High Crimes @ MindSay 
International A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Click Here to A.ct N.ow and Ask
S.top W.ar and E.nd R.acism!
"Dissent is the ESSENTIAL
aspect of patriotism"!
--Thomas Jefferson
[PLEASE TAKE NOTICE: All entries are in descending order by the date(s) they were posted, and in some cases in ascending order by the date(s) written.]
Excellent documentary on the grave
situation that now faces us in the
United States and the World
VERY important that you watch now!
(View for FREE below)
Posted on 2 November 2009
by S. Wolf Britain
"And Now The Apocalypse!"
http://www.wolfbritain.com/
[Copyright (c) 2009-2012 in the U.S.A.
and Internationally by
Alex Jones and "InfoWars.com:
Because There Is A War On
For Your Mind (And Soul)".
All rights reserved.]
Proof of the FEMA concentration camps
all over the U.S., in every state
including Alaska and Hawaii:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index
.php?context=va&aid=7763
Now please read the following article(s), etc., and/or the articles that I've written and posted on my main blog, at: http://www.wolfbritain.com/ ....
International A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Click Here to A.ct N.ow and Ask
S.top W.ar and E.nd R.acism!
"Dissent is the ESSENTIAL
aspect of patriotism"!
--Thomas Jefferson
[PLEASE TAKE NOTICE: All entries are in descending order by the date(s) they were posted, and in some cases in ascending order by the date(s) written.]
Excellent documentary on the grave
situation that now faces us in the
United States and the World
VERY important that you watch now!
(View for FREE below)
Posted on 2 November 2009
by S. Wolf Britain
"And Now The Apocalypse!"
http://www.wolfbritain.com/
[Copyright (c) 2009-2012 in the U.S.A.
and Internationally by
Alex Jones and "InfoWars.com:
Because There Is A War On
For Your Mind (And Soul)".
All rights reserved.]
Proof of the FEMA concentration camps
all over the U.S., in every state
including Alaska and Hawaii:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index
.php?context=va&aid=7763
Now please read the following article(s), etc., and/or the articles that I've written and posted on my main blog, at: http://www.wolfbritain.com/ ....
The American flag, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights have now been torn to shreads. "Rest In Peace (RIP)", Freedom and Liberty. RIP, "the experiment in democracy".
We have watched in dumb amazement (those of us who have realized what is really going on, that is) as for the past five years the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, liberty, and freedom have been step by step, systematically eviscerated, first with the so-called "USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act (those who criticize it supposedly aren't patriots)", and then with the latest afront on domestic freedom and liberty, the "Military Commissions Act of 2006," also known among other names as the "Detainee Bill", passed by an almost completely cowed Senate in the dead of night on Friday, the 29th day of September, 2006.
Now NONE OF US is safe. Not civil libertarians, not dissenters, not protesters of even the mildest variety (as virtually everything is now considered "terrorism"), and not even those blind worshippers of the U.S. government or its agents; because, if someone decides they don't like you, or gets jealous or resentful of you, all they need do is CLAIM you criticized the government, defended "rights", felt that certain force used against someone was excessive, or committed some other equally innocent "perceived threatening conduct" (some of the federal government's favorite wording that they now use for those who exercise their inalienable, immutable, inviolable First Amendment rights of Freedom of Speech, Belief and Dissent to disagree with their government), and you will very likely be "disappeared" into custody, stripped of U.S. citizenship, and be interro(r)gated, intimidated, humiliated, terrorized, tortured, and/or very possibly murdered, all without "Due Process of Law" under the Fifth and Fourteen Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, or a fair, unbiased hearing, access to an impartial lawyer, court, judge, or jury; and, if you live through this process, you could be kept secretly imprisoned forever without access to ANYONE important to you. This is NO exageration WHATSOVER; and, if "We, The People" don't repeal this horrific law, or the U.S. Supreme court doesn't overturn it, this is the END of our Republic, of Democracy, and of ALL Liberty and Freedom in "the land of the free, and the home of the brave", and THE END OF ALL protection(s) from a capricious, out of control, dictatorial government.
So, you see, the inviolable freedoms and liberties that we have so taken for granted, and that most Americans now have so little understanding of the supreme importance of, much to our grave detriment, were not overturned by "Islamo-Fascist terrorists", nor by protesting, dissenting U.S. citizens, nor journalists critical of the government, nor any other equally illusory, contrived, manufactured, engineered, and/or U.S.-government-created, state-sponsored "enemy(ies)", agents, assets, patsies, bogeymen, infiltra(i)tors, disinfo-agents, detractors, distractors, naysayers, actors, shills, trolls, hackers, informers, spies, entrappers, and/or agents provocateur, etc., but this act of true terrorism was carried out by the very people in our own government who are literally sworn to uphold and protect the U.S. Constitution "from all enemies, foreign AND DOMESTIC", including from THEMSELVES and other tyrannical, 'absolutely despotic' (to loosely quote the Declaration of Independence) forces in that very government; and the vast majority of them have COMPLETELY failed us and thrown EVERY SINGLE PERSON in this great country OF OURS into limitless danger and threat(s) by that government to the very safety of EACH AND EVERY ONE OF OUR LIVES.
The following is very likely the best article on this subject that has thus far been written, at least as far as I am aware; and, therefore, I share it with you at this time to further clarify just how truly catastrophic, life-threatening and consequential the situation we are now in actually is for every single man, woman, child, and little baby in this entire country, and ultimately in this entire world. The world-renowned True Journalist who wrote this great article, Chris Floyd, is also a True Hero and an exceedingly courageous human being for writing such an accurate article of warning to world-citizens planet-wide, and such an accurate portrayal of the extremely dire situation the U.S. and the world are in as a direct result of the subject matter it covers, as follows:
Print This Story 
E-mail This Story
Read more of Chris Floyd's columns.
FATAL VISION: THE DEEPER EVIL
BEHIND THE DETAINEE BILL
("Big Brother" Government
Is Now Here In The U.S.)
By Chris Floyd, T.O. UK Reporter
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday, 3 October 2006
[Copyright (c) 2006 in the
U.S.A. and Internationally
by t r u t h o u t (.org),
Empire Burlesque (Chris' blog)
and/or Chris Floyd.
All rights reserved.]
(This is a slightly revised version of a piece that first appeared on the Oct. 2nd edition of Truthout.org .)
There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country -- if the people lose their confidence in themselves -- and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
--- Walt Whitman
I.
It was a dark hour indeed (on Friday, September 29th, 2006) when the United States Senate voted to end the constitutional republic and transform the country into a "Leader-State," giving the president and his agents the power to capture, torture and imprison forever anyone -- American citizens included -- whom they arbitrarily decide is an "enemy combatant." This also includes those who merely give "terrorism" some kind of "support," defined so vaguely that many experts say it could encompass legal advice, innocent gifts to charities or even political opposition to US government policy within its draconian strictures.
All of this is bad enough -- a sickening and cowardly surrender of liberty not seen in a major Western democracy since the Enabling Act passed by the German Reichstag in March 1933. But it is by no means the full extent of our degradation. In reality, the darkness is deeper, and more foul, than most people imagine. For in addition to the dictatorial powers of seizure and torment given by Congress on Thursday to George W. Bush -- powers he had already seized and exercised for five years anyway, even without this fig leaf of sham legality -- there is a far more sinister imperial right that Bush has claimed -- and used -- openly, without any demur or debate from Congress at all: ordering the "extrajudicial killing" of anyone on earth that he and his deputies decide -- arbitrarily, without charges, court hearing, formal evidence, or appeal -- is an "enemy combatant."
That's right; from the earliest days of the Terror War -- September 17, 2001, to be exact -- Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life and death over the entire world. If he says you're an enemy of America, you are. If he wants to imprison you and torture you, he can. And if he decides you should die, he'll kill you. This is not hyperbole, liberal paranoia, or "conspiracy theory": it's simply a fact, reported by the mainstream media, attested by senior administration figures, recorded in official government documents -- and boasted about by the president himself, in front of Congress and a national television audience.
And although the Republic-snuffing act just passed by Congress does not directly address Bush's royal prerogative of murder, it nonetheless strengthens it and enshrines it in law. For the measure sets forth clearly that the designation of an "enemy combatant" is left solely to the executive branch; neither Congress nor the courts have any say in the matter. When this new law is coupled with the existing "Executive Orders" authorizing "lethal force" against arbitrarily designated "enemy combatants," it becomes, quite literally, a license to kill -- with the seal of Congressional approval.
How arbitrary is this process by which all our lives and liberties are now governed? Dave Niewert at Orcinus has unearthed a remarkable admission of its totally capricious nature. In an December 2002 story in the Washington Post, then-Solicitor General Ted Olson described the anarchy at the heart of the process with admirable frankness:
"[There is no] requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant," Olson argues.
"'There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this,' Olson said in the interview. 'There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.'"
In other words, what is safe to do or say today might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the "law" is merely the whim of the Leader and his minions: their "instincts" determine your guilt or innocence, and these flutterings in the gut can change from day to day. This radical uncertainty is the very essence of despotism -- and it is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government.
And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder. Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people: a president ordering hits like a Mafia don? But that is our reality, and has been for five years. To overcome what seems to be a widespread cognitive dissonance over this concept, we need only examine the record -- a record, by the way, taken entirely from publicly available sources in the mass media. There's nothing secret or contentious about it, nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know -- if they choose to know it.
II.
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush signed a "presidential finding" authorizing the CIA to kill those individuals whom he had marked for death as terrorists. This in itself was not an entirely radical innovation; Bill Clinton's White House legal team had drawn up memos asserting the president's right to issue "an order to kill an individual enemy of the United States in self-defense," despite the legal prohibitions against assassination, the Washington Post reported in October 2001. The Clinton team based this ruling on the "inherent powers" of the "Commander in Chief" -- that mythical, ever-elastic construct that Bush has evoked over and over to defend his own unconstitutional usurpations.
The practice of "targeted killing" was apparently never used by Clinton, however; despite the pro-assassination memos, Clinton followed the traditional presidential practice of bombing the hell out of a bunch of civilians whenever he wanted to lash out at some recalcitrant leader or international outlaw -- as in his bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, or the two massive strikes he launched against Iraq in 1993 and 1998, or indeed the death and ruin that was deliberately inflicted on civilian infrastructure in Serbia during that nation's collective punishment for the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Here, was following the example set by George H.W. Bush, who killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Panamanian civilians in his illegal arrest of Manuel Noriega in 1988, and Ronald Reagan, who killed Moamar Gadafy's adopted 2-year-old daughter and 100 other civilians in a punitive strike on Libya in 1986.
Junior Bush, of course, was about to outdo all those blunderbuss strokes with his massive air attacks on Afghanistan, which killed thousands of civilians, and the later orgy of death and destruction in Iraq. But he also wanted the power to kill individuals at will. At first, the assassination program was restricted to direct orders from the president aimed at specific targets, as suggested by the Clinton memos. But soon the arbitrary power of life and death was delegated to agents in the field, after Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval for each attack, the Washington Post reported in December 2002. Nor was it necessary any longer for the president to approve each new name added to the target list; the "security organs" could designate "enemy combatants" and kill them as they saw fit. However, Bush was always keen to get the details about the agency's wetwork, administration officials assured the Post.
The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen, along with several foreign nationals, by a CIA drone missile in Yemen on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred on December 4, 2005, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al-Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner's son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.
However, there is simply no way of knowing at this point how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside all judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally. As a Pentagon document uncovered by the New Yorker in December 2002 revealed, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to ... enter countries surreptitiously."
What's more, there are strong indications that the Bush administration has outsourced some of the contracts to outside operators. In the original Post story about the assassinations -- in those first heady weeks after 9/11, when administration officials were much more open about "going to the dark side," as Cheney boasted on national television -- Bush insiders told the paper that "it is also possible that the instrument of targeted killings will be foreign agents, the CIA's term for nonemployees who act on its behalf.
Here we find a deadly echo of the "rendition" program that has sent so many captives to torture pits in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere -- including many whose innocence has been officially established, such as the Canadian businessman Maher Arar, German national Khalid El-Masri, UK native Mozzam Begg and many others. They had been subjected to imprisonment and torture despite their innocence, because of intelligence "mistakes." How many have fallen victim to Bush's hit squads on similar shaky grounds?
So here we are. Congress has just entrenched the principle of Bush's "unitary executive" dictatorship into law; and it is this principle that undergirds the assassination program. As I wrote in December, it's hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and good in America have done.
But this should come as no surprise. They have known about it all along, and have not only countenanced Bush's death squad, but even celebrated it. I'll end with one more passage from that December article, which sadly is even more apt for our degraded reality today. It was a depiction of the one of the most revolting scenes in recent American history: Bush's state of the Union address in January 2003, delivered live to the nation during the final warmongering frenzy before the rape of Iraq:
Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists" had been arrested worldwide -- "and many others have met a different fate." His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: "Let's put it this way. They are no longer a problem."
In other words, the suspects -- and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects -- had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything to end his torment, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds -- or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world.
Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called "the meaning of American justice." And the assembled legislators ... applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little man's bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his sneering contempt for law -- our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, brute, ignorant, ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day, not ever.
And now, in September 2006, we know they will never raise that protest. Oh, a few Democrats stood up at the last minute on Thursday to posture nobly about the dangers of the detainee bill -- but only when they knew that it was certain to pass, when they had already given up their one weapon against it, the filibuster, in exchange for permission from their Republican masters to offer amendments that they also knew would fail. Had they been offering such speeches since October 2001, when the lineaments of Bush's presidential tyranny were already clear -- or at any other point during the systematic dismantling of America's liberties over the past five years -- these fine words might have had some effect.
Now the killing will go on. The tyranny that has entered upon the country will grow stronger, more brazen; the darkness will deepen. Whitman, thou should'st be living at this hour; America has need of thee. (Subtitle and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)
Chris Floyd is an American journalist residing in the UK. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times, and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium
________
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The American flag, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights have now been torn to shreads. "Rest In Peace (RIP)", Freedom and Liberty. RIP, "the experiment in democracy".
We have watched in dumb amazement (those of us who have realized what is really going on, that is) as for the past five years the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, liberty, and freedom have been step by step, systematically eviscerated, first with the so-called "USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act (those who criticize it supposedly aren't patriots)", and then with the latest afront on domestic freedom and liberty, the "Military Commissions Act of 2006," also known among other names as the "Detainee Bill", passed by an almost completely cowed Senate in the dead of night on Friday, the 29th day of September, 2006.
Now NONE OF US is safe. Not civil libertarians, not dissenters, not protesters of even the mildest variety (as virtually everything is now considered "terrorism"), and not even those blind worshippers of the U.S. government or its agents; because, if someone decides they don't like you, or gets jealous or resentful of you, all they need do is CLAIM you criticized the government, defended "rights", felt that certain force used against someone was excessive, or committed some other equally innocent "perceived threatening conduct" (some of the federal government's favorite wording that they now use for those who exercise their inalienable, immutable, inviolable First Amendment rights of Freedom of Speech, Belief and Dissent to disagree with their government), and you will very likely be "disappeared" into custody, stripped of U.S. citizenship, and be interro(r)gated, intimidated, humiliated, terrorized, tortured, and/or very possibly murdered, all without "Due Process of Law" under the Fifth and Fourteen Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, or a fair, unbiased hearing, access to an impartial lawyer, court, judge, or jury; and, if you live through this process, you could be kept secretly imprisoned forever without access to ANYONE important to you. This is NO exageration WHATSOVER; and, if "We, The People" don't repeal this horrific law, or the U.S. Supreme court doesn't overturn it, this is the END of our Republic, of Democracy, and of ALL Liberty and Freedom in "the land of the free, and the home of the brave", and THE END OF ALL protection(s) from a capricious, out of control, dictatorial government.
So, you see, the inviolable freedoms and liberties that we have so taken for granted, and that most Americans now have so little understanding of the supreme importance of, much to our grave detriment, were not overturned by "Islamo-Fascist terrorists", nor by protesting, dissenting U.S. citizens, nor journalists critical of the government, nor any other equally illusory, contrived, manufactured, engineered, and/or U.S.-government-created, state-sponsored "enemy(ies)", agents, assets, patsies, bogeymen, infiltra(i)tors, disinfo-agents, detractors, distractors, naysayers, actors, shills, trolls, hackers, informers, spies, entrappers, and/or agents provocateur, etc., but this act of true terrorism was carried out by the very people in our own government who are literally sworn to uphold and protect the U.S. Constitution "from all enemies, foreign AND DOMESTIC", including from THEMSELVES and other tyrannical, 'absolutely despotic' (to loosely quote the Declaration of Independence) forces in that very government; and the vast majority of them have COMPLETELY failed us and thrown EVERY SINGLE PERSON in this great country OF OURS into limitless danger and threat(s) by that government to the very safety of EACH AND EVERY ONE OF OUR LIVES.
The following is very likely the best article on this subject that has thus far been written, at least as far as I am aware; and, therefore, I share it with you at this time to further clarify just how truly catastrophic, life-threatening and consequential the situation we are now in actually is for every single man, woman, child, and little baby in this entire country, and ultimately in this entire world. The world-renowned True Journalist who wrote this great article, Chris Floyd, is also a True Hero and an exceedingly courageous human being for writing such an accurate article of warning to world-citizens planet-wide, and such an accurate portrayal of the extremely dire situation the U.S. and the world are in as a direct result of the subject matter it covers, as follows:
Print This Story E-mail This Story
Read more of Chris Floyd's columns.
FATAL VISION: THE DEEPER EVIL
BEHIND THE DETAINEE BILL
("Big Brother" Government
Is Now Here In The U.S.)
By Chris Floyd, T.O. UK Reporter
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday, 3 October 2006
[Copyright (c) 2006 in the
U.S.A. and Internationally
by t r u t h o u t (.org),
Empire Burlesque (Chris' blog)
and/or Chris Floyd.
All rights reserved.]
(This is a slightly revised version of a piece that first appeared on the Oct. 2nd edition of Truthout.org .)
There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country -- if the people lose their confidence in themselves -- and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
--- Walt Whitman
I.
It was a dark hour indeed (on Friday, September 29th, 2006) when the United States Senate voted to end the constitutional republic and transform the country into a "Leader-State," giving the president and his agents the power to capture, torture and imprison forever anyone -- American citizens included -- whom they arbitrarily decide is an "enemy combatant." This also includes those who merely give "terrorism" some kind of "support," defined so vaguely that many experts say it could encompass legal advice, innocent gifts to charities or even political opposition to US government policy within its draconian strictures.
All of this is bad enough -- a sickening and cowardly surrender of liberty not seen in a major Western democracy since the Enabling Act passed by the German Reichstag in March 1933. But it is by no means the full extent of our degradation. In reality, the darkness is deeper, and more foul, than most people imagine. For in addition to the dictatorial powers of seizure and torment given by Congress on Thursday to George W. Bush -- powers he had already seized and exercised for five years anyway, even without this fig leaf of sham legality -- there is a far more sinister imperial right that Bush has claimed -- and used -- openly, without any demur or debate from Congress at all: ordering the "extrajudicial killing" of anyone on earth that he and his deputies decide -- arbitrarily, without charges, court hearing, formal evidence, or appeal -- is an "enemy combatant."
That's right; from the earliest days of the Terror War -- September 17, 2001, to be exact -- Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life and death over the entire world. If he says you're an enemy of America, you are. If he wants to imprison you and torture you, he can. And if he decides you should die, he'll kill you. This is not hyperbole, liberal paranoia, or "conspiracy theory": it's simply a fact, reported by the mainstream media, attested by senior administration figures, recorded in official government documents -- and boasted about by the president himself, in front of Congress and a national television audience.
And although the Republic-snuffing act just passed by Congress does not directly address Bush's royal prerogative of murder, it nonetheless strengthens it and enshrines it in law. For the measure sets forth clearly that the designation of an "enemy combatant" is left solely to the executive branch; neither Congress nor the courts have any say in the matter. When this new law is coupled with the existing "Executive Orders" authorizing "lethal force" against arbitrarily designated "enemy combatants," it becomes, quite literally, a license to kill -- with the seal of Congressional approval.
How arbitrary is this process by which all our lives and liberties are now governed? Dave Niewert at Orcinus has unearthed a remarkable admission of its totally capricious nature. In an December 2002 story in the Washington Post, then-Solicitor General Ted Olson described the anarchy at the heart of the process with admirable frankness:
"[There is no] requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant," Olson argues.
"'There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this,' Olson said in the interview. 'There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.'"
In other words, what is safe to do or say today might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the "law" is merely the whim of the Leader and his minions: their "instincts" determine your guilt or innocence, and these flutterings in the gut can change from day to day. This radical uncertainty is the very essence of despotism -- and it is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government.
And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder. Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people: a president ordering hits like a Mafia don? But that is our reality, and has been for five years. To overcome what seems to be a widespread cognitive dissonance over this concept, we need only examine the record -- a record, by the way, taken entirely from publicly available sources in the mass media. There's nothing secret or contentious about it, nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know -- if they choose to know it.
II.
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush signed a "presidential finding" authorizing the CIA to kill those individuals whom he had marked for death as terrorists. This in itself was not an entirely radical innovation; Bill Clinton's White House legal team had drawn up memos asserting the president's right to issue "an order to kill an individual enemy of the United States in self-defense," despite the legal prohibitions against assassination, the Washington Post reported in October 2001. The Clinton team based this ruling on the "inherent powers" of the "Commander in Chief" -- that mythical, ever-elastic construct that Bush has evoked over and over to defend his own unconstitutional usurpations.
The practice of "targeted killing" was apparently never used by Clinton, however; despite the pro-assassination memos, Clinton followed the traditional presidential practice of bombing the hell out of a bunch of civilians whenever he wanted to lash out at some recalcitrant leader or international outlaw -- as in his bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, or the two massive strikes he launched against Iraq in 1993 and 1998, or indeed the death and ruin that was deliberately inflicted on civilian infrastructure in Serbia during that nation's collective punishment for the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Here, was following the example set by George H.W. Bush, who killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Panamanian civilians in his illegal arrest of Manuel Noriega in 1988, and Ronald Reagan, who killed Moamar Gadafy's adopted 2-year-old daughter and 100 other civilians in a punitive strike on Libya in 1986.
Junior Bush, of course, was about to outdo all those blunderbuss strokes with his massive air attacks on Afghanistan, which killed thousands of civilians, and the later orgy of death and destruction in Iraq. But he also wanted the power to kill individuals at will. At first, the assassination program was restricted to direct orders from the president aimed at specific targets, as suggested by the Clinton memos. But soon the arbitrary power of life and death was delegated to agents in the field, after Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval for each attack, the Washington Post reported in December 2002. Nor was it necessary any longer for the president to approve each new name added to the target list; the "security organs" could designate "enemy combatants" and kill them as they saw fit. However, Bush was always keen to get the details about the agency's wetwork, administration officials assured the Post.
The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen, along with several foreign nationals, by a CIA drone missile in Yemen on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred on December 4, 2005, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al-Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner's son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.
However, there is simply no way of knowing at this point how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside all judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally. As a Pentagon document uncovered by the New Yorker in December 2002 revealed, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to ... enter countries surreptitiously."
What's more, there are strong indications that the Bush administration has outsourced some of the contracts to outside operators. In the original Post story about the assassinations -- in those first heady weeks after 9/11, when administration officials were much more open about "going to the dark side," as Cheney boasted on national television -- Bush insiders told the paper that "it is also possible that the instrument of targeted killings will be foreign agents, the CIA's term for nonemployees who act on its behalf.
Here we find a deadly echo of the "rendition" program that has sent so many captives to torture pits in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere -- including many whose innocence has been officially established, such as the Canadian businessman Maher Arar, German national Khalid El-Masri, UK native Mozzam Begg and many others. They had been subjected to imprisonment and torture despite their innocence, because of intelligence "mistakes." How many have fallen victim to Bush's hit squads on similar shaky grounds?
So here we are. Congress has just entrenched the principle of Bush's "unitary executive" dictatorship into law; and it is this principle that undergirds the assassination program. As I wrote in December, it's hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and good in America have done.
But this should come as no surprise. They have known about it all along, and have not only countenanced Bush's death squad, but even celebrated it. I'll end with one more passage from that December article, which sadly is even more apt for our degraded reality today. It was a depiction of the one of the most revolting scenes in recent American history: Bush's state of the Union address in January 2003, delivered live to the nation during the final warmongering frenzy before the rape of Iraq:
Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists" had been arrested worldwide -- "and many others have met a different fate." His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: "Let's put it this way. They are no longer a problem."
In other words, the suspects -- and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects -- had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything to end his torment, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds -- or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world.
Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called "the meaning of American justice." And the assembled legislators ... applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little man's bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his sneering contempt for law -- our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, brute, ignorant, ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day, not ever.
And now, in September 2006, we know they will never raise that protest. Oh, a few Democrats stood up at the last minute on Thursday to posture nobly about the dangers of the detainee bill -- but only when they knew that it was certain to pass, when they had already given up their one weapon against it, the filibuster, in exchange for permission from their Republican masters to offer amendments that they also knew would fail. Had they been offering such speeches since October 2001, when the lineaments of Bush's presidential tyranny were already clear -- or at any other point during the systematic dismantling of America's liberties over the past five years -- these fine words might have had some effect.
Now the killing will go on. The tyranny that has entered upon the country will grow stronger, more brazen; the darkness will deepen. Whitman, thou should'st be living at this hour; America has need of thee. (Subtitle and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)
Chris Floyd is an American journalist residing in the UK. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times, and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium
________
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Read more of William Rivers Pitt's columns.
HOW CRAZY ARE THEY?
(Crazy Enough to Carry Out
Systematic Terrorism, etc.)
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday, 11 April 2006
[Copyright (c) 2006 in the
U.S.A. and Internationally
by t r u t h o u t (.org)
and/or William Rivers
Pitt. All rights reserved.]
I had a debate with my boss last night about Sy Hersh's terrifying New Yorker article describing Bush administration plans to attack Iran, potentially with nuclear weapons. After reading the Hersh piece, my boss was understandably worried, describing his reaction to the article in road-to-Damascus-revelation terms. They're going to do this, he said.
I told my boss that I couldn't believe it was possible the Bush administration would do this. I ran through all the reasons why an attack on Iran, especially with any kind of nuclear weaponry, would be the height of folly.
Iran, unlike Iraq, has a formidable military. They own the high ground over the Persian Gulf and have deployed missile batteries all throughout the mountains along the shore. Those missile batteries, I told him, include the Sunburn missile, which can travel in excess of Mach 2 and can spoof Aegis radar systems. Every American warship in the Gulf, including the carrier group currently deployed there, would be ducks on the pond.
The blowback in Iraq would be immediate and catastrophic, I reminded him. The Shi'ite majority that enjoys an alliance with Iran would go indiscriminately crazy and attack anyone and anything flying the stars and stripes.
Syria, which has inked a mutual defense pact with Iran and is believed to have significant chemical and biological weapons capabilities, would get into the game.
China, which has recently established a multi-billion dollar petroleum relationship with Iran, might step into the fray if it sees its new oil source at risk.
Russia, which has stapled itself to the idea that Iran's nuclear ambitions are for peaceful purposes, would likewise get pulled in.
Blair and Britain want nothing to do with an attack on Iran, Berlusconi appears to have lost his job in Italy, and Spain's Aznar is already gone. If the Bush administration does this, I told my boss, they'd instantly find themselves in a cold and lonely place.
The nuclear option, I told my boss, brings even more nightmarish possibilities. The reaction to an attack on Iran with conventional weapons would be bad enough. If we drop a nuke, that reaction will be worse by orders of magnitude and puts on the table the ultimate nightmare scenario: a region-wide conflagration that would reach all the way to Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf is fending off the fundamentalists with both hands. If the US drops a nuke on Iran, it is possible that the Taliban-allied fundamentalists in Pakistan would rise up and overthrow Musharraf, thus gaining control of Pakistan's own arsenal of nuclear weapons. All of a sudden, those nukes would be loose, and India would lose its collective mind.
It was a cogent argument I made, filled with common sense. My boss seemed mollified, and we bid each other goodnight. Ten minutes later, I had an email from my boss in my Inbox. He'd sent me Paul Krugman's latest editorial from the New York Times, titled "Yes He Would." Krugman's piece opens this way:
"But he wouldn't do that." That sentiment is what made it possible for President Bush to stampede America into the Iraq war and to fend off hard questions about the reasons for that war until after the 2004 election. Many people just didn't want to believe that an American president would deliberately mislead the nation on matters of war and peace. "But he wouldn't do that," say people who think they're being sensible. Given what we now know about the origins of the Iraq war, however, discounting the possibility that Mr. Bush will start another ill-conceived and unnecessary war isn't sensible. It's wishful thinking.
Great.
Things have come to a pretty pass in the United States of America when the first question you have to ask yourself on matters of war and death is, "Just how crazy are these people?" Every cogent estimate sees Iran's nuclear capabilities not becoming any kind of reality for another ten years, leaving open a dozen diplomatic and economic options for dealing with the situation. There is no good reason for attacking that country, but there are a few bad reasons to be found.
The worst of the bad reasons, of course, is that an attack on Iran would change the conversation in Washington as the 2006 midterm elections loom. Bush and his congressional allies are about as popular as scabies right now, according to every available poll. If the current trend is not altered or disrupted, January 2007 may come with Democratic Rep. John Conyers Jr. sitting as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee with subpoena powers in hand.
"As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently pointed out," continued Krugman in his editorial, "the administration seems to be following exactly the same script on Iran that it used on Iraq: 'The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The US secretary of state tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The secretary of defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism. The president blames it for attacks on US troops.'"
For the moment, one significant departure from the Iraq script has been the Bush administration vehemently denying that an attack on Iran, particularly with nuclear weapons, is an option being considered at this time. Bush himself called the Hersh article "wild speculation," and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan bluntly stated that the US is committed to diplomacy. Gary Sick, an Iran expert quoted by columnist Jim Lobe in a recent article, seems to think the reputation for irrational and dangerous actions enjoyed by the Bush administration is being used as a psychological lever. "That is their record," said Sick, "so they have no need to invent it. If they can use that reputation to keep Iran -- and everybody else -- off balance, so much the better."
Then why this cold feeling in the pit of my stomach? Julian Borger, writing for the UK Guardian, has some added insight. "Vincent Cannistraro," writes Borger, "a former CIA counter-terrorism operations chief, said Mr. Bush had not yet made up his mind about the use of direct military action against Iran. 'There is a battle for Bush's soul over that,' he said, adding that Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser is adamantly opposed to a war. However, Mr. Cannistraro said covert military action, in the form of special forces troops identifying targets and aiding dissident groups, is already under way. 'It's been authorized, and it's going on to the extent that there is some lethality to it. Some people have been killed.'"
A battle for Bush's soul? Some people have been killed? It's a wild day here in Bizarro World when I find myself in total agreement with Karl Rove. It is the uncertainty in all this that makes the situation truly terrifying. No sane person would undertake an action so fraught with peril, but if we have learned anything in the last few years, it is that sanity takes a back seat in this administration's hayride.
I bought a coffee this morning at the excellent cafe around the corner, which is run by a wonderful Iranian woman. I asked her point-blank what would happen in her home country if we did attack. She dismissed the possibility out of hand. "I read that Krugman article," she said, "but there's no way they would do this. They'd have to be crazy."
Indeed. Too bad that hasn't stopped them yet. [(Subtitle and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)]
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know
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BUSH'S IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY
[The Country "Not Like Its
Enemies", Becoming More and
More Like Its Enemies! (Part 1)]
By Jim Hightower
The Hightower Lowdown
Alternet.org
Sunday, 30 April 2006
[Copyright (c) 2006 in the
U.S.A. & Internationally
by Alternet (.org),
HightowerLowdown (.org)
and/or Jim Hightower.
All rights reserved.]
A fellow from a town just outside of Austin (Texas) wrote a four-sentence letter to the editor of our local daily that astonished me: "I want the government to please, please listen in on my phone calls. I have nothing to hide. It is also welcome to check my emails and give me a national identification card, which I will be proud to show when asked by people in authority. What's with all you people who need so much privacy?"
Well, gee where to start? How about with the founders? Many of the colonists who rose in support of the rebellion of '76 did so because their government kept snooping on them and invading their privacy. Especially offensive was the widespread use of "writs of assistance," which were sweeping warrants authorizing government agents to enter and search people's homes and businesses -- including those of people who had nothing to hide. The founders had a strong sense of the old English maxim "A man's house is his castle." They hated the government's "knock at the door," the forced intrusion into their private spheres, the arrogant abrogation of their personal liberty. So they fought a war to stop it. Once free of that government, they created a new one based on laws to protect liberty -- and this time they were determined to put a short, tight leash on government's inherently abusive search powers.
Hence, the Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Periodically in American history, presidents have tried to annul our basic right to be left alone. John Adams imposed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson conducted the Palmer Raids. FDR interned Japanese-Americans and others. And LBJ and Nixon used the COINTEL program to spy on war protestors and civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr.
In each case, however, the abuses were temporary. Americans rebelled and gradually brought the government back in line with our country's belief that privacy, a basic human right, is a cornerstone of democracy.
Bush's Push
Now comes the Bush-Cheney regime, pushing the most massive and rapid expansion of presidential might America has ever known. "I believe in a strong, robust executive authority," growled Dick "Buckshot" Cheney, architect of the power grab. He added, "The president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will." I wouldn't, but they're nonetheless asserting an imperious view of unlimited executive power that is foreign to our Constitution, demolishes the founders' ingenious system of checks and balances (key to the functioning of our democratic republic), and transforms America's government into a de facto presidential autocracy.
Their push includes a White House program of domestic spying so sweeping that it would make Nixon blush; an audacious claim of a unilateral executive right to suspend treaties and ignore U.S. laws; an insistence that a president can seize U.S. citizens with no due process of law and imprison them in CIA "black sites" or send them to foreign regimes to be tortured; a series of new plans for military spying on the American people; the repression of both internal dissenters and outside protestors; an all-out assault on the public's right to know; and well, way too much more.
The rise of a supreme executive is such a fundamental threat to our constitutional form of government -- and to who we are as a people -- that the Lowdown will devote both this issue and next month's to it. The media barons have covered this rise only sporadically and disjointedly, but it's important for We The People to see the frightening whole of it and launch the rebellion of '06.
National Security Agency
Richard Nixon is the godfather of the Bush-Cheney philosophy of executive supremacy. "Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal," Tricky Dick explained to us some 30 years ago. This plenipotentiary view of the American presidency (which would send shivers through the founders) is behind the unilateral, secret and illegal directive issued by Bush in 2001, ordering the NSA to spy on ordinary Americans. It's now conceded that untold thousands of citizens who have no connection at all to terrorism have had their phone conversations and emails swept up and monitored during the past four years by NSA agents.
This is against the law. First, Bush's directive blatantly violates the Fourth Amendment, for it sends his agents stealing into our lives to search our private communications without probable cause and without a warrant. Second, it goes against the very law creating NSA, which prohibited the agency from domestic spying without court supervision. Third, it bypasses 1978's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set up a special FISA court specifically to issue secret warrants so a president could snoop on Americans suspected of being connected to terrorists. Going around this law is a felony, punishable by five years in prison. Yes: George W. Bush broke the law. He's a criminal.
When this sweeping program of presidential eavesdropping was revealed last December by a leak to the New York Times, Bush first tried lying, scoffing that the news report was mere media "speculation." Didn't work. So then he turned defiant, belligerently declaring that damned right he was tapping phones. "If you're talking to a member of al-Qaida," he announced, "we want to know why."
Of course, George, if you have reason to believe that a particular American is talking to al-Qaida, you should scoot over to FISA pronto and get a spy warrant. We don't have time to wait for no stinking court order, he shouts, we gotta jump on these traitors quicker than a gator on a poodle. The FISA system is "too cumbersome" -- we need "agility."
Yeah, well, democracy is supposed to be a little cumbersome, so guys like you don't run amok. Fact is, FISA judges can act PDQ and are hardly restrictive. Of the 5,645 times Bush has requested surveillance warrants, how many did the court reject or defer? Only six! Besides, FISA lets presidents go a-snooping all they want, the instant they want, then come back to court three days later to get the warrant. How cumbersome is that? Even GOP lawmakers didn't buy the agility line, so Bush next tried claiming that Congress had actually given him the go-ahead to bypass the law. On Sept. 14, 2001, he said Congress passed the "authorization for use of military force," empowering him to use all necessary force against the 9/11 terrorists. Yet none of the 518 lawmakers who voted for this say that it included permission for Bush to spy illegally on our people. In fact, George W. specifically asked congressional leaders to give him this permission but was turned down. Finally, Bush has resorted to spouting Nixon's maxim that a president's official actions are inherently legal. Even though he broke the law knowingly and repeatedly, the Bushites assert that it's OK, citing a dangerous and thoroughly un-American defense that, as commander-in-chief, he has the constitutional right to break any law in the interest of national security. In matters of war and foreign policy, he, Cheney, and Alberto "See No Evil" Gonzales claim that the president's authority cannot be checked by Congress or the judiciary -- indeed, they don't even have to be informed.
Nonsense. He's commander-in-chief of the military -- not of the country. He's president, not king. And as president, he's the head of only one of the three co-equal branches. Yet bizarrely and pathetically, Congress has rolled over and even cheered this gross usurpation of its clear constitutional responsibilities -- including its power to declare war, control the public purse, regulate the military, ratify treaties, make laws "necessary and proper" for the conduct of all government, provide oversight of executive actions and generally serve the public as a check and balance against presidential abuses. As Sen. Russ Feingold, the truly fine defender of our rights and liberties, wrote in a February blog: "I cannot describe the feeling I had, sitting on the House floor during Tuesday's State of the Union speech, listening to the president assert that his executive power is, basically, absolute, and watching several members of Congress stand up and cheer him on. It was surreal and disrespectful to our system of government and to the oath that as elected officials we have all sworn to uphold. Cheering? Clapping? Applause? All for violating the law?" The breathtaking notion that Bush can, on his own say-so, thumb his nose at the due process of law and even be a serial lawbreaker has astounded not only Feingold but also a slew of leading right-wing thinkers:
Paul Weyerich of Free Congress Foundation: "My criteria for judging this stuff is, what would a President Hillary do with these same powers?"
George Will, columnist: "[Executive] powers do not include deciding that a law -- FISA, for example -- is somehow exempted from the presidential duty to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed.'"
David Keene of the American Conservative Union: "The American system was set up on the assumption that you can't rely on the good will of people with power."
Ironically, this Bush push to place himself above the law is centered on a failed program. The agents who are having to sift through piles of our calls and emails say that nearly all of the sifting is worthless, finding fewer than 10 citizens a year who even warrant further checking. In fact, the Bushites can point to only two "successes." They brag that the spying uncovered a plot to detonate fertilizer bombs in London -- but British officials deny that NSA spying helped uncover the plot. Their other "success" is ludicrous -- they claim to have found a guy who was going to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge. His weapon? A blowtorch. In response to Bush's illegal spying, Congress has been almost comical. After huffing and puffing about doing a deep investigation into the criminality of the program, Senate Republicans abruptly cancelled their plans for public hearings and ran to the White House waving surrender hankies. Last month, they announced that they had negotiated with Cheney, who graciously gave the Senate a grand oversight role. What did they get, specifically? A new subcommittee. TAH-DAH! Now seven senators will be allowed an occasional peek at whatever documents the White House is willing to send to them. In turn, Congress will sanction Bush's secret spying on Americans, letting him snoop on someone for 45 days without having to bother getting a warrant from that pesky FISA court. You can just hear Cheney guffawing back in his cave. Bush's assertion of extraordinary authority has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with his and Cheney's mad intent to enthrone the American presidency with "plenary" power -- i.e., unqualified, absolute power.
March of Autocracy
It would be distressing enough if the Bush-Cheney NSA power play was their only assertion of authoritarian government, but it is just one item on an astoundingly long list. Here are two particularly brash examples:
IMPRISONMENT. Bush maintains that, as "a war president," he has the inherent power (never claimed by any predecessor) to seize and imprison any American citizen suspected by his administration of having even the vaguest connection to terrorists. He declares that he can throw citizens in federal jails in perpetuity on his own authority, without consulting a judge or getting an arrest warrant. The hapless innocent suspects who wail that a nightmarish mistake is being made are out of luck. Bush says that his executive prisoners can be taken in secret (without even notifying their families), do not have to be told of any specific charges against them, have no right to lawyers and can be held without trial.
They might be shipped to secret CIA prisons around the world, which were authorized not by Congress, but by a classified executive order signed by Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. Yes, the order creating the secret prisons was itself secret. These CIA "black sites," as they are called in Bush's bureaucratic netherworld, are not subject to congressional oversight. Last December, after members of Congress learned about these facilities, both chambers voted to get reports on where the CIA's prisons are and what goes on inside them. But at the behest of the White House, GOP leaders quietly took this provision behind closed doors and killed it -- the majority vote be damned.
Accused citizens might also be secretly turned over to repressive foreign governments for interrogation -- an unpleasant, illegal and morally bankrupt practice known as "extraordinary rendition." Consider Maher Arar's case. Returning home from a family vacation in 2002, this Canadian software engineer was "detained" by the feds at Kennedy Airport, thrown into solitary confinement in Brooklyn, denied proper legal counsel, grilled and then "rendered" by the Bushites to a Syrian prison. He was held there for 10 months in a rat-infested dungeon and brutally tortured. Finally, finding that he had no connection to terrorism, the Syrians released him.
Arar sued the U.S. government for knowingly sending him to a torture chamber. In February, a federal judge blocked Arar's case without even hearing it. Caving in to Bush's claim of supreme executive power, the judge ruled that extraordinary rendition is a foreign-policy matter that the courts cannot review.
TORTURE. "We do not torture," says George W. in yet another bald-faced lie. Actually, he and his henchmen have bent themselves into contortions trying to assert that the commander-in-chief does, indeed, have the inherent right to torture suspects in U.S. custody. In 2002, when he learned that Afghan detainees were being abused in violation of the Geneva Conventions and our own War Crimes Act, Bush did not order the mistreatment to stop. Instead, he signed an order stating, "I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva." He might as well have shouted, "I am the king!"
A year later, a White House memo tried to redefine torture, imperiously declaring that only gross brutality that causes "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" can be called torture. John Yoo, the lawyer who has crafted many of Bush's claims of expansive executive authority, even argues that it would not be unlawful torture for a president to order that the testicles of a detainee's child be crushed. "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that," says Yoo.
Human-rights groups report that more than 100 captives have died while being tortured by executive-branch interrogators. "We do not torture?" Then why did Bush and Cheney fight so ferociously last year to kill Sen. John McCain's bill that would ban our government from using torture? The White House pleaded, threatened, cajoled and demanded that Congress at least exempt the CIA. Only when the ban passed both houses by veto-proof margins did Bush appear to give in, even publicly hugging McCain in a gesture of concession.
But when he signed the bill on Dec. 30, with Congress and the media out of town on holiday, Bush quietly added a "signing statement," augustly proclaiming that he retains the right to ignore the ban whenever he thinks it conflicts with his inherent authority as commander-in-chief. The Constitution clearly says that Congress -- and only Congress -- is empowered "to make all laws." Yet this president, who whines that "liberal" judges keep stretching the Constitution beyond the strict words of the founders, says that he can rewrite America's laws by interpreting them to mean what he wants them to mean.
If Bush can spy illegally, arrest citizens and throw away the key, sanction torture, lie, make his own laws and not be held accountable, then what can't he do? More next month (below). [(Subtitle and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)]
From The Hightower Lowdown, edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, April 2006.
Jim Hightower is the author of THIEVES IN HIGH PLACES: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It Back(!)
________
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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INSIDE DONNIE RUMSFELD'S
ORWELLIAN PENTAGON
[The Country "Not Like Its
Enemies", Becoming More and
More Like Its Enemies! (Part 2)]
By Jim Hightower
The Hightower Lowdown
Alternet.org
Wednesday, 24 May 2006
[Copyright (c) 2006 in the
U.S.A. & Internationally
by Alternet (.org),
HightowerLowdown (.org)
and/or Jim Hightower.
All rights reserved.]
In 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that the real threat to American freedom was not from an outside assault, but from the devious manipulations of our own misguided leaders. "The greatest dangers to liberty," he observed, "lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding."
Nearly 80 years after Brandeis's warning, the zealots have been brought in from the far-right fringe on the golden chariot of George W, and they've shown that they have no understanding of the essence of America, which includes our hard-won liberties, our rule of law and our system of checked-and-balanced governmental power.
But these men of zeal -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. -- are hardly well-meaning. They are deliberately and determinedly striving to impose the AntiAmerica on our own land -- an unrecognizable America of supreme executive authority, constant surveillance of the citizenry, secret government and suppression of dissent. Their chief weapon is fear. They feverishly wave the bloody flag of 9/11, shouting that the citizenry must surrender liberties or be attacked again by The Madmen, that we mustn't question authority for this only encourages The Madmen, that all government operations must be cloaked in a dark veil of secrecy to keep The Madmen off balance, and that executive and police power must drastically expand to protect us from The Madmen.
While claiming that they must "secure" America for a post-9/11 world, the BushCheney zealots are taking us back to a pre-1776 world. They have been astonishingly successful in a remarkably short time, insidiously taking autocratic step after step, which a compliant Congress and the establishment media have mostly missed, ignored, minimalized or applauded. These two "institutions of vigilance" have failed us. So it is up to "We, The People" to assert ourselves against this dangerous rise of authoritarianism in Bush's America.
The Spook Society
"You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you have to concentrate on," George W said with a laugh at Washington's Gridiron dinner in 2001.
If only we'd known then that behind George's snickers, the Bushites were serious. Employing a combination of deceit, defiance, arrogance, flag-waving and secrecy, they have fooled a majority of Congress and the media into accepting the overlay of a "spook society" on our "Land of the Free." The far-reaching extent of their efforts are only now becoming clear.
Last month's installment covered Bush's secret and blatantly illegal directive for the National Security Agency to spy on citizens here at home. This clandestine four-year program of executive eavesdropping -- scooping up billions of phone calls and emails sent or received by innocent Americans -- has now been getting wide media coverage. But to focus only on this one piece is to miss the more startling reality: the quiet installation inside our country of a massive snoopervision complex, much of it initiated, funded and controlled by Donnie Rumsfeld's Orwellian Pentagon.
Since the founding of America, a central tenet of our liberty has been that the military is not to be turned on our own people. Violations of this guiding rule have occurred in the past, but rarely and only temporarily, and when it's been violated, public outcry has forced the reinstatement of the rule.
Bush & Co., however, has not only turned loose the military to spy extensively on the American people, but has also asserted the right to do so in perpetuity. Its claim is that 9/11 turned the homeland into a foreign battlefield, so the nation's historic prohibition against military surveillance of Americans is null and void. And since this war on terrorists has no end ("the long war," Rumsfeld calls it), the Bushites maintain that the Pentagon can engage in domestic spying ad infinitum.
This military intrusion into our privacy has come with a heavy dose of linguistic perversions by top officials. For example, a secret Pentagon memo from Nov. 5, 2001, has now surfaced. In it, the Army's chief intelligence officer insists that while the Pentagon cannot "collect" information on citizens who have no connection to foreign terrorists, it can "receive" such information. "Remember," he wrote with Machiavellian delight, "merely receiving information does not constitute 'collection' [Military intelligence] may receive information from anyone, anytime."
Meanwhile, the ever-sneaky Bushites have quietly been pushing legislation that would compel the FBI and other police agencies to give information that they collect on you and me to the Pentagon, as long as the info is somehow "related" to a foreign intelligence investigation. This does not mean that, to spy on you, the snoops must have cause to think that you are in any way tied to terrorism, but only that they claim their investigation to be vaguely related to some
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