Another victim was Dr. Rafil Dhafir, a Muslim American of Iraqi descent and practicing oncologist until his license was suspended. He was convicted in a shameless kangaroo court trial of 59 of 60 trumped up charges of violating the Iraqi Sanctions Regulations (IEEPA) for using his own funds and what he could raise through his Help the Needy charity to bring desperately needed essential to life humanitarian aid to Iraqis under sanctions. He's now serving a 22 year sentence in a special Terre Haute, IN "Communications Management Unit" (CMU) for Muslims and Arabs for his "crime of compassion" (see dhafirtrial.net, Katherine Hughes) where he, like Sami Al-Arian, is a Bush administration "trophy" prisoner in the "war on terrorism."
Undocumented Latino immigrants have also been targeted with ICE shock troops mandated to do it. The agency was established in March, 2003 as the largest DHS investigative and enforcement arm and charged with protecting the public safety by identifying and targeting "criminal" and "terrorist" threats to the country. In most cases, they're innocent victims of NAFTA and globalized trade coming north to survive. ICE heads them off at the border, hunts them down ruthlessly once they're here, and boasts how well their multi-billion dollar budget lets them conduct a reign of terror against vulnerable people.
Workplace assaults continue, and on October 3, ICE said it swept up and deported (or will deport) more than 1300 "criminal aliens, immigrations fugitives, and immigration violators" in the "largest-ever" operation of its kind in the Los Angeles area. Most were Mexican nationals, but some were from 30 other countries, and ICE called them "immigration violators." They're Bush administration targets in its "war on terrorism" that soon may come for us.
Police State America Preparations
Today, dissent is an endangered species, and preparations are underway for mass detentions in the "war on terrorism" targeting anyone seen as a threat. Halliburton is the beneficiary with a DHS contingency contract worth nearly $400 million to build US-based camps for "detention and processing" in case of an "emergency influx of immigrants....or to support the rapid development of new programs (for planned) expansion facilities (for anyone with capacity for 5000 or more persons)."
This language is cover for planned US-based concentration camps for anyone labeled an enemy of the state or threat to "national security." The plan is clear - to have facilities in place if martial law is declared with plenty of reasons to fear it's coming. Why else these camps and why all the repressive laws, EOs, NSPDs, and HSPDs put in place if they weren't for a purpose.
The Pentagon is also ready with a DOD action plan called "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support." It envisions an "active, layered defense" both within and outside the country that pledges to "transform US military forces to execute homeland defense missions in the....US homeland." It lays out a strategy for increased reconnaissance and surveillance to "defeat potential challengers before they threaten the United States." It also "maximizes threat awareness and seizes the initiative from those who would harm us."
These are ominous developments that suggest a likely real or contrived homeland terror attack severe enough to warrant suspending the Constitution and declaring martial law with the public acquiescing out of fear. If it comes, anyone may be targeted as a "national security" threat, indefinitely detained in a camp, and no evidence is needed for proof. The state and military will be empowered by law to act preventively through mass roundups and detentions that appears the reason for three test-run FALCON operations.
Full-scale militarization of the country is already lawful under the 1988 Reagan administration's "national security emergency" EO 12656. It was meant for "Any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States." "Police state America" has been in the works a long time, and it now may be near the boiling point.
The Role of Blackwater USA in Police State America
Most people know about Blackwater but not how it operates. We better learn because it's coming to a neighborhood near you, and that means trouble. Author Jeremy Scahill wrote the book on the company he calls "the world's most powerful mercenary army" and describes it as a "shadowy mercenary company (employing) some of the most feared professional killers in the world accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences (and) largely off the congressional radar." It has friends in high places who give it "remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus" with unaccountable license to practice street violence with impunity to include cold-blooded murder wherever their paramilitaries are deployed.
For now, that's mostly abroad, and controversy surfaced about the company after its mercenaries killed two dozen or more Iraqis and wounded dozens more in al-Nisour on September 16. It was the latest incident involving a company with a disturbing history of unprovoked violence and then claiming self-defense. Blackwater is contracted to provide security services for US diplomats, officials and others that once was assigned to the military at one-sixth or less what the company charges under an administration that believes anything government can do private business does better, so let it whatever the cost.
Using Blackwater and other paramilitaries is part of the scheme to militarize America, and New Orleans is its first test case. Scahill wrote that "about 150 heavily armed Blackwater troops dressed in full battle gear" arrived in the Crescent City right after Katrina hit and spread out into the city's chaos. Others came later. Their cover was to provide hurricane relief, but that was a ruse as local residents still around in the wrong places soon discovered. They patrolled like Gestapo in SUVs with tinted windows and their logo on the back. Others used unmarked cars with no license plates, and relief wasn't their mandate. They came to secure neighborhoods from their legal residents and treat those wanting to return like criminals. They wore flak jackets, carried automatic weapons and had extra guns strapped to their legs. They weren't for show.
Instead of helping hurricane victims, they came as vigilantes to terrorize them and be empowered by federal, state and local authorities to do it. Blackwater USA is the face of paramilitarism on US streets as the "war on terrorism" comes to a neighborhood near you with New Orleans the first test case to see if the company can operate here the way it does in Iraq and get away with it. It's doing it.
More than two years after Katrina, New Orleans is still a disaster zone, and many thousands of its residents are still without homes. Instead of helping them rebuild and restore their lives, federal funds instead go to private mercenaries to protect the privileged from desperate people needing help. Blackwater is another element in place in "police state America" where the streets of Boston, Boise or Buffalo may one day resemble Baghdad and bring the "war on terror" to the homeland with chilling implications of what that means.
I am a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.
What a stupid comment on the first page regarding the misinformation that no Pope has condemned the war in Iraq. All the author had to do was google Popes + Iraq War and find all sorts of condemnations by Pope Paul II and Benedict XVI of the war. What the article should have stated is that our MSM has not reported on these condemnations because they certainly undermined what the Bushies wanted to do.
Other than that, probably a good article.
by
Shirley Bianchi (10 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 95 comments)
on Monday, December 17, 2007 at 12:12:59 PM
one sour apple will not spoil the complete bushel. Comments Popes have made can be taken either way. Popes are also known to contradict themselves with their public statements. I haven't read all ten pages of your article. Once I have, I shall add yet another response.
curtis
by
Tony Forest (6 articles, 15 quicklinks, 155 diaries, 1358 comments)
on Monday, December 17, 2007 at 2:55:04 PM
In other words, you didn't read the article, but merely saw
the 1st-page comment about "Popes." Do you really think it's fair to use the word "stupid" in connection with this article, based on your shallow (probably non-existent) acquaintance with it?
You picked on what is at worst a trivial defect, in an otherwise high-quality & thorough review of an immensely important subject. Meanwhile, you don't have a single word to say about the article's main thrust. // There's a large gap between the quality of the article, & the quality of your petty criticism of it.
by
Richard Mynick (2 articles, 3 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 1170 comments)
on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 at 1:11:01 PM
This is the most comprehensive review and summary of all of the preconditions already placed for dictatorial rule and the suspension of civil rights in the United States. Typically, the first comment nitpicks a minor, though important, mistake, that is irrelevant to the body of the work. This is one I will print and reference again and again, and I thank the author for the hard work he put into it.
I might note, additionally, that many of the rights lost, and structures built, actually occurred long before Bush II, during another unending war on drugs. In that war, random stops without cause and vehicle searchs without cause became legal, excessive and no bail became constitutional, anonymous and confidential sources became sufficient cause to obtain a search warrant for a dwelling, paid state witnesses became common, perjury by police became more common than not, local police became militarized in SWAT units, and joint federal/state investigations ended the long held tensions between the two.
by
W.M.L. (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 332 comments)
on Monday, December 17, 2007 at 4:19:16 PM
for your excellent article Mr. Lendman. I found your article to be the best compilation of all these issues I have yet read. I will pass it on to all I know because it lays everything out very clearly.
btw, Shirley's harshness in the first post was uncalled for and rather telling.
m.
by
richard (0 articles, 5 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 789 comments)
on Monday, December 17, 2007 at 6:50:07 PM
Police State America ---- the domestic half of Vichy Empire
Yes, Stephen Lendman’s article provides a very comprehensive review focusing on the domestic tyranny and police state which has arisen in parallel with the current and future imperialist wars in Iraq and the Middle East.
The author’s previous book, “The Iraq Quagmire: The Price of Imperial Arrogance” focused more on the dangers of arrogant empire in terms of foreign imperialist wars, while this article focuses more on the domestic tyranny and police state also common to the very same pathology of empire.
Lendman’s analysis of both foreign wars and domestic tyranny at the hands of empire certainly bespeaks his own intelligent assessment of the real danger in which we find ourselves, and also comports with the insightful views of many progressive and humanitarian leaders and with the increasing number of active participants on Op-Ed (and other anti-war, anti-tyranny, and pro-human rights sites and movements).
However, what really caught my attention in Lendman’s piece was his reference to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams’ very public and very blunt statement that, the US is 'worst' imperialist’ and wields its power more reprehensibly than the British Empire ever did.Which is saying quite a bit ---- but which I fully subscribe to also.
But the real question that came to my mind from this dramatic statement (which I had not previously seen), and, in fact, the question that always comes to my mind when reading Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Harold Pinter, David Harvey, David Korten, Gabriel Kolko, Justin Raimondo, Michael Hardt and hundreds of other well informed progressive intellectuals and thousands of articles and authors here on Op-Ed, is just this:Why is this ‘worst imperialist’ empire, which wrecks foreign wars, domestic tyranny, and economic oppression not universally recognized as such an awful and clearly un-democratic empire?
If a ‘Brit’ like the Archbishop of Canterbury sees this as imperialism worse than the British Empire, then why doesn’t everybody see this danger as empire?
Or to put it another way, how can the laughable veneer or façade of a supposedly progressive democracy be conflated with what is so clearly the behavior of an empire worse than the British Empire?Is it merely that America is not called an empire by the MSM?
Hannah Arendt presciently warned that, “Empire abroad (always) entails tyranny at home”, and yet the tyranny and police state that Lendman describes here, as well as the imperialist wars that his book describes are precisely the twin symptoms of empire.So why is America not easily recognized by the majority of the citizens as acting like an empire?Why is it not openly recognized and described as an empire?
My belief comes back to a more guileful style of empire than ‘Brits’ or Germans, or Russians, or anyone historically caught in the belly of an empire ever saw.I fully believe that, except for the insightful minority who see through the fog, the very modern, new style of guileful empire (one might say neo-empire) that infects our country is a nearly invisible virus or pathology, which maintains the outward appearance and image of a normal nation-state, and yet takes over the entire body politic.
Similarly to the Nazi Empire that breached the Maginot Line and took over the French Republic, this neo-empire of global corporatism, through stealth instead of Panzers, breached the defenses of the old American Republic.But instead of setting up a thinly veiled ‘Vichy French’ government to front for the empire, it has set up a much more guileful, harder to comprehend, and infinitely more sophisticated two-party ‘Vichy America’ ---- which is not just one phony party installed as the government, but the entire two-party structure of government, plus a ‘vichy press’, and all the appearances of a civil and economic society infrastructure imposed over the rough glove of empire.
Many, like Lendman, see through the façade of normalcy and clearly comprehend the dangers of empire in both foreign wars of imperialism and domestic tyranny and police-state tactics.But we are faced with the need for some cleaning solution to ‘clear the windshields’ of most Americans, so that they can see the road they are driving down before it is too late.We are currently on the ‘yellow brick road of empire’ in this land of Oz and the mainstream media is no more helpful than the Cheshire Cat in getting us back to reality.We are living in a surreal corporatist empire’s movie only imitating normal democracy titled ‘Vichy America’, and we have to regain our bearings and our country before it becomes “Apocalypse Now”.
by
Alan MacDonald (10 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 51 comments)
on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 at 3:35:16 PM
WHEN THE DRUM BEAT IN CONGRESS GET LOURDER ON "GUN CONTROL" THIS WILL BE THE TURNIND POINT TO DECTATORSHIP. AMERICAN PUBLIC IS THE MOST ARMED IN THE WORLD, AND THIS IS A BIG PROBLEM FOR NEOCONS AND GLOBALIST, BELEIVE ME THEY WANT YOUR GUNS.
A LITTLE HISTORY
IN 1929 THE SOVIET UNION ESTABLISTED GUN CONTROL. FROM 1929 ABOUT 20 MILLION DISSIDENTS, UNABLE TO DEFEND THEMSELVES, WERE ROUNDED UP AND EXTERMINATED.
IN 1911 TURKEY ESTABLISHED GUN CONTROL. FROM 1915 TO 1917, 1.5 MILLION ARMENIANS, UNABLE TO DEFEND THEMSELVES WERE ROUYNDED UP AN EXTERMINATED.
AND WE ALL KNOW WHAT HITLER DID WITH GUN CONTROL. I KNOW THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE WHO THINK GUNS KILL PEOPLE, BUT THE FACT PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE. AND IF OUR GOVERNMENT TAKES OUR GUNS, THE ONLY PEOPLE WITH GUNS WILL BE THE CRIMINALS AND OUR GOVERNMENT. AND WE KNOW THAT THE POLICE ONLY ARIVE AFTER THE FACT, AND REALLY DON'T STOP CRIME.
by
RICHARD SHADE (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 460 comments)
on Wednesday, December 19, 2007 at 9:53:40 AM
And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. 2 Corinthians 11:14
Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake. Matthew 24:9
The unbearable situation of the poor under oppressive national orders is reinforced by an unjust international order President Bush's new world order is coming on the heels of a decade that witnessed the largest transfer of wealth from the third-world poor to the developed-country rich in human history. The recent massive drain of wealth from the South to the North is reminiscent of the colonial conquest. In 1989 alone, third world peoples sent $52 billion more in debt payments to developed countries in the North than their nations received in new credits.
by
countsueulaw@hotmail.com (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments)
on Friday, December 21, 2007 at 6:47:38 AM
looks like we have the stage set for the anti christ
I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." - Thomas Jefferson
It is perfectly possible for a man to b out of prison, and yet not b free-to b under no physical constraint and yet to b a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private insterest within the nation, wants him to think feel and act...the nature of the psychological compulsion is that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to b free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective -Aldous Huxley(Brave New World Revisited)
"The U.S. record of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders, no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable for criminal actions... Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion." Carl Boggs
"We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an autocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity ... a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now." Sam Smith Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - John Perkins
"Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike." William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice
by
countsueulaw@hotmail.com (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments)
on Friday, December 21, 2007 at 7:04:22 AM
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