B00BLPJNWE EBOK (11 page)

This “protected right” is not protected for war protesters and other dissidents, as we will see.

President Richard Nixon was the last US president to be held accountable to law. There was an unsuccessful effort to hold president Bill Clinton accountable. However, the George W. Bush administration succeeded in elevating the president above the law.  President Bush succeeded in violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and spied on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court.

Bush also succeeded in violating both US and international laws against torture. In placing the president above the law, the Bush administration had the help of the Federalist Society, an organization of Republican lawyers who believe that the president has unique powers that place executive decisions above the reach of the legislature and the courts.

By failing to hold Bush and officials of his administration accountable for their unambiguous violations of law, the Obama administration has, in effect, accepted the constitutional coup that has elevated the president above the law. The American president is now a Caesar.

The transformation of the president into a caesar coincided with “the war on terror.” The Bush regime used fear created by the “terrorist threat” to deny to detainees and accused people both constitutional protections and the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Initially, it was only foreign “enemy combatants” who were held without due process. However, accused American citizens soon found themselves denied habeas corpus, right to an attorney, and due process. (See, for example
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29167.htm
) Unconstitutional laws, such as the PATRIOT Act, were passed to provide legal cover for constitutional violations by the executive branch.

A massive new federal police agency, Homeland Security, was created in 2002 to protect Americans from a non-existent “terrorist threat.” By 2011 this federal police agency had shifted its focus from terrorists to “domestic extremists,” defined as war protesters, environmentalists, animal rights activists, and everyone else of whom elites disapprove. In 2011 FBI agents burst into the homes of peace activists in Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin and other states seizing the residents’ computers and other possessions that could possibly be misconstrued as evidence  in behalf of the charge that the peace activists had given material support to foreign terrorist organizations by opposing America’s wars
.
  (See, for example,
http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-the-Road-from-9-11-Led-by-Jess-Sundin-110908-814.html
) Federal grand juries are now convened in efforts to indict peace activists under terrorism laws.

The government is working to shut down all its critics. US citizen-soldier Bradley Manning has been held for two years mainly in solitary confinement
under abusive conditions that many equate with torture
without any charges presented to a court on suspicion that he leaked documents to Wikileaks. A federal grand jury is at work in Alexandria, Virginia, concocting spy charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Obama regime official Cass Sunstein wants the 9/11 Truth movement to be infiltrated by intelligence agents and shut down.

A distinguished international attorney, professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois, was put on the terrorist watch list because he refused a FBI/CIA request to violate the attorney-client privilege and inform on his clients.

Justin Raimondo, proprietor of the Internet news site,
antiwar.com
, discovered that his site was under surveillance by the FBI for suspect activities.

The CIA is prohibited from domestic spying. However, a report from the Associated Press revealed that the CIA in conjunction with the New York Police Department has been conducting a “human mapping program.” According to news reports, “undercover officers known as ‘rakers’ have been dispatched into minority neighborhoods” to monitor “daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs.” Informants are used “to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.”

The police obtain informants by such means as framing Pakistani cab drivers and dropping the charges if the Pakistani agrees to infiltrate and inform on the Muslim community.  The next step, of course, is to have the informer bring false charges. This illegal and unconstitutional activity is justified in the name of “preventing another 9/11.”

Wired
magazine reports that the FBI conducts a training program for its agents that teaches that Muslim-Americans are “violent” and “radical,” even though there is no evidence that American Muslim citizens are violent and radical. (
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/fbi-muslims-radical/all/1
)

Americans are being turned against Muslims in a way similar to how Germans were turned against Jews. According to
Wired
magazine, “The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that ‘mainstream’ American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that the Prophet Mohammed was a ‘cult leader;’ and that the Islamic practice of giving charity is no more than a ‘funding mechanism for combat.’ At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more ‘devout’ a Muslim, the more likely he is to be ‘violent.’ Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: ‘Any war against non-believers is justified’ under Muslim law; a ‘moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the word of Allah.’”

Think about that for a moment.  No Muslim country has attacked the US. According to the official reports, the 9/11 hijackers were mainly Saudi Arabians and were not acting on behalf of any Muslim government.  Yet, the US government has launched wars against three Muslim states--Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya--and conducts military operations against alleged terrorists in three other Muslim states--Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia
,
operations that have resulted in countless civilian deaths
.
General Wesley Clark has reported that Syria, Lebanon, and Iran remain on the target list.

Which is the violent state?  Who is invading who? Which state is committing the war crime of unprovoked aggression?

The United States went to war against Iraq based on intentional lies about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” and conjured up images of “mushroom clouds” from non-existent nuclear weapons programs.  How does this differ from Adolf Hitler’s claim that “last night Polish troops crossed the frontier and attacked Germany?”

These criminal violations of US statutory law by the US government are chosen at random among numerous similar examples. They are powerful evidence that the United States is now a police state comparable to the early stages of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. This statement will seem extreme to Russians and Germans who remember the Stalin and Nazi eras. However, a police state does not require that the population of a country is put into concentration camps. Neither Stalin nor Hitler had more than a small percentage of the populations in camps. A police state is a state in which citizens do not have the protection of law and in which the government and its police agencies are not accountable to law. As the George W. Bush and Barack Obama regimes have made clear, the US government can violate its own laws, and nothing is done about it. The US government can deny its citizens their constitutional rights and nothing is done about it. The US government can announce that it has assassinated its own citizens, and nothing is done about it. The situation will worsen.

Indeed, the United States has now institutionalized the Stalinist and Gestapo practice of requiring citizens to inform on one another.  In American airports, for example, there are constant announcements that people must report any suspicious activity and that everyone is subject to search at any time even after completing airport security. Homeland Security now stops traffic on the country’s highways for searches.

Homeland Security instructs drivers to report “suspicious activity” by other drivers. These intrusive practices and the conditioning of citizens to spy on one another are being carried on despite the fact that there have been no terrorist events in the US since September 11, 2001 (“9/11”), except for those organized and orchestrated by the FBI in order to keep alive the fear that serves so well the growth of the “security” apparatus.*

________________

• * There is suspicion of the official explanation of 9/11 among some scientists, architects, engineers, pilots, and firefighters. Moreover, more than one-third of the US population is perplexed that a handful of stateless terrorists could outwit not only the CIA and FBI, but all 16 US intelligence agencies, the intelligence agencies of America’s allies including Israel’s Mossad, the National Security Council, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, and cause US airport security to fail four times on one morning. It is even more perplexing that such an extraordinary event could happen without the President, Congress, and the media immediately demanding an expert investigation and holding accountable those who so miserably failed in their responsibilities. Instead, the George W. Bush administration resisted for more than one year demands by 9/11 families for an investigation. The “investigation” produced a politically controlled report by the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commission’s co-chairmen and chief legal counsel later wrote books in which they reported that information was withheld from the commission. They described the commission as “set up to fail.”
  

________________

On
September 11, 2011, one decade after the event that was used to turn America into a police state, three people on a flight to Detroit, Michigan, from Denver, Colorado, which landed safely with no incident, were arrested and pulled off the airliner in handcuffs. ( see,
http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=137965
)

What occurred is that a woman passenger on the flight had been made paranoid by the ceaseless propaganda that Muslims, dark-skinned people, are terrorists and a threat to her life.  She noticed that two dark-skinned men--who turned out to be from India--were sitting in the same row with a dark-skinned woman--who turned out to be a Jewish/Arab-American housewife in Detroit. The men frequently visited the lavatory.  Remembering the “shampoo-bottled-water bomb,” that came between the shoe and underwear bombs, she jumped to the conclusion that the three were terrorists and reported her finding to the airline attendant, who is required to report such “findings” of passengers to the pilots, who duly reported to higher authorities.

Whatever the procedure, when the airliner landed without any incident, because two of the three dark-skinned suspects had used the toilet facilities too often for the paranoid woman to accept as innocent, three passengers were embarrassed, abused, and taken to jail, where they were strip-searched and questioned about their nefarious intentions.

The affair turned out to be pointless. None of the arrested “suspects” had done anything, had any kind of weapon or prohibited item or improper documentation. They sat in a jail while the FBI discovered that all that had happened is that a woman made paranoid by “terrorist” reports from Fox “News” and Homeland Security had concluded that dark-skinned people who used the toilet facilities too often were terrorists.

In the event that you do not realize what this means, it means that anyone, no matter how stupid and brainwashed, can report
anyone to be a terrorist. 
A fully-armed SWAT team will appear to drag the suspect from a plane, a train, a shopping center, or home, and if the latter, shoot the family dog, point automatic weapons at the family, and then justify their actions on the basis of a report from a person about whom they know nothing whatsoever. Every American is now threatened by reports stemming from jealousy, acts of revenge, or fantasy. As the massive police bureaucracy needs terrorist cases to justify its budget, there will be a growing tendency to regard reported people as guilty and to treat them as such.

As many writers who have experienced police states have made clear, once a police state is formed, the bureaucracy itself produces “suspects” and “enemies of the people.” The “street sweeps” of the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union resulted from pressure on the police agency to apprehend “enemies of the people” so that the secret police themselves would not fall under Stalin’s suspicion.

For now, in the early stages of the American Police State, it is still possible for innocent people to be cleared. However, too many clearances undermine the terror threat that is used to justify the abuse of citizens. The time will come when the FBI will cease to do an honest investigation that clears the accused. Everyone suspected and arrested will be declared guilty in order that the police agency proves its worth or survives suspicion from those at the top, who might be paranoid or orchestrating the system for an undeclared agenda.

That time at which accusation prevails over investigation might be close at hand. On New Year’s eve, 2011, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act which contains an amendment passed with majority support of both parties (Democrats and Republicans) of both houses of Congress (House and Senate). The amendment in effect repeals the US Constitution. This Bill of Tyranny gives the power to the US military to detain indefinitely without presenting charges American citizens anywhere in the world, including in the United States.