Controlling The Web

In January 2012, two controversial pieces of legislation were making their way through the US Congress. SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, were meant to crack down on the illegal sharing of digital media. The bills were drafted on request of the content industry, Hollywood studios and major record labels.

The online community rose up against the US government to speak out against SOPA, and the anti-online piracy bill was effectively killed off after the largest online protest in US history. But it was only one win in a long battle between US authorities and online users over internet regulation. SOPA and PIPA were just the latest in a long line of anti-piracy legislation US politicians have passed since the 1990s.

"One of the things we are seeing which is a by-product of the digital age is, frankly, it's much easier to steal and to profit from the hard work of others," says Michael O'Leary, the executive vice-president for global policy at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The US government says it must be able to fight against piracy and cyber attacks. And that means imposing more restrictions online. But proposed legislation could seriously curb freedom of speech and privacy, threatening the internet as we know it.

Can and should the internet be controlled? Who gets that power? How far will the US government go to gain power over the web? And will this mean the end of a free and global internet?

The Rise Of The Police State & The Absence Of Mass Opposition

James Petras and Robin Eastman Abaya write:

One of the most significant political developments in recent US history has been the virtually unchallenged rise of the police state. Despite the vast expansion of the police powers of the Executive Branch of government, the extraordinary growth of an entire panoply of repressive agencies, with hundreds of thousands of personnel, and enormous public and secret budgets and the vast scope of police state surveillance, including the acknowledged monitoring of over 40 million US citizens and residents, no mass pro-democracy movement has emerged to confront the powers and prerogatives or even protest the investigations of the police state.

In the early fifties, when the McCarthyite purges were accompanied by restrictions on free speech, compulsory loyalty oaths and congressional ‘witch hunt’ investigations of public officials, cultural figures , intellectuals, academics and trade unionists, such police state measures provoked widespread public debate and protests and even institutional resistance. By the end of the 1950’s mass demonstrations were held at the sites of the public hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in San Francisco (1960) and elsewhere and major civil rights movements arose to challenge the racially segregated South, the compliant Federal government and the terrorist racist death squads of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley (1964) ignited nationwide mass demonstrations against the authoritarian-style university governance.

The police state incubated during the first years of the Cold War was challenged by mass movements pledged to retain or regain democratic freedoms and civil rights.

Key to understanding the rise of mass movements for democratic freedoms was their fusion with broader social and cultural movements: democratic freedoms were linked to the struggle for racial equality; free speech was necessary in order to organize a mass movement against the imperial US Indo-Chinese wars and widespread racial segregation; the shutting down of Congressional ‘witch hunts’ and purges opened up the cultural sphere to new and critical voices and revitalized the trade unions and professional associations. All were seen as critical to protecting hard-won workers’ rights and social advances.

In the face of mass opposition, many of the overt police state tactics of the 1950’s went ‘underground’ and were replaced by covert operations; selective state violence against individuals replaced mass purges. The popular pro-democracy movements strengthened civil society and public hearings exposed and weakened the police state apparatus, but it did not go away. However, from the early 1980’s to the present, especially over the past 20 years, the police state has expanded dramatically, penetrating all aspects of civil society while arousing no sustained or even sporadic mass opposition.

The question is why has the police state grown and even exceeded the boundaries of previous periods of repression and yet not provoked any sustained mass opposition? This is in contrast to the broad-based pro-democracy movements of the mid to late 20th century. That a massive and growing police state apparatus exists is beyond doubt: one simply has to look up the published records of personnel (both public agents and private contractors), the huge budgets and scores of agencies involved in internal spying on tens of millions of American citizens and residents. The scope and depth of arbitrary police state measures taken include arbitrary detention and interrogations, entrapment and the blacklisting of hundreds of thousands of US citizens. Presidential fiats have established the framework for the assassination of US citizens and residents, military tribunals, detention camps and the seizure of private property.

Yet as these gross violations of the constitutional order have taken place and as each police state agency has further eroded our democratic freedoms, there have been no massive “anti-Homeland Security” movements, no campus ‘Free Speech movements'. There are only the isolated and courageous voices of specialized ‘civil liberties’ and constitutional freedoms activists and organizations, which speak out and raise legal challenges to the abuse, but have virtually no mass base and no objective coverage in the mass media.

To address this issue of mass inactivity before the rise of the police state, we will approach the topic from two angles.

We will describe how the organizers and operatives have structured the police state and how that has neutralized mass responses.

We will then discuss the ‘meaning’ of non-activity, setting out several hypotheses about the underlying motives and behavior of the ‘passive mass’ of citizens.

The Concentric Circles of the Police State

While the potential reach of the police state agencies covers the entire US population, in fact, it operates on the basis of ‘concentric circles’. The police state is perceived and experienced by the US population according to the degree of their involvement in critical opposition to state policies. While the police state theoretically affects ‘everyone’, in practice it operates through a series of concentric circles. The ‘inner core’, of approximately several million citizens, is the sector of the population experiencing the brunt of the police state persecution. They include the most critical, active citizens, especially those identified by the police state as sharing religious and ethnic identities with declared foreign enemies, critics or alleged ‘terrorists’. These include immigrants and citizens of Arab, Persian, Pakistani, Afghan and Somali descent, as well as American converts to Islam.

Ethnic and religious “profiling” is rife in all transport centers (airports, bus and train stations and on the highways). Mosques, Islamic charities and foundations are under constant surveillance and subject to raids, entrapment, arrests, and even Israeli-style ‘targeted’ assassinations.

The second core group, targeted by the police state, includes African Americans, Hispanics and immigration rights activists (numbering in the millions). They are subject to massive arbitrary sweeps, round-ups and unlimited detention without trial as well as mass indiscriminate deportations.

After the ‘core groups’ is the ‘inner circle’ which includes millions of US citizens and residents, who have written or spoken critically of US and Israeli policy in the Middle East, expressed solidarity with the suffering of the Palestinian people, opposed US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or have visited countries or regions opposed to US empire building (Venezuela, Iran, South Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza, etc.). Hundreds of thousands of these citizens have their telephone, e-mail and internet communications under surveillance; they have been targeted in airports, denied passports, subject to ‘visits’ and to covert and overt blacklisting at their schools and workplaces.

Activists engaged in civil liberties groups, lawyers, and professionals, leftists engaged in anti-Imperialist, pro-democracy and anti-police state activities and their publications are on ‘file’ in the massive police state labyrinth of data collecting on ‘political terrorists’. Environmental movements and their activists have been treated as potential terrorists – with their own family members subjected to police harassment and ominous ‘visits’.

The ‘outer circle’ includes, community, civic, religious and trade union leaders and activists who, in the course of their activity interact with or even express support for core and inner circle critics and victims of police state violations of due process . The ‘outer circle’ numbering a few million citizens are ‘on file’ as ‘persons of interest’, which may involve monitoring their e-mail and periodic ‘checks’ on their petition signing and defense appeals.
These ‘three circles’ are the central targets of the police state, numbering upward of 40 million US citizens and immigrants - who have not committed any crime. For having exercised their constitutional rights, they have been subjected to various degrees of police state repression and harassment.

The police state, however, has ‘fluid boundaries’ about whom to spy on, whom to arrest and when - depending on whatever arouses the apparatchiks ‘suspicion’ or desire to exercise power or please their superiors at any given moment.

The key to the police state operations of the US in the 21st century is to repress pro-democracy citizens and pre-empt any mass movement without undermining the electoral system, which provides political theater and legitimacy. A police state ‘boundary’ is constructed to ensure that citizens will have little option but to vote for the two pro-police state parties, legislatures and executives without reference to the conduct, conditions and demands of the core, inner and outer circle of victims, critics and activists. Frequent raids, harsh public ‘exemplary’ punishment and mass media stigmatization transmit a message to the passive mass of voters and non-voters that the victims of repression ‘must have been doing something wrong’ or else they would not be under police state repression.

The key to the police state strategy is to not allow its critics to gain a mass base, popular legitimacy or public acceptance. The state and the media constantly drum the message that the activists’ ‘causes’ are not our (American, patriotic) ‘causes’; that ‘their’ pro-democracy activities impede ‘our’ electoral activities; their lives, wisdom and experiences do not touch our workplaces, neighborhoods, sports, religious and civic associations. To the degree that the police-state has ‘fenced in’ the inner circles of the pro-democracy activists, they have attained a free hand and uncontested reach in deepening and extending the boundaries of the authoritarian state. To the degree that the police state rationale or presence has penetrated the consciousness of the mass of the US population, it has created a mighty barrier to the linking of private discontent with public action.

Hypothesis on Mass Complicity and Acquiescence with the Police State

If the police-state is now the dominant reality of US political life, why isn’t it at the center of citizen concern? Why are there no pro-democracy popular movements? How has the police state been so successful in ‘fencing off’ the activists from the vast majority of US citizens? After all, other countries at other times have faced even more repressive regimes and yet the citizens rebelled. In the past, despite the so-called ‘Soviet threat’, pro-democracy movements emerged in the US and even rolled back a burgeoning police state. Why does the evocation of an outside ‘Islamic terrorist threat’ seem to incapacitate our citizens today? Or does it?

There is no simple, single explanation for the passivity of the US citizens faced with a rising omnipotent police state. Their motives are complex and changing and it is best to examine them in some detail.

One explanation for passivity is that precisely the power and pervasiveness of the police state has created deep fear, especially among people with family obligations, vulnerable employment and with moderate commitments to democratic freedoms. This group of citizens is aware of cases where police powers have affected other citizens who were involved in critical activities, causing job loss and broad suffering and are not willing to sacrifice their security and the welfare of their families for what they believe is a ‘losing cause’ – a movement lacking a strong popular base and with little institutional support. Only when the protest against the Wall Street bailout and the ‘ Occupy Wall Street ’ movements against the ‘1%’ gained momentum, did this sector express transitory support. But as the Office of the President consummated the bailout and the police-state crushed the ‘Occupy’ encampments, fear and caution led many sympathizers to withdraw timidly back into passivity.

The second motive for ‘acquiescence’ among a substantial public is because they tend to support the police state, based on their acceptance of the anti-terror ideology and its virulent anti-Muslim-anti-Arab racism, driven in large part by influential sectors of pro-Israel opinion makers. The fear and loathing of Muslims, cultivated by the police state and mass media, was central to the post-9/11 build-up of Homeland Security and the serial wars against Israel ’s adversaries, including Iraq , Lebanon , Libya and now Syria with plans for Iran . Active support for the police state peaked during the first 5 years post- 9/11 and subsequently ebbed as the Wall Street-induced economic crisis, loss of employment and the failures of government policy propelled concerns about the economy far ahead of support for the police state. Nevertheless, at least one-third of the electorate still supports the police state, ‘right or wrong’. They firmly believe that the police state protects their ‘security’; that suspects, arrestees, and others under watch ‘must have been doing something illegal’. The most ardent backers of the police state are found among the rabid anti-immigrant groups who support arbitrary round-ups, mass deportations and the expansion of police powers at the expense of constitutional guarantees.

The third possible motive for acquiescence in the police state is ignorance: those millions of US citizens who are not aware of the size, scope and activities of the police state. Their practical behavior speaks to the notion that ‘since I am not directly affected it must not exist’. Embedded in everyday life, making a living, enjoying leisure time, entertainment, sports, family, neighborhoods and concerned only about household budgets … This mass is so embedded in their personal ‘micro-world’ that it considers the macro-economic and political issues raised by the police state as ‘distant’, outside of their experience or interest: ‘I don’t have time’, ‘I don’t know enough’, ‘It’s all ‘politics’ … The widespread apoliticism of the US public plays into its ignoring the monster that has grown in its midst.

Paradoxically as some peoples’ concerns and passive discontent over the economy has grown, it has lessened support for the police state as well as having lessened opposition to it. In other words the police state flourishes while public discontent is focused more on the economic institutions of the state and society. Few, if any, contemporary political leaders educate their constituency by connecting the rise of the police state, imperial wars and Wall Street to the everyday economic issues concerning most US citizens. The fragmentation of issues, the separation of the economic from the political and the divorce of political concerns from individual ones, allow the police state to stand ‘above and outside’ of the popular consciousness , concerns and activities.

State-sponsored fear mongering on behalf of the police state is amplified and popularized by the mass media on a daily basis via propagandistic-‘news’, ‘anti-terrorist’ detective programs, Hollywood’s decades of crass anti-Arab, Islamophobic films. The mass media portrayal of the police state’s naked violations of democratic rights as normal and necessary in a milieu infiltrated by ‘Muslim terrorists’, where feckless ‘liberals’(defenders of due process and the Bill of Rights) threaten national security, has been effective.

Ideologically, the police state depends on identifying the expansion of police powers with ‘national security’ of the passive ‘silent’ majority, even as it creates profound insecurity for an active, critical minority. The self-serving identification of the ‘nation’ and the ‘flag’ with the police state apparatus is especially prominent during ‘mass spectacles’ where ‘rock’, schlock and ‘sports’ infuse mass entertainment with solemn Pledges of Allegiance to uphold and respect the police state and busty be-wigged young women wail nasally versions of the national anthem to thunderous applause. Wounded ‘warriors’ are trotted out and soldiers rigid in their dress uniforms salute enormous flags, while the message transmitted is that police state at home works hand in hand with our ‘men and women in uniform’ abroad. The police state is presented as a patriotic extension of the wars abroad and as such both impose ‘necessary’ constraints on citizen opposition, public criticism and any real forthright defense of freedom.

Conclusion: What is to be done?

The ascendancy of the police state has benefited enormously from the phony bi-partisan de-politicization of repressive legislation, and the fragmentation of socio-economic struggles from democratic dissent. The mass anti-war movements of the early 1990’s and 2001-2003 were undermined (sold-out) by the defection of its leaders to the Democratic Party machine and its electoral agenda. The massive popular immigration movement was taken over by Mexican-American political opportunists from the Democratic Party and decimated while the same Democratic Party, under President Barack Obama, has escalated police state repression against immigrants, expelling millions of Latino immigrant workers and their families.

Historical experience teaches us that a successful struggle against an emerging police state depends on the linking of the socio-economic struggles that engage the attention of the masses of citizens with the pro-democracy, pro-civil liberty, ‘free speech’ movements of the middle classes. The deepening economic crisis, the savage cuts in living standards and working conditions and the fight to save ‘sacred’ social programs (like Social Security and Medicare) have to be tied in with the expansion of the police state. A mass social justice movement, which brings together thousands of anti-Wall Streeters, millions of pro-Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid recipients with hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers will inevitably clash with the bloated police-state apparatus. Freedom is essential to the struggle for social justice and the mass struggle for social justice is the only basis for rolling back the police state. The hope is that mass economic pain will ignite mass activity, which, in turn, will make people aware of the dangerous growth of the police state. A mass understanding of this link will be essential to any advance in the movement for democracy and people’s welfare at home and peace abroad.

Via: "Global Research"

Expose The Siege Of Democracy, Not Abet It

By John Hanrahan
July 6, 2012
Courtesy Of "Nieman Watchdog"

‘We have become overly fearful, willing to surrender many core freedoms for the illusion of absolute security…We as a nation are less free than we were 11 years ago. And the mainstream press needs to say so, needs to explore this in news articles, as well as editorially and on the op-ed pages and in the broadcast media.’

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! 

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? 

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that! 

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat… Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

     From A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt

Have we in the United States cut down much of  “Man’s laws” – our Bill of Rights – in the name of protecting ourselves from, and attacking, those whom our government has identified as our modern-day devils? 

Has the mainstream press largely ignored the chilling story that, pushed by the alarmist warnings of national leaders since the September 11, 2001 attacks, we have become overly fearful, willing to surrender many core freedoms for the illusion of absolute security against what we are told is a never-ending terrorism threat? Never mind reality, we’re scared, as polls show: Do whatever you need to do to keep us safe, please, no questions asked. 

Wage secret wars and semi-covertly unleash cyber attacks and drone strikes in any country against any putative enemies – as defined by the Obama administration – and don’t worry about international and national legal niceties or congressional approval, much less having open, public debate about our overt and covert war-making? Fine, as long as you keep us safe and don’t tell us about the civilian casualties we and our NATO allies cause or the number of new enemies we create through our military adventurism – unless, of course, those civilian casualties are caused by governments in Libya or Syria or the like. After all, we are the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, and the rules don’t apply to us.

Have we as citizens collectively assumed an “I’m-doing-nothing-wrong-so-why-should-I-worry” attitude, firm in the knowledge that it’s mainly Muslims, activists and foreigners who are affected by civil liberties abridgments and targeted assassinations – at least for now? Are we Americans stumbling obliviously into authoritarianism, with few in government or in the mainstream press willing to warn us about it? Is the real ticking time bomb that should concern us the one attached to our Bill of Rights, rather than the hyperbolic one wielded by Muslim extremists? Has the mainstream press been as vigilant in alerting us to the dangerous policies and tendencies in our own government over the last decade as it has been in alerting us to abuses in, say, China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and on and on? We’re not arguing moral equivalencies here, but rather asking: Has the mainstream press overall met what is supposedly its role of serving as watchdogs over our own government and the military-industrial-homeland security apparatus that feeds so profitably off of it?

Call it whatever you will and, if you feel President Obama is acting in your interest, and that President Bush and Vice President Cheney did so before him, and presumably that Romney will if he is elected, then go ahead and defend this diminution in civil liberties as being necessary. But it seems indisputable that we as a nation are less free than we were 11 years ago. And the mainstream press needs to say so, needs to explore this vital-to-democracy topic in news articles, as well as editorially and on the op-ed pages and in the broadcast media. 

The Loss Of Civil Liberties: Just Collateral Damage

Among civil libertarians, constitutional scholars, activists, alternative media commentators (such as Democracy Now on Pacifica, the Alyona Show on RT) and widely-read progressive bloggers and reporters (such as Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, TomDispatch’s Tom Engelhardt, and the Nation’s Jeremy Scahill), the diminishment of our civil liberties and the unchecked war-waging by the United States since the September 11, 2011 attacks is, rightly, a topic of constant discussion. One wonders how much worse the civil liberties picture would be were it not for the heroic efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In theory, a majority of the American people today appear to still hold to the ideals embodied in the Bill of Rights, even as those rights have been whittled away in the decade-long climate of fear.

In a Pew Research poll last September on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, 54 percent of respondents said "no" when asked whether it was "necessary to give up civil liberties in order to curb terrorism” – up from 35 percent right after the attacks and 45 percent at the one-year mark. But within Washington’s tightly-closed inner circle – the mainstream news outlets, the president, the Congress, the military-industrial-security state complex – civil liberties and the rule of law are just so much unacknowledged collateral damage.

Why, in our mainstream press, don’t we see more news articles and op-ed pieces along the lines of the opinion piece that Professor Jonathan Turleywrote in January and that, miracle of miracles, actually found its way into The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section with this provocative headline: “10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free.”

In this remarkable piece Turley, the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and one of the nation’s leading authorities on civil liberties, noted: 

“In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state...While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian.”

I call the Turley piece remarkable not only because of its tightly-reasoned, sobering arguments but for the fact that one hardly ever sees such notions raised in daily mainstream newspapers, or on mainstream television news. As Turley wrote: “We seem as a country to be in denial as to the implications of these laws and policies. Whether we are viewed as a free country with authoritarian inclinations or an authoritarian nation with free aspirations (or some other hybrid definition), we are clearly not what we once were.” We would be wise, Turley said, to follow the Chinese proverb: “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.”

Turley noted similarities between rollbacks of civil liberties in this country and the civil liberties abuses in other countries such as Iran, Russia, China and Cuba: 

“Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.”

Sound at all familiar?

Despite the similarities between powers assumed by or granted to the U.S. government over the last 10 years, Turley noted: “Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own – the land of the free.” But, he cautioned: “The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.”

Turley went on: “Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of ‘free,’ but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit. These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens – precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.”

“Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely...Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free.”

Looking At The U.S, What Would A Foreign Correspondent See?

While our mainstream press can be clear-eyed and forceful about civil liberties and human rights abuses and military belligerence by other countries’ governments, U.S. reporters for the most part seem unable – or unwilling (or are blocked by editors) – to look at the United States as if it were a foreign country and see that since 2001 we have traveled a long way down a dangerous path.   

If I were a foreign correspondent coming to the United States, what would I see? A two-plus-centuries old democracy where over the course of little more than one decade first one president and then his successor have assumed or been granted awesome powers for the government to assassinate citizens and non-citizens alike who are deemed to be dangerous to the state – anywhere in the world, merely on the say-so of the president that these are dangerous individuals; to detain individuals indefinitely without trial; to conduct warrantless surveillance of individuals; to subject persons accused of crimes against the state to trial by a military tribunal rather than before a civilian court; to bring some defendants deemed to be particularly dangerous to proceedings before secret tribunals; to arrest and hold indefinitely without charge not only suspected terrorist enemies of the state but any person deemed, without trial, to be giving ill-defined “material support” to such enemies; to remand prisoners to custody in other countries whose governments are known for torture policies; to set up secret prisons for terrorist suspects in other countries; to invade and occupy and bomb other countries that pose no direct or imminent threat to his own nation; to wage secret wars using elite military units, without open consultation with the legislative branch or the citizenry; to unleash armed drone strikes and assassinations in any country felt to be harboring dangerous enemies of the state, with or without authorization of the leaders of those countries, and with or without knowledge of specific terrorists residing in those countries; to bring espionage –espionage! – charges in record numbers against government whistleblowers, accusing them of disclosing information about illegal government spying or government lying about matters of national security and war; to keep one accused whistleblower in solitary confinement, often stripped naked, for eight months, even refusing a United Nations human rights investigator’s request to interview him, and so on. And I would see self-serving, dangerous legal opinions, used first by one president to justify torture, and then by his successor to assassinate via drone or other methods any person deemed by presidential fiat to be a terrorist enemy of the state.

And I would see a nation in which the country’s legislative branch, with only a few cries of outrage from its less-influential members, acquiesces in most of these abuses of powers – or takes the lead in authorizing even more abusive powers for the president and the federal government – powers directed against individuals in other countries as well as against their own fellow citizens. And, in addition to agreeing with the president that the nation is beset with enemies from abroad and within and that some liberties need to be abridged, this legislative branch for the most part sits idly by as the nation’s foreign intelligence services and the national police take on ever more aspects of a corporatist surveillance state with increased powers, including what one spy-agency whistleblower says is wholesale collection of billions of citizens’ "transactions" – phone calls, emails and other forms of data – from Americans.  I would see human rights and civil liberties abuses committed by a previous president and vice president and their administration – including torture and spying on citizens – swept under the rug, as the current president with the blessing of congressional leaders of both parties turns a blind eye to most of those earlier abuses, while continuing to commit most of these same abuses himself. I would see abuses that previously had been regarded as crimes, such as targeted and “signature strike” assassinations, now normalized as supposed essential tools in what was once called the global war on terror. Only some of these aren’t even considered abuses anymore, because they have been codified into law or upheld by courts. 

As Peter Van Buren, who was recently forced out of the State Department after 23 years as a foreign service officer for writing a book and numerous personal blog posts criticizing the government’s so-called “reconstruction efforts” in Iraq, has noted: “Many of the illegal things President Richard Nixon did to the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg are now both legal (under the Patriot Act) and far easier to accomplish with new technologies. There is no need, for instance, to break into my psychiatrist’s office looking for dirt, as happened to Ellsberg; after all, the National Security Agency can break into my doctor’s electronic records as easily as you can read this page.” 

And as a foreign correspondent I would see that when citizens took to the streets to protest economic and foreign policy injustices, some 7,300 of them were arrested in a nine-month period in more than 100 cities around the country, with many of the arrests demonstrably brutal and arbitrary and often carried out by riot-gear-clad, heavily-armed, militarized police who increasingly are coming to resemble urban armies. So-called “free speech zones” have become commonplace in any situation where large numbers of protesters are expected to assemble. Press efforts to provide first-hand coverage of the protests and arrests of protesters are not only blocked by police in some cities, but dozens of reporters, photographers and videographers are arrested on spurious trespassing and assault charges (or moved far away from newsworthy events) – merely for doing their jobs of trying to cover the news.

Meanwhile, police in the nation’s greatest city are found to be conducting massive spying operations against Muslims in their mosques and businesses within their own city and beyond its borders in a systematic collection of personal data and gossip through surveillance and infiltration in the manner of some frightening, wannabe Stasi. And the mayor of another major city, in advance of an international conference in his city – in an apparent effort to thwart militant protests – arranges for 500 state police troopers and 600 National Guard troops to supplement his own heavily-armed, riot-geared police known historically for their brutality against demonstrators. I would see how federal, state and local police increasingly infiltrate Muslim and activist groups with the goal of enticing individuals into acts of violence and then making highly-publicized arrests ballyhooing how another terrorist threat has been thwarted. 

And I would see the courts in this still self-proclaimed bastion of liberty, with few exceptions, being caught up in the national security mania, almost always supporting extreme government secrecy and upholding dangerous new powers assumed or granted to the president or other government officials under the guise of the terrorist threat or state secrets – relying strictly on the government’s say-so. With the support of the president’s cabinet officer in charge of justice, the nation’s highest court rules that anyone imprisoned or arrested for any reason can be strip-searched. The timing, interestingly, coincides with an upsurge in street protest demonstrations, and activists voice concerns that strip searches will become routine in mass arrests of protesters for even the flimsiest of pretexts, thus scaring off many protesters already concerned about the increasing rough tactics of the police. Meanwhile, security agents, assigned to monitor passengers at airports, extend their jurisdiction to train stations, highways, city streets – those same city streets that in major cities are choked with surveillance cameras. I would see the way suddenly being opened for the use of surveillance drones on a wide scale in many of the nation’s states and cities and border areas.

The New Meaning Of Exceptionalism

You can imagine the outcry all of these abuses occurring in another erstwhile democratic country would provoke from President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or the previous regime of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. One can even imagine the likes of Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) calling, as usual, for armed intervention by the United States to restore democracy to a once-democratic nation – and a nation that, after all, is especially dangerous as it has a great storehouse of nuclear weapons, up to 1,000 or more military installations in scores of countries around the globe, a military budget almost equal to the military budgets of the rest of the world’s governments combined, actual wars and secret wars on two continents, and demonstrably belligerent intentions toward other nations and insurgent groups globally. One can imagine the outcry. But, of course, that nuclear-armed nation experiencing its leaders’ assaults on democracy is the United States, a nation blessed with exceptionalism that exempts it from the rules and allows it to make the rules for other countries (even as it violates those same rules it applies to others).

These governmental powers recited above, of course, are exactly the ones that have been authorized to Presidents Bush and Obama by Congress and by favorable court decisions, or just claimed by Bush or Obama using self-serving secret legal opinions and without any congressional authorization, since the attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 

If taken one by one, only from the perspective of how these issues were reported in the mainstream print and broadcast press, many readers and viewers might not view with alarm one particular power granted to or asserted by, first Bush, and now Obama. Powers that, as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has frequently noted, are endorsed on a bipartisan basis by congressional Democrats and Republicans alike. 

Taken as a package, the implications of these extraordinary governmental powers for our ever-dwindling democracy are most serious indeed. Shouldn’t the mainstream press be loudly and repeatedly sounding the alarm over these threats to democracy? Would future historians consulting the pages of our major mainstream newspapers, and watching old videos of network and cable news, get any feeling that the press of our day presented the Bill of Rights as being wobbly and about to go down for the count in the first and second decades of the 21st century? Or would they get the feeling that our press and our national leaders in Congress felt that whatever was going on, it was just politics as usual, not really worth talking about much – certainly not worth even a fraction of the news coverage devoted to, say, nonsensical right-wing fantasies of Obama’s secret Muslim and socialist beliefs and foreign birth, or the U.S. Secret Service agents’ prostitution scandal, or John Edwards’ disgraceful behavior and trial? 

To my knowledge, no mainstream publication or broadcast outlet has put together a comprehensive piece along the lines of  “growing concerns among civil libertarians, constitutional scholars, activists that the United States is no longer a fully free society.” Aside from the handful of praiseworthy U.S. mainstream journalists – such as Charlie Savage of the New York Times, Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post and the New York Times editorial writers who have regularly reported or commented on government secrecy, the growing power of the executive branch in foreign and military affairs, and the threats to civil liberties post-9/11 – those of us concerned about where our democracy is heading have to rely mainly on the aforementioned established bloggers such as Greenwald and Engelhardt and alternative media journalists. Or the foreign press, such as this piece fromPaul Harris of the London-based Observer, who wrote recently: 

“Obama has presided over a massive expansion of secret surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. He has launched a ferocious and unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. He has made more government documents classified than any previous president. He has broken his promise to close down the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison and pressed on with prosecutions via secretive military tribunals, rather than civilian courts. He has preserved CIA renditions. He has tried to grab broad new powers on what defines a terrorist or a terrorist supporter and what can be done with them, often without recourse to legal process. The sheer scope and breadth of Obama's national security policy has stunned even fervent Bush supporters and members of the Washington DC establishment.”

Just as with the mainstream press, the Congress has continued its downhill slide into irrelevance as a critic and watchdog on foreign and military affairs. Those few voices in Congress who do regularly warn against assaults on the Bill of Rights and military adventurism – Democratic House members such as Jerrold Nadler of New York, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Barbara Lee of California, and Republicans Ron Paul of Texas and Walter Jones of North Carolina – are ignored or otherwise marginalized by the press in such a way that their warnings are seldom published or broadcast by mainstream media. When was the last time any interviewer on, say, one of the Sunday talk shows, cited the abuses instituted under the Bush and Obama administrations and asked the question: Has our government’s decade-long response to 9/11 made us more unfree?

It would be a great boon to Americans’ understanding of the United States’ militaristic posture in the world and the corresponding decline of civil liberties at home if we heard more in the mainstream media from people like Nadler and a lot less from get-tough, be-afraid-be-very-afraid war hawk Senators McCain, Graham and Lieberman. As Nadler, whose lower Manhattan-Brooklyn district includes the World Trade Center attack site, warned last December in urging a no vote on the National Defense Authorization Act, which codified in law the detention without trial of non-citizens and citizens alike on suspicion of links to terrorism: 

“We are in danger of losing our most precious heritage not because a band of thugs threatens our freedom, but because we are at risk of forgetting who we are and what makes the United States a truly great nation. In the last 10 years, we have begun to let go of our freedoms, bit by bit, with each new executive order, court decision and, yes, act of Congress. We have begun giving away our rights to privacy, our right to our day in court when the government harms us, and, with this legislation, we are continuing down the path of destroying the right to be free from imprisonment without due process of law.”

Nadler has been that rare congressional Democrat who has criticized Obama and Democratic congressional leaders for taking positions on civil liberties and the rule of law that are essentially the same as those policies they widely decried under the Bush-Cheney administration. Democrats should apply the same standards to President Barack Obama as they did to George W. Bush.Nadler said that the National Defense Authorization Act codifies presidential powers which “frankly, these are powers that – that, during the campaign three years ago that President Obama – candidate Obama – said we shouldn't have and, on these questions, they [Obama and congressional leaders) have essentially taken the same positions as the Bush administration and we Democrats should — should oppose this by our own party.” 

Obama’s supporters, of course, point out that there really are terrorists (albeit a growing number, thanks to our government’s militaristic actions on so many fronts in the last decade) who want to do harm to Americans, and that Obama is doing what he thinks necessary to keep us safe. Another factor, though, is that Democratic leaders, since the end of World War II, have been consumed with the notion that they are seen as being "soft" on defense and foreign policy matters. President Truman "lost" China, went the right-wing attacks of the time. President Johnson disastrously escalated the war in Vietnam out of a concern that Republicans would accuse Democrats as being "soft on communism" if he dithered. With the 9/11 attacks and the aggressive response by Bush-Cheney (two major wars, torture, a crackdown on civil liberties), Obama clearly does not want to appear to be "soft on terrorism." And so, for example, his defenders praise him (or withhold their criticism) for his quasi-secret use of armed drones in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, his extra-judicial killings of even Americans deemed to be enemies, and his continuation of almost all of the Bush-Cheney civil liberties rollbacks, which all show he is not “soft on terrorism.” As it is, Obama is soft on democracy, and that's a lot worse.

Jimmy Carter Laments Loss Of Moral Authority, Absence Of Dissent

Yet to read and listen to almost all of the mainstream media outlets, you would swear that at worst we have had some civil liberties blips and “controversies” here and there over the last decade, as the press generally hasn’t seen a need to put it all together and look at what Professor Turley termed “a mosaic of powers” or to even pose the question: What does all this mean for the future of our democracy, as year after year what were once once-inviolable barriers against government intrusion on personal liberties are cut down? 

Former President Jimmy Carter recently weighed in with his own warning on the government's abuse of civil liberties over the last decade, stating that the United States “is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.” Without naming either President Bush or President Obama, Carter said that recent revelations “that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.” Noting U.S. leadership in the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Carter said, “It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’” The result, he said, is that “instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.”

And these extraordinary powers that Carter warns of will pass to the next president – either after this next election if Obama is defeated or in 2017 after Obama finishes a second term. Even if you believe Obama has used, and will use, these powers wisely, why should anyone be certain the next president will? And does anyone really believe this is as far as presidential powers will go in the areas of war and peace and civil liberties? What’s next? If some actual terrorist plot – resulting in a large or small number of casualties – is successful within the borders of the United States, what will be the next draconian law passed or power assumed unilaterally by a president to counter what will surely be adjudged an even more dire situation than 9/11? How can influential Democrats possibly speak out against future civil liberties abuses by a Republican president now that they have assented to abuses by the Obama administration – and, when they had the majority in both Houses in 2008-2010, took no action to restore any of the civil liberties usurped under Bush? 

What will be the next Bill-of-Rights-negating power granted to, or assumed by, a president? Will we have a “debate” over mass incarceration of U.S. “terrorist suspects” if that happens, the way we had a “debate” over waterboarding (not torture when the U.S. does it, according to National Public Radio and much of our mainstream press, but rather “enhanced interrogation techniques”), or the “debate” we had over President Obama’s unilateral assumption of authority to assassinate anywhere, far from any armed conflict zone, individuals who are deemed by virtue of secret information possessed by the government to pose a threat to the United States? Or the recent “debate” over whether New York police were acting illegally in their mass surveillance and profiling of Muslims not only in New York, but in New Jersey? Where does this all end, and who will stop it? 

There are so many questions for the public to ask and the mainstream press to answer.

Where, for example, was the discussion of any of these civil liberties issues in the bizarre 2012 Republican presidential primary campaign (other than by libertarian, anti-government Rep. Ron Paul of Texas), or by any of the major supporters of President Obama’s re-election? And where will this diminishment in civil liberties issue be in the general election campaign? Nowhere, you can bet, given that the incumbent president will be defending, even bragging about many of the civil liberties abuses during his term (e.g., targeted assassinations), if anyone even brings them up. Meanwhile, his Republican opponent Mitt Romney will proclaim Obama as not bellicose enough toward unfriendly countries or insurgent groups and not tough enough in limiting our civil liberties in the name of security. There are, of course, presidential candidates who raise these issues all the time: former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, the nominee of the Justice Party, and Jill Stein, likely nominee of the Green Party, but you are unlikely to see either of them in the presidential debates or quoted or pictured in the major news media because they are those dirty words in officially-sanctioned U.S. politics: “third-party candidates.” If it’s not said by the Republican or Democratic presidential candidates, then it’s not an issue as far as most of the mainstream press is concerned. 

In the print press, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage can no doubt be counted on in election coverage to compare the civil liberties views and policies of Obama and Romney, just as he comprehensively compared the views of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in 2008 when he was with the Boston Globe. It would be instructive for him to include the views of third-party candidates so readers could see what we have lost in the area of civil liberties in the last decade. And the Times editorial page can generally be counted on for hard-hitting defenses of the Bill of Rights, regardless of which political party is in power.

For example, a recent, excellent Times editorial denounced the long-delayed decision by Pentagon prosecutors to finally, officially charge Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men with war crimes for planning the 9/11 atrocities and to try them before “a constitutionally flawed military tribunal that will be convened at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, a global symbol of human rights abuses.” 

The editorial rightly criticized the nine-year – yes, nine-year – time period the defendants have been held without trial, as well as their being subjected to “brutal and illegal interrogations,” one of the polite euphemisms much of the U.S. media uses to describe the unmentionable word torture which, as we know, only occurs elsewhere and not in our country. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month alone, the editorial noted. Sounding a theme similar to that offered by Jonathan Turley, the editorial quoted an ACLU official to the effect that “after years of being subjected to treatment designed to destroy prisoners physically and psychologically...how confident can we be that the statement is untainted by torture? Imagine that another country – Iran, say, or North Korea – proposed as much. Would we buy it?” The editorial concluded that even the best-managed trial in a military tribunal “will not be able to change the fact that this country has in the last decade accepted too many damaging and unnecessary changes to its fundamental principles of justice and human rights.”

From what is still the nation’s most influential news outlet and, arguably, the nation’s best newspaper, this otherwise excellent editorial offers the rather tepid conclusion that a lot of disturbing things have happened that this country has “accepted,” but falls well short of saying what this means for the present and future of our democracy. It should be willing to say that this, folks, is truly a crisis and we had all better wake up, especially the press, to the fact that the very heart of our democracy is under siege.

As for the broadcast media, where is the network documentary about this rollback of civil liberties, a la the Edward R. Murrow expose of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s assault on democracy back in the 1950s? Don’t hold your breath.

Regarding Congress, why have there been no congressional hearings on the government’s assault on civil liberties and what this means for our democracy, in the mold of the Senate Select Committee on intelligence abuses of 1975-1976, under the leadership of Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho)? The panel, referred to as the Church Committee, investigated threats to democracy posed by the widespread illegal intelligence operations of the FBI, CIA, IRS and NSA at home and abroad that targeted the great social movements of the time for civil rights and against the Vietnam war.  

In a further sign of our nation’s downhill trajectory, most of what Church and other civil libertarians of the time denounced as dangers to our democracy are today praised or taken for granted by our national leaders and many mainstream media commentators as the normal state of affairs, necessary to protect against every person everywhere who might harbor an intent to do the United States and its people wrong. Would this current crop of congressional go-alongers and demagogic alarmists even have considered impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon for his crimes? Look forward, not backward, to quote a famous, recent Nobel Peace Prize-winner.

Likewise, couldn’t the press ask why have there been no congressional hearings on all of our post-9/11 overt and covert wars comparable to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings of the 1960s, under chairman Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR), into the conduct of the Vietnam War? (Perhaps politicians of this current era draw their own survival lessons from the congressional opposition to the Vietnam war, when various Democratic senators – first, notably, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, and later Fulbright and others – were willing to vigorously take on the war policies of a president of their own party, the next election and blind party loyalty be damned. Their defeats in subsequent elections were attributable to one degree or another to their outspoken positions on the war.)

Why are both Republican and Democratic leaders so supportive – or silent and incurious – or cowardly – about our use of drone warfare? About civilian casualties? About how our actions are creating more terrorists? About how our war in Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, created several million refugees and generally devastated that country? About how our war in Afghanistan has likewise devastated that country? Shouldn’t editorial writers and op-ed columnists be demanding an accounting of what our war on terror has reaped and where in the world (literally) our leaders think it is going?

And why are most Republicans, who otherwise portray Obama as an arch-fiend on domestic issues and who claim to see dangerous socialism and threats to liberty in even the mildest, albeit pro-corporate healthcare plan, so willing to acquiesce in what are true threats to the Bill of Rights? Namely, those actions that have been unleashed by the Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations in the name of a type of homeland security that spreads fear among the populace and rips up the Constitution in order to keep us all safe by waging a war without end against terrorists everywhere? Why do Republicans incredibly and callously see health and safety regulations, clear air and clean water, as threats to corporate rights and to our inalienable right to be poisoned in the name of the free market, but yet would seem to favor having a future president who they hope would be even more belligerent and invasive of individual privacy than Bush or Obama – as witness the GOP’s nasty and anti-democratic wars against immigrants, minorities and women? 

Finally, let the press explore the question: Have we become to a troubling degree exactly what we as a nation professed to abhor a little more than a decade ago? Thrown into the scrap heap many of the precious liberties we claimed to be defending in the war on terrorists everywhere? Become a nation of ‘fraidy-cats, more concerned with the myth of total security than with the human rights of the people whose nations we occupy and bomb, as well as our own?

While Democratic and Republican leaders continue to mouth the cliché about the world envying us our liberties, the reality no longer matches the nice little fairy tale we tell ourselves. President George W. Bush famously said that the terrorists “hate our freedoms.” Thanks to his actions and that of his successor in our government’s never-ending bomb-and occupy response to the 9/11 atrocities, we have fewer freedoms for them to hate us for today.

No Crops Without Plowing Up The Ground

This is the point at which I should be suggesting ways to halt this catastrophic slide into ever-more dangerous territory. Perhaps the words of a slaveholding Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, and a former slave and statesman Frederick Douglass would help. 

Jefferson stated: "Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories." And: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." 

As if predicting our current situation, Douglass said: "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them." In his most famous quote, Douglass gave his tough prescription for social change: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." And then, specifically, what to do: "Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground."

Elections alone won't win back our civil liberties, as we have seen. Had Obama supporters spent much of the last four years holding the president's feet to the fire on issues pertaining to war and peace and civil liberties (as Progressive Democrats of America, seemingly alone among Democratic groups, does) – rather than focusing on the next congressional or presidential election – they might have pushed Obama and the Democrats into a progressive position on civil liberties and our wars, and on our worldwide military presence and our bloated military budget. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, those constituencies that did aggressively pressure Obama – namely on the issues of undocumented migrants and gay marriage – were successful in getting him to act favorably on their behalf. The press, once seen by the founders as a bulwark of liberty and essential to keeping the public well-informed about matters of civic importance, needs to be pressured, too, to call for a return of our full Bill of Rights and to show it is more than repeaters of statements and leaks about the dangers of terrorism that come out of the White House, or Congress, or the Pentagon or the intelligence community. 

What likely is most needed is a super-version of Occupy Wall Street, with the kind of persistent and disruptive street agitation that is vital to any campaign to restore the Bill of Rights. Whether this would come about is problematic. Nevertheless, without lobbying, without an informed populace, without street pressure, there will only be one direction for civil liberties in the current climate – and that is down. It is time, in Jefferson's words, to educate. And it is way past time, in Douglass' words, to plow up some ground.

John Hanrahan is a former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism and reporter for The Washington Post, The Washington Star, UPI, and other news organizations. He is now on special assignment for Nieman Watchdog.

Anti-Tyranny Quotes For These Times

Compiled by Gary G. Kohls, MD

“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.” -- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

"The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice." -- Mohandas Gandhi

"You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul." -- Gandhi

"Cowardice asks the question - is it safe? Expediency asks the question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question - is it popular? But conscience asks the question - is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

”In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.“ -- George Orwell

“If you see injustice and say nothing, you have taken the side of the oppressor."­ -- Desmund Tutu,.South African Anglican Archbishop

“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses … the (actual) truth will seem utterly preposterous and the speaker (of the actual truth), a raving lunatic." -- Dresden James

“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.” -- Henry David Thoreau (commenting on a less virulent, pre-Luftwaffe/Royal Air Force/USAF/NASA time in history, when the warmongering militarists [and the obedient warrior class], the ChickenHawk politicians [and their dumbed-down, deaf and blind voter-supporters], the war-profiteering billionaires, corporations and financiers [and the blindered, amoral investor class that hopes to become them] only ruled over the earth and the sea - and not the air)

“Those who take oaths to politically powerful secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic republic.” -- President John Quincy Adams

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." -- Voltaire

“Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.” -- Mikhail Gorbachev

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." -- James Madison, Chief Architect of the Constitution
"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes." -- Thomas Paine

“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” -- Frederick Douglass

"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." -- Thomas Jefferson, September 23, 1800, as inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial

"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong that will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." -- Thomas Paine, from his incendiary, anti-tyranny publication, Common Sense

“Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.” -- Tom Paine

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” -- Tom Paine

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" -- Edmund Burke (British Statesman and Philosopher, 1729-1797)

”A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” -- Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

“The most important topic on earth: peace. What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” -- US President John F. Kennedy, American University commencement address, Washington, 10 June 1963. (Five months later Kennedy was assassinated.)

"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder and it is the working class who fights all the battles, the working class who makes the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely sheds their blood and furnishes their corpses, and it is they who have never yet had a voice - in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their duty but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches." -- Eugene V. Debs

“War is the terrorism of the rich. Terrorism is the war of the poor!” -- Peter Ustinov

"When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock. When you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz." -- Doug Newman
[From The Fountain of Truth: http://www.thefot.us]

"There is no scientific evidence . . . " is supposed to mean, "They have looked for it and it has not been found," instead of, "They have not looked for it and, therefore, it has not been found." -- Dr. Hans Moolenburgh from: “Fluoride: The Freedom Fight” (pp. 157)

“A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.” -- Aristotle

"Military power is as corrupting to the man who possesses it as it is pitiless to its victims. Violence is just as devastating to the soul of the perpetrator as it is to the body and souls of those who are victims of it." -- American Friends (Quakers) Service Committee

Following are some anti-tyranny quotes from antifascist author George Orwell’s (1903 – 1950). Orwell is most famous for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty Four (1949), in which he is warning his readers about Fascism.
Ed. Note: It is worth mentioning that Orwell “put his money where his mouth was”. He went to Spain in 1936 and fought with America’s Lincoln Brigade against the fascist general Francisco Franco’s army in the Spanish Civil War.

”In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.“ -- George Orwell

“When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys. “ -- George Orwell - 1936

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.” -- George Orwell – 1937

“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.” -- George Orwell – 1938

“It’s frightful that people who are so ignorant have so much influence.” -- George Orwell – 1940

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” -- George Orwell – 1945 (in one of Orwell’s introductions to Animal Farm that was not published until 1970, 20 years after his death)

“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” -- George Orwell – 1946

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem invincible.” -- George Orwell – 1946

Below are Seven Quotes from Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is about a conscienceless state/corporate tyranny (whose laws are ruthlessly enforced by obedient police/military goon squads).

“WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. (the Party's slogans inscribed on the Ministry of Truth building).”

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

“War hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude toward the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave.”

“Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”

“We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

“There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.... Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duluth, MN, for Every Church A Peace Church (www.ecapc.org)

40 Years Of Growing Surveillance

By Nat Hentoff
This article appeared on The New York Times (Online) on June 13, 2012.
Courtesy Of "The CATO Institute"

The Watergate legacy of disabling opponents by wiretaps and other suspensions of the Bill of Rights has since been protected by the current administration in federal court. The attorney general, Eric Holder, opposed a history professor's attempt to secure records about the wiretap that cost Nixon his presidency.

But ceaseless advances in government privacy-invading technology have made the Nixon-era suspensions of individual constitutional liberties appear amateurish.

For an example that far exceeds the once-fearsome vision of George Orwell's 1984, the National Security Agency — with the support of President Obama, who was elected in part for pledging the most transparent administration in American history — is erecting a data tracking center in Bluffdale, Utah, that as of September 2013 will be storing and distributing to other intelligence agencies "all forms of communications, including the contents of private emails, cellphone calls and Google searches, as well as personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases." 

(Including, I'm sure, e-books, to be up to date.) In view of the Obama administration's strange definition of its transparency, I give you my source: James Bamford, a historian who, more successfully than any investigative reporter, has become familiar with the inner workings of the N.S.A.

It was Senator Frank Church of Idaho who, investigating the state of our privacy in 1975, warned that as the N.S.A. kept evolving without accountability, for Americans "there would be no place to hide."

Meanwhile, the F.B.I.'s domestic surveillance powers allow it to open a warrantless "threat assessment" against any American or organization without going to court and without any articulable evidence of imminent or actual criminal behavior.

Turning America into a society under surveillance was never remotely conceived by the Founders, however conflicted they sometimes were. Nor does it seem likely that our resemblance to Iran in this context will be an issue of any consequence in the 2012 elections. The incumbent is, of course, immovable in his definition of national security as it frees him from fealty to the Constitution. Mitt Romney has so far not given any indication that he is in the least troubled by the National Security Agency. And most of the rest of us are concerned with our survival in this perilous economy.
Is this still America?

The Insects Are Watchin

The Future Of Government Surveillance Technology

Post by "Sayf Maslul"

In June of 2011, the US military admitted to having drone technology so sophisticated that it could be the size of a bug.

European Phoenix -- In what is referred to as the “microaviary” on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, drones are in development and design to replicate the flight patterns of moths, hawks and other air-borne creatures of the natural world.

Greg Parker, aerospace engineer, explains: “We’re looking at how you hide in plain sight” for the purpose of carrying out espionage or kill missions.

Cessna-sized Predator drones, used to carry out unmanned attacks, are known around the world. The US Pentagon has an estimated 7,000 aerial drones in their arsenal.

In 2011, the Pentagon requested $5 billion for drones from Congress by the year 2030.

Their investigative technology is now moving toward “spy flies” equipped with sensors and mircocameras to detect enemies and nuclear weapons.

Parker is using helicopter technology to allow his computer-driven drone “dragonflies” to become precise intelligence gathering weapons.

 

To have a computer do it 100 per cent of the time, and to do it with winds, and to do it when it doesn’t really know where the vehicle is, those are the kinds of technologies that we’re trying to develop.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has unveiled hummingbird drones that can fly at speeds of 11 miles per hour.

DARPA is also inserting computer chips into moth pupae in the hopes of hatching “cyborg moths”.

Within DARPA is the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project (HIMEM), whose aim is to develop shutterbugs – insects with cameras attached to their very nervous system that can be controlled remotely. Under HIMEM, there are researchers working on cyborg beetles.

Other institutions are hard at work for the US government, developing more insect technology.

The California Institute of Technology has created a “mircobat ornithopter” that flies and fits comfortably in the palm of your hand.

A team at Harvard University has successfully built a housefly-like robot with synthetic wings that buzz at 120 beats per second.

Back in 2007, at the International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots, Japanese researchers unveiled a radio-controlled hawk-moth.

While the US military would have the American public believe that these new “fly drones” are used for overseas missions, insect drones have been spotted surveilling streets right here in the US.

It is believed that these insect-like drones are high-tech surveillance tools used by the Department of Homeland Security.

The US government is experimenting with different types of micro-surveillance capabilities, such as cultivating insects with computer chips in them in the hopes of breeding software directly into their bodies to control flight patterns remotely.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been working on this technology since the 1970s. Known as the “inscetothopter”, it was developed by the Office of Research and Development for the CIA.

It appears to be a dragonfly; however, it contains a tiny gasoline engine to control its four wings. It was subsequently classified as a failure because it could not maintain flight against natural wind patterns.

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has created a butterfly-shaped drone that is the smallest built thus far. It can hover in mid-flight, just as a helicopter and take pictures with its 0.15 gram camera and memory card.

The “butterfly” imitates nature so well, that birds and other insects are convinced it is real and not man-made.

Via: "The European Phoenix"