belafonte over his comparison of DHS to the Gestapo, a brutal secret police organization used by the Nazis to enforce party rule and terrorize Jews.

"You think that what the Department of Homeland Security is doing to, you know, some U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism is similar to what the Nazis did to the Jew?" Blitzer asked.

"Well, if you're taking people out of a country and spiriting them someplace else, and they're being tortured, and they're being charged without – or not being charged, so they don't know what it is they've done," said Belafonte. "It may not have been directly inside the Department of Homeland Security, but the pattern, the system, it's what the system does. It's what all these different divisions have begun to reveal in their collective.

"My phones are tapped. OK? 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," he said.

The CNN interviewer pressed the former calypso singer and actor, saying that to his knowledge, "no one has taken you or anyone else, as far as I can tell, to an extermination camp and by the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, even millions decided to kill them. …"

Belafonte suggested had Jews spoken out sooner and begun to resist "the tyranny that was on the horizon," they might have prevented their demise.

But Blitzer shot back, "Are you blaming the Jews of Germany for what Hitler did to them?"

Belafonte denied that, saying if more resistance to the Nazis had occurred, "then perhaps an early warning would have saved the world a lot of what we all experienced."

Belafonte has leveled a number of other accusations at the Bush administration. During a visit to Venezuela earlier this month, he told the country's anti-American President Hugo Chavez, "No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people ... support your revolution."

On a separate visit to Cuba in December 2002, Belafonte – who traveled with actor and Bush administration critic Danny Glover – said the White House is maintaining a policy "that doesn’t identify with the interests of the U.S. people." He added that the Sept. 11 events, "that sowed fear in their hearts," served the administration "to extend its imperialist, economic and political domination all over the planet."

Belafonte's comments are becoming too red-hot even for some Democrats who have also been critical of the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror.

At a Children's Defense Fund event last week, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., studiously avoided Belafonte, according to reports.

And Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shied away from Belafonte's "Gestapo" comparison, telling CNN: "I never use Nazi analogies because I think that those were unique. And I think, you know, we have to be careful in using historical analogies like this."

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