I kept having this repeating dream that someone had to revise some file on the internet-- an article or something-- then, afterward, would be killed. This seemed to go on for hours. Finally, I got up out of bed and a thought dawned on me. First, was that this dream was probably primed by the movie. But then, the big realization was that Obama's decision to kill Americans extra-judicially, without justice, without judges...

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I had a dream about government ordered killing last night that's led to this article. 

Writing articles based on dreams can be dangerous. The last time I wrote an article based on a dream I got a call from the DC Capitol police that persuaded me to slightly modify the article and remove the reference to a part of my dream in which a semi-automatic-weapon-supporting member of congress was being chased by a thug with a semi-automatic weapon (I'd mentioned the congress rep's name and the Capitol police were called. Today, that might have me treated as a terrorist.)

I viewed the new movie, Bourne Legacy last night. I think that's what inspired the dream. I think I can say, without being a spoiler, that a lot of people are killed in Bourne Legacy at the behest of the US government. 

Last night, I kept having this repeating dream that someone had to revise some file on the internet-- an article or something-- then, afterward, would be killed. This seemed to go on for hours. 

Finally, I got up out of bed and a thought dawned on me. First, was that this dream was probably primed by the movie. But then, the big realization was that Obama's decision to kill Americans extra-judicially, without justice, without judges or courts, was probably based on precedent.

It's just not in Obama's DNA to decide to set a policy that it's  okay to kill people. But he went public with that policy. My dream tied together the dots  in my head that Obama had to be persuaded to set this policy. And the way he was persuaded was he was told and shown evidence that others before him had already followed this trail-- probably George W Bush 43 and Cheney, maybe even Clinton and almost certainly former CIA director George Herbert Walker Bush 41. 

George Herbert Walker Bush posing at the CIA Does anyone doubt he authorized killings?

The fact that Obama was not the first president to do it does not take away from how wrong it is. 

I think we need to get this dirty, frankly, horrible aspect of Executive power on the table. We need to go back in history and draw a line and start asking which presidents exercised this power and who they killed. I have zero doubt that Obama did it first. He did it because he wanted to look tough and maybe because he got caught. But it casts a light into a dark, stygian corner of our decaying republic, that some are under the illusion is a democracy. That dark corner needs a lot more light. 

There's a chance that a pair of psychopathic narcissistic corporatists will be in the White House and then, who knows what ways they will define threats to national security and enemies of the state. 

The other day, an Occupy protester, demonstrating in front of a bank, was charged with Terroristic Felony.   Who knows what will qualify as a presidentially decreed "termination" if these corporatists gain access to the White House?

We are moving at an accelerating pace deeper and deeper into a police state. We don't even know how bad it is. Movies like Bourne Legacy are not wild fantasies. They are probably reasonable speculations of the kinds of things that NSA, CIA, Homeland Security, FBI and all the fusion centers and even local law enforcement orgs, engorged with Homeland Security funding, are already doing. 

My nightmare, that people are pushed to change records and then killed is minor league compared to reality. I have no doubts about that. As a website owner, I approach problems with the website with a philosophy that drives my webmaster crazy. I believe that for every bug or problem on the site that a user reports, there are 10 or 100 users who have faced the bug without reporting it. I take every bug very seriously. 

When it comes to presidential assassinations, I think it's reasonable to make a similar assumption. For every one we know about there are ten or 100 that we are never told about, maybe a thousand. 

Rachel Maddow has written, in her brilliant book, Drift, about how the military industrial, security complex is out of control. We must take heroic actions to get it, including its commander in chief, back under the control of we-the-people. Power, once attained, fights fiercely to hold on to that power, even power attained through the pseudo-meritocracy, as Chris Hayes brilliantly writes about in his book, Twilight of the Elites.  

We will not be able to ask nicely for our power back, or for the military or the intelligence agencies or the Executive branch's power to be given up. We will have to take strong, powerful actions. We will have to use all the resources that we the people have to take away the powers that have been accumulated so pathologically. And we do have  powers. We still have the internet, thought they're trying hard to take it away from us. We still have the first amendment-- freedom of speech, press and assembly. But, with electronic surveillance, we've lost the heart of the 4th amendment-- freedom from unreasonable search. 

It could be that the US is too far down the police state road to turn back, as it may be with global warming. But the first step to fixing and then changing something for the better is to be aware of, to diagnose the full extent and the etiology of the problem. Realizing that killing Americans and foreigners has been US policy and presidential policy for years, probably scores of years, is a beginning. Maybe I'm naive and it's just me that figured this out. Or maybe this has been taken for granted. It's time for that to change. It's time to start systematically taking away powers that Presidents and security agencies have grabbed. 

Do you think Obama was the first to order assassinations?

How far back to you think this policy has gone? Twenty years? Two thousand years?

Submitters Bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind.  Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives  one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big)  to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project. 

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Over 200 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Rob is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article. For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V..  and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years. Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript. . 

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook. His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.