It Has Happened Here in America: The Police State is Real
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The Bush regime’s response to 9/11 and the Obama regime’s
validation of this response have destroyed accountable democratic
government in the United States.
So much unaccountable power has been concentrated in the executive
branch that the US Constitution is no longer an operable document.
Whether a person believes the official story of 9/11 which rests on
unproven government assertions or believes the documented evidence
provided by a large number of scientists, first responders, and
structural engineers and architects, the result is the same. 9/11 was
used to create an open-ended “war on terror” and a police state. It is
extraordinary that so many Americans believe that “it can’t happen here”
when it already has.
We have had a decade of highly visible evidence of the construction of a police state:
- the PATRIOT Act, illegal spying on Americans in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
- the initiation of wars of aggression–war crimes under the Nuremberg Standard–based on intentional lies,
- the Justice Department’s concocted legal memos justifying the executive branch’s violation of domestic and international laws against
- torture, the indefinite detention of US citizens in violation of the constitutionally protected rights of habeas corpus and due process,
- the use of secret evidence and secret “expert witnesses” who cannot be cross-examined against defendants in trials,
- the creation of military tribunals in order to evade federal courts, secret legal memos giving the president authority to launch preemptive cyber attacks on any country without providing evidence that the country constitutes a threat, and the Obama regime’s murder of US citizens without evidence or due process.
As if this were not enough, the Obama regime now creates new
presidential powers by crafting secret laws, refusing to disclose the
legal reasoning on which the asserted power rests. In other words, laws
now originate in secret executive branch memos and not in acts of
Congress. Congress? We don’t need no stinking Congress.
Despite laws protecting whistleblowers and the media and the US
Military Code which requires soldiers to report war crimes,
whistleblowers such as CIA agent John Kiriakou, media such as Julian
Assange, and soldiers such as Bradley Manning are persecuted and
prosecuted for revealing US government crimes. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33804.htm The criminals go free, and those who report the crimes are punished.
The justification for the American police state is the “war on
terror,” a hoax kept alive by the FBI’s “sting operations.” Normally
speaking, a sting operation is when a policewoman poses as a prostitute
in order to ensnare a “John,” or a police officer poses as a drug dealer
or user in order to ensnare drug users or dealers. The FBI’s “sting
operation” goes beyond these victimless crimes that fill up US prisons.
The FBI’s sting operations are different. They are just as
victimless as no plot ever happens, but the FBI doesn’t pose as bomb
makers for terrorists who have a plot but lack the weapon. Instead, the
FBI has the plot and looks for a hapless or demented person or group, or
for a Muslim enraged over the latest Washington insult to him and/or
his religion. When the FBI locates its victim, its agents approach the
selected perpetrator pretending to be Al-Qaeda or some such and ply the
selected perpetrator with money, the promise of fame, or threats until
the victim signs on to the FBI’s plot and is arrested.
Trevor Aaronson in his book, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s War on Terrorism,
documents that the FBI has so far concocted 150 “terrorist plots” and
that almost all of the other “terrorist cases” are cases unrelated to
terrorism, such as immigration, with a terror charge tacked on. See video
The presstitute American media doesn’t ask why, if there is so much
real terrorism requiring an American war against it, the FBI has to
invent and solicit terrorist plots.
Neither does the media inquire how the Taliban, which resists the
US invasion and attempted occupation of Afghanistan, fighting the US
superpower to a standstill after 11 years, came to be designated as
terrorists. Nor does the US presstitute media want to know how tribesmen
in remote regions of Pakistan came to be designated as “terrorists”
deserving of US drone attacks on the citizens, schools and medical
clinics of a country with which the US is not at war.
Instead the media protects and perpetrates the hoax that has given
America the police state. The American media has become Leni
Riefenstahl, as has Hollywood with
the anti-Muslim propaganda film, Zero Dark Thirty. This propaganda
film is a hate crime that spreads Islamophobia. Nevertheless, the film
is likely to win awards and to sink Americans into both tyranny and a
hundred-year war in the name of fighting the Muslim threat.
What I learned many years ago as a professor is that movies are
important molders of Americans‘ attitudes. Once, after giving a
thorough explanation of the Russian Revolution that led to communist
rule, a student raised his hand and said: “That’s not the way it
happened in the movie.”
At first I thought he was making a witty joke, but then I realized
that he thought that the truth resided in the movie, not in the
professor who was well versed in the subject. Ever since I have been
puzzled how the US has survived for so long, considering the ignorance
of its population. Americans have lived in the power of the US economy.
Now that this power is waning, sooner or later Americans will have to
come to terms with reality.
It is a reality that will be unfamiliar to them.
Some Americans claim that we have had police states during other
wartimes and that once the war on terror is won, the police state will
be dismantled. Others claim that government will be judicious in its use
of the power and that if you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing
to fear.
These are reassurances from the deluded. The Bush/Obama police
state is far more comprehensive than Lincoln’s, Wilson’s, or
Roosevelt’s, and the war on terror is open-ended and is already three
times longer than World War II. The Police State is acquiring
“squatter’s rights.”
Moreover, the government needs the police state in order to protect
itself from accountability for its crimes, lies, and squandering of
taxpayers‘ money. New precedents for executive power have been created
in conjunction with the Federalist Society which, independent of the war
on terror, advocates the “unitary executive” theory, which claims the
president has powers not subject to check by Congress and the Judiciary.
In other words, the president is a dictator if he prefers to be.
The Obama regime is taking advantage of this Republican theory. The
regime has used the Republican desire for a strong executive outside
the traditional checks and balances together with the fear factor to
complete the creation of the Bush/Cheney police state.
As Lawrence M. Stratton and I documented in our book, The Tyranny Of Good Intentions,
prior to 9/11 law as a shield of the people was already losing ground
to law as a weapon in the hands of the government. If the government
wanted to get you, there were few if any barriers to a defendant being
framed and convicted, least of all a brainwashed jury fearful of crime.
I cannot say whether the US justice system has ever served justice
better than it has served the ambition of prosecutors. Already in the
1930s and 1940s US Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland and US
Attorney General Robert Jackson were warning against prosecutors who
sacrifice “fair dealing to build up statistics of success.” Certainly
it is difficult to find in the ranks of federal prosecutors today
Jackson’s “prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks
truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes,
and who approaches his task with humility.”
Just consider the wrongful conviction of Alabama’s Democratic
governor, Don Siegelman by what apparently was a Karl Rove plot to rid
the South of Democratic governors. The “Democratic” Obama regime has not
investigated this false prosecution or given clemency to its innocent
own. Remember how quickly Bush removed the prison sentence of Cheney’s
operative who revealed the name of a CIA undercover agent? The Democrats
are a cowed and cowardly political party, fearful of justice, and as
much a part of the corrupt police state as the Republicans.
Today the purpose of a prosecution is to serve the prosecutor’s
career and that of the party that appoints him or her. A prosecutor’s
career is served by high conviction rates, which require plea bargains
in which the evidence against a defendant is never tested in court or
before a jury, and by high profile cases, which can launch a prosecutor
into a political career, as Rudy Giuliana achieved with his frame-up of
Michael Milken.
Glenn Greenwald explained how Internet freedom advocate Aaron
Swartz was driven to his death by the ambition of two federal
prosecutors, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant US Attorney Stephen
Heymann, who had no aversion to destroying an innocent person with
ridiculous and trumped-up charges in order to advance their careers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/ortiz-heymann-swartz-accountability-abuse
It is rare for a prosecutor to suffer any consequence for bringing
false charges, for consciously using and even paying for false evidence,
and for lying to judge and jury.
As prosecutors are rarely held accountable, they employ illegal and
unethical methods and routinely abuse their power. As judges are mainly
concerned with clearing their court dockets, justice is rarely served
in America, which explains why the US has not only a larger percentage of its citizens in prison than any other country on earth, but also the largest absolute number of prisoners. The
US actually has more of its citizens in prison than “authoritarian”
China which has a population four times larger than the US. The US,
possibly the greatest human rights abuser in history, is constantly
bringing human rights charges against China. Where are the human rights
charges against Washington?
In America the collapse of law has gone beyond corrupt prosecutors
and their concocted false prosecutions. Unless it needs or desires a
show trial, a police state does not need prosecutors and courts. By
producing legal memos that the president can both throw people into
prison without a trial and execute them without a trial simply by
stating that some official in the executive branch thinks the person has
a possible or potential connection to terrorism, tyranny’s friends in
the Justice (sic) Department have dispensed with the need for courts,
prosecutors and trials.The Bush/Obama regime has made the executive
branch judge, juror, and executioner. All that is needed is an unproven
assertion by some executive branch official. Here we have the epitome
of evil.
Evidence is no longer required for the president of the US to
imprison people for life or to deprive them of their life. A secret
Justice Department memo has been leaked to NBC News that reveals the
tyrannical reasoning that authorizes the executive branch to execute
American citizens on the basis of belief alone without the requirement
of evidence that they are terrorists or associated with terrorists. See NBCreport
In “freedom and democracy” America, innocent until proven
guilty is no longer the operative legal principle. If the government
says you are guilty, you are. Period. No evidence required for your
termination. Even Stalin pretended to have evidence.
The United States government is working its way step by step toward
the determination that any and every critic of the government is guilty
of providing “aid and comfort” to Washington’s “terrorist enemies,”
which includes the elected Hamas government in Gaza. The only critics
exempted from this rule-in-the-making are the neoconservatives who
criticize the US government for being too slow to throttle both its
critics and “anti-semites,” such as former US President Jimmy Carter,
who criticize the Israeli government’s illegal appropriation of
Palestinian lands. Most of Palestine has been stolen by Israel with
Washington acquiesce and aid. Therefore, nothing is left for a
“two-state solution.”
There is no doubt whatsoever that the Israeli government’s theft of
Palestine is illegal; yet, Washington, on which Israel is totally
dependent, does nothing about law. Law, we don’t need no stinking law.”
Washington has might. Might is right. Get used to it.
Not only for Palestinians has law ceased to exist, but also for
Americans, and for Washington’s NATO puppets in the UK and Europe,
pitiful remnants of once great nations now complicit in Washington’s
crimes against humanity. The Open Society Justice Initiative, a NGO
based in New York, has issued a report that documents that 54
governments are involved in Washington’s rendition and torture program.
Twenty-five of the governments that help Washington to kidnap,
disappear, and torture people are European. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/cia-rendition-report-uk-court
The opening decade of the 21st century has seen the destruction of
all the law that was devised to protect the innocent and the vulnerable
since the rise of the now defunct moral conscience of the West. The
West’s moral conscience never applied outside of
itself. What happened to people in Europe’s colonies and to native
inhabitants of the US and Australia is a very different story.
Nevertheless, despite its lack of coverage to the powerless, the
principle of the rule of law was a promising principle. Now America
under Bush and Obama, two peas of the same pod, has abandoned the
principle itself.
The Obama police state will be worse than the Bush/Cheney police
state. Unlike conservatives who in times past were suspicious of
government power, Obamabots believe that government power is a force for
good if it is in the right hands. As Obama’s supporters see him as a
member of an oppressed minority, they are confident that Obama will not
misuse his power. This belief is akin to the belief that, as Jews
suffered so much at the hands of Hitler, Israel would be fair to the
Palestinians.
Glenn Greenwald writes that
“the most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power
to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due
process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only
asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in
practice.”
This is the power of a dictator. That Saddam Hussein and Muammar
Gaddafi were said to have this power was part of their demonization as
“brutal dictators,” a justification for overthrowing their governments
and murdering the dictators and their supporters.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the president of the United States now
murders his political opponents just as Saddam Hussein murdered his. How
long before critics move from the no-fly list to the extermination
list?
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