This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
From Ray McGovern Website
Gerry Condon, President of Veterans For Peace, was bloodied and 'taken to ground,' for trying to get food to people inside the occupied Venezuelan embassy.
(Image by Twitter.) Details DMCA
I just got word that Gerry Condon, President of Veterans For Peace, was bloodied and "taken to ground," as they like to say, for trying to get food to people inside the occupied Venezuelan embassy this evening. See here.
This link should take you directly to a photo of Gerry Condon on the sidewalk after the attack.
We are at the point Edward Snowden described as "turnkey tyranny." Last night the key was turned a bit more, but at least until now it has been an almost imperceptibly gradual process, like the proverbial frog in the pan, as the water starts to boil. And, of course, this has happened before.
What follows is taken from "Creeping Fascism: History's Lessons," which I posted on December 27, 2007: [See here.]
"There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater. ... Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later..."
The above are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as "Geschichte eines Deutschen" (The Story of a German).
The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages -- in English as "Defying Hitler."
I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner's birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and e-mailed to ask me to "write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush's America... This is almost unbelievable." [Emphasis added.]
More about Haffner below. Let's set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on here in the U.S. [in late 2007] that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how "odd" it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such "calm, superior indifference." Reflect on the key role played by the media.
Collect on Everyone
After suppressing for two and a half years the explosive story of the Bush/Cheney surveillance of Americans in gross violation of the Fourth Amendment, top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Not to mention the U.S. Constitution.
The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004, and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information. In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen's book, "State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," revealing the warrant-less eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer.
It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen's book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs's trademark criterion: All The News That's Fit To Print.
(The Times' own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper's explanation for the long delay in publishing this story "woefully inadequate.")
When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times. The truth would out; part of it, at least...
What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article exposing the Fourth-Amendment-trashing program, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense.
Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Judiciary Committee.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
11
9
6
