Showing posts with label
crimes against the Constitution.
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Showing posts with label
crimes against the Constitution.
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How America Was Lost — Paul Craig Roberts
November 7, 2013 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
How America Was Lost
Paul Craig Roberts
“No legal issue arises when the United States responds to a
challenge to its power, position, and prestige.” Dean Acheson , 1962,
speaking to the American Society of International Law.
Dean Acheson declared 51 years ago that power, position, and prestige
are the ingredients of national security and that national security
trumps law. In the United States democracy takes a back seat to
“national security,” a prerogative of the executive branch of
government.
National security is where the executive branch hides its crimes
against law, both domestic and international, its crimes against the
Constitution, its crimes against innocent citizens both at home and
abroad, and its secret agendas that it knows that the American public
would never support.
“National security” is the cloak that the executive branch uses to make certain that the US government is unaccountable.
Without accountable government there is no civil liberty and no
democracy except for the sham voting that existed in the Soviet Union
and now exists in the US.
There have been periods in US history, such as President Lincoln’s
war to prevent secession, World War I, and World War II, when
accountable government was impaired. These were short episodes of the
Constitution’s violation, and the Constitution was reinstated in the
aftermath of the wars. However, since the Clinton regime, the
accountability of government has been declining for more than two
decades, longer than the three wars combined.
In law there is the concept of adverse possession, popularly known as
“squatters’ rights.” A non-owner who succeeds in occupying a piece of
property or some one else’s right for a certain time without being
evicted enjoys the ownership title conveyed to him. The reasoning is
that by not defending his rights, the owner showed his disinterest and
in effect gave his rights away.
Americans have not defended their rights conveyed by the US
Constitution for the duration of the terms of three presidents. The
Clinton regime was not held accountable for its illegal attack on
Serbia. The Bush regime was not held accountable for its illegal
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama regime was not held
accountable for its renewed attack on Afghanistan and its illegal
attacks on Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen, and by its proxies on Syria.
We also have other strictly illegal and unconstitutional acts of
government for which the government has not been held accountable. The
Bush regimes’ acts of torture, indefinite detention, and warrantless
spying, and the Obama regime’s acts of indefinite detention, warrantless
spying, and murder of US citizens without due process. As the Obama
regime lies through its teeth, we have no way of knowing whether torture
is still practiced.
If these numerous criminal acts of the US government spread over the
terms of three presidents pass into history as unchallenged events, the
US government will have acquired squatters’ rights in lawlessness. The
US Constitution will be, as President George W. Bush is reported to have
declared, “a scrap of paper.”
Lawlessness is the hallmark of tyranny enforced by the police state.
In a police state law is not a protector of rights but a weapon in the
hands of government. [see Roberts & Stratton, The Tyranny of Good
Intentions] The accused has no recourse to the accusation, which does
not require evidence presented to a court. The accused is guilty by
accusation alone and can be shot in the back of the head, as under
Stalin, or blown up by a drone missile, as under Obama.
As a person aware of the long struggle against the tyrannical state, I
have been amazed and disheartened by the acceptance not only by the
insouciant American public, but also by law schools, bar associations,
media, Congress and the Supreme Court of the executive branch’s claim to
be above both law and the US Constitution.
As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book about how the law was
lost, liberals and conservatives chasing after their favorite devils,
such as child abusers and drug pushers, and prosecutors, judges, and
police devoted to conviction and not to justice, have gradually eroded
over time the concept of law as a protection of the innocent. With the
atmosphere of threat created by 9/11, the final destruction of the
protective features of law was quickly achieved in the name of making us
safe from terrorists.
The fact that we are no longer safe from our own government did not register.
This is how liberty was lost, and America with it.
Can liberty be regained? Probably not, but there is a chance if
Americans have the necessary strength of character. The chance comes
from the now known fact that the neoconservative Bush/Cheney regime took
America and its puppet states to war in Afghanistan and Iraq entirely
on the basis of lies. As all evidence proves, these wars were not the
results of mistaken intelligence. They were the products of intentional
lies.
The weapons inspectors told the Bush regime that there were no
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Despite this known fact, the Bush
regime sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN with fabricated
evidence to convince the world that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass
destruction” and was a threat to the world. Even if such weapons had
existed in Iraq, many countries have them, including the US and Israel,
and the presence of weapons does not under the Nuremberg Laws justify
unprovoked aggression against the possessor. Under the Nuremberg Laws,
unprovoked military aggression is a war crime, not the possession of
weapons that many countries have. The war crime was committed by the US
and its “coalition of the willing,” not by Saddam Hussein.
As for the invasion of Afghanistan, we know from the last video of
Osama bin Laden in October 2001, attested by experts to be the last
appearance of a man dying of renal failure and other diseases, that he
declared that he had no responsibility for 9/11 and that Americans
should look to their own government. We know as a reported fact that
the Afghan Taliban offered to turn over Osama bin Laden to Washington if
the Bush regime would provide the evidence that indicated bin Laden was
responsible. The Bush regime refused to hand over the (non-existent)
evidence and, with support of the corrupt and cowardly Congress and the
presstitute media, attacked Afghanistan without any legal justification.
Remember, the FBI has stated publicly that it has no evidence that
Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 and that that is why the crimes
for which the FBI wanted bin Laden did not include responsibility for
the 9/11 attack.
The war propaganda campaign was well prepared. Yellow ribbon decals
were handed out for cars proclaiming “support the troops.” In other
words, anyone who raises the obvious questions is not supporting the
troops. Still today insouciant Americans sport these decals on their
cars unaware that what they are supporting are the murder of foreign
women, children and village elders, the death and physical and mental
maiming of American soldiers, and the worldwide destruction of the
reputation of the United States, with America’s main rival, China, now
calling for a “de-Americanized world.”
A country with a population as insouciant as Americans is a country in which the government can do as it pleases.
Now that we have complete proof that the criminal Bush regime took
our country to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq solely on the basis of
intentional lies, how can the legal institutions, the courts, the
American people possibly tolerate the Obama regime’s ignoring of the
obvious crimes? How can America simply accept Obama’s statement that we
mustn’t look back, only move ahead? If the US government, which has
committed the worst crimes of our generation, cannot be held accountable
and punished, how can federal, state, and local courts fill up American
prisons with people who smoked pot and with people who did not
sufficiently grovel before the police state.
Doubtless, the Obama regime, should it obey the law and prosecute the
Bush regime’s crimes, would have to worry about being prosecuted for
its own crimes, which are just as terrible. Nevertheless, I believe that
the Obama regime could survive if it put all the blame on the Bush
regime, prosecuted the Bush criminals, and desisted from the illegal
actions that it currently supports. This would save the Constitution
and US civil liberty, but it would require the White House to take the
risk that by enforcing US law, US law might be enforced against its own
illegal and unconstitutional acts by a succeeding regime.
The Bush/Cheney/John Yoo neoconservative regime having got rid of US
law, no doubt the Obama regime thinks it is best to leave the situation
as it is, rid of law.
Without accountability, America is finished. Not only will Americans
live in a police state with no civil liberties, but the rest of the
world is already looking at America with a jaundiced eye. The US is
being reconstituted as an authoritarian state. All it takes is one
failure of accountability for the police state to become entrenched, and
we have had numerous failures of accountability. Does anyone really
believe that some future government is going to make restitution to
persecuted truth-tellers, such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and
Edward Snowdon, as was done for Japanese Americans?
Now that we know for a certain fact that the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq were based on propaganda and lies, Congress and the world
media should demand to know what was the real secret agenda. What are
the real reasons for which Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded?
No truthful explanation for these wars exists.
Paul O’Neill, the Bush regime’s first Treasury Secretary, is on
public record stating that at the very first cabinet meeting, long prior
to 9/11, the agenda was a US attack on Iraq.
In other words, the Bush regime’s attack on Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.
What was the Bush regime’s secret agenda, kept secret by the Obama
regime, that required an illegal, war criminal, attack on a sovereign
country, an action for which officials of Hitler’s government were
executed? What is the real purpose of Washington’s wars?
It is totally and completely obvious that the wars have nothing to do
with protecting Americans from terrorism. If anything, the wars stir
up and create terrorists. The wars create hatred of America that never
previously existed. Despite this, America is free of terrorists attacks
except for the ones orchestrated by the FBI. What the fabricated
“terror threat” has done is to create a thorough-going domestic police
state that is unaccountable.
Americans need to understand that they have lost their country. The
rest of the world needs to recognize that Washington is not merely the
most complete police state since Stalinism, but also a threat to the
entire world. The hubris and arrogance of Washington, combined with
Washington’s huge supply of weapons of mass destruction, make Washington
the greatest threat that has ever existed to all life on the planet.
Washington is the enemy of all humanity.
Humanity Is Drowning In Washington’s Criminality — Paul Craig Roberts
August 13, 2013 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Humanity Is Drowning In Washington’s Criminality
Paul Craig Roberts
Americans will soon be locked into an unaccountable police state unless US Representatives and Senators find the courage to ask questions and to sanction the executive branch officials who break the law, violate the Constitution, withhold information from Congress, and give false information about their crimes against law, the Constitution, the American people and those in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Guantanamo, and elsewhere. Congress needs to use the impeachment power that the Constitution provides and cease being subservient to the lawless executive branch. The US faces no threat that justifies the lawlessness and abuse of police powers that characterize the executive branch in the 21st century.
Impeachment is the most important power of Congress. Impeachment is what protects the citizens, the Constitution, and the other branches of government from abuse by the executive branch. If the power to remove abusive executive branch officials is not used, the power ceases to exist. An unused power is like a dead letter law. Its authority disappears. By acquiescing to executive branch lawlessness, Congress has allowed the executive branch to place itself above law and to escape accountability for its violations of law and the Constitution.
National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper blatantly lied to Congress and remains in office. Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, has also misled Congress, and he remains in office. Attorney General Holder avoids telling Congress the truth on just about every subject, and he also remains in office. The same can be said for President Obama, one of the great deceivers of our time, who is so adverse to truth that truth seldom finds its way out of his mouth.
If an American citizen lies to a federal investigator, even if not under oath, the citizen can be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison. Yet, these same federal personnel can lie to Congress and to citizens with impunity. Whatever the American political system is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with accountable government. In Amerika no one is accountable but citizens, who are accountable not only to law but also to unaccountable charges for which no evidence is required.
Congress has the power to impeach any presidential appointee as well as the president. In the 1970s Congress was going to impeach President Richard Nixon simply because he lied about when he learned of the Watergate burglary. To avoid impeachment, Nixon resigned. In the 1990s, the House impeached President Bill Clinton for lying about his sexual affair with a White House intern. The Senate failed to convict, no doubt as many had sexual affairs of their own and didn’t want to be held accountable themselves.
In the 1970s when I was on the Senate staff, corporate lobbyists would send attractive women to seduce Senators so that the interest groups could blackmail the Senators to do their bidding. Don’t be surprised if the NSA has adopted this corporate practice.
The improprieties of Nixon and Clinton were minor, indeed of little consequence, when compared to the crimes of George W. Bush and Obama, their vice presidents, and the bulk of their presidential appointees. Yet, impeachment is “off the table,” as Nancy Pelosi infamously declared. http://www.nytimes.com/cq/2006/11/08/cq_1916.html Why do Californian voters send a person to Congress who refuses to protect them from an unaccountable executive branch? Who does Nancy Pelosi serve? Certainly not the people of California. Most certainly not the US Constitution. Pelosi is in total violation of her oath of office. Will Californians re-elect her yet again? Little wonder America is failing.
The question demanding to be asked is: What is the purpose of the domestic surveillance of all Americans? This is surveillance out of all proportion to the alleged terrorist threat. The US Constitution is being ignored and domestic law violated. Why? Does the US government have an undeclared agenda for which the “terrorist threat” is a cover?
What is this agenda? Whose agenda is more important than the US Constitution and the accountability of government to law? No citizen is secure unless government is accountable to the Constitution and to law. It is an absurd idea that any American is more threatened by terrorism than by unaccountable government that can execute them, torture them, and throw them in prison for life without due process or any accountability whatsoever. Under Bush/Obama, the US has returned to the unaccountable power of caesars, czars, and autocrats.
In the famous play, “A Man For All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England, asks: So, you would have me to cut down the law in order to chase after devils? And what will we do, with the law cut down, when the devil turns on us?
This is the most important legal question ever asked, and it is seldom asked today, not in our law schools, not by our bar associations, and most certainly not by the Justice (sic) Department or US Attorneys.
American conservatives regard civil liberties as mere excuses for liberal judges to coddle criminals and terrorists. Never expect a conservative Republican, or more than two or three of them, to defend your civil liberty. Republicans simply do not believe in civil liberty. Democrats cannot conceive that Obama–the first black president in office, a member of an oppressed minority–would not defend civil liberty. This combination of disinterest and denial is why the US has become a police state.
Civil liberty has few friends in government, the political parties, law schools, bar associations, or the federal judiciary. Consequently, no citizen is secure. Recently, a housewife researched online for pressure cookers looking for the best deal. Her husband was searching for a backpack. The result was that a fully armed SWAT team appeared at the door demanding to search the premises and to have questions answered. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/67864/
I am always amazed when someone says: “I haven’t done anything wrong. I have nothing to fear.” If you have nothing to fear from the government, why did the Founding Fathers put the protections in the Constitution that Bush and Obama have stripped out? Unlike the Founding Fathers who designed our government to protect the citizens, the American sheeple trust the government to their own demise.
Glenn Greenwald recently explained how the mass of data that is being accumulated on every American is being mined for any signs of non-terrorist-related criminal behavior. As such warrantless searches are illegal evidence in a criminal trial, the authorities disguise the illegal way in which the evidence is obtained in order to secure conviction based on illegally obtained evidence. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35773.htm
In other words, the use of the surveillance justified by the “war on terror” has already spread into prosecutions of ordinary criminals where it has corrupted legal safeguards and the integrity, if any, of the criminal court system, prosecutors and judges.
This is just one of the many ways in which you have much to fear, whether you think you are doing anything wrong or not. You can be framed for crimes based on inferences drawn from your Internet activity and jokes with friends on social media. Jurors made paranoid by the “terrorist threat” will convict you.
We should be very suspicious of the motive behind the universal spying on US citizens. The authorities are aware that the terrorist threat does not justify the unconstitutional and illegal spying. There have been hardly any real terrorist events in the US, which is why the FBI has to find clueless people around whom to organize an FBI orchestrated plot in order to keep the “terrorist threat” alive in the public’s mind. At last count, there have been 150 “sting operations” in which the FBI recruits people, who are out of touch with reality, to engage in a well-paid FBI designed plot. Once the dupes agree, they are arrested as terrorists and the plot revealed, always with the accompanying statement that the public was never in any danger as the FBI was in control.
When 99 percent of all terrorism is organized by the FBI, why do we need NSA spying on every communication of every American and people in the rest of the world?
Terrorism seldom comes from outside. The source almost always is the government in power. The Czarist secret police set off bombs in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. The Nazis burned down the Reichstag in order to decimate the communists and assume unaccountable power in the name of “public safety.” An alleged terrorist threat is a way of using fear to block popular objection to the exercise of arbitrary government power.
In order to be “safe from terrorists,” the US population, with few objections, has accepted the demise of their civil liberties, such as habeas corpus, which reaches back centuries to Magna Carta as a constraint on government power. How, then, are they safe from their government? Americans today are in the same position as the English prior to the Great Charter of 1215. Americans are no longer protected by law and the Constitution from government tyranny.
The reason the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution was to make citizens safe from their government. If citizens allow the government to take away the Constitution, they might be safe from foreign terrorists, but they are no longer safe from their government.
Who do you think has more power over you, foreign terrorists or “your” government?
Washington defines all resistance to its imperialism and tyranny as “terrorism.” Thus, Americans who defend the environment, who defend wildlife, who defend civil liberties and human rights, who protest Washington’s wars and robbery of the people in behalf of special interests, all become “domestic extremists,” the term Homeland Security has substituted for “terrorist.” Those who are out of step with Washington and the powerful private interests that exploit us, other peoples, and the earth for their profits and power fall into the wrong side of Bush’s black and white division of the world: “you are for us or against us.”
In the United States independent thought is on the verge of being criminalized as are constitutionally guaranteed protests and the freedom of the press. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/10/james-risen-prison-journalism-criminalised The constitutional principle of freedom of speech is being redefined as treason, as aiding an undefined enemy, and as seeking to overthrow the government by casting aspersions on its motives and revealing its secret misdeeds. The power-mad inhabitants of Washington have brought the US so close to Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia that it is no longer funny. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to see the difference.
The neoconservatives have declared that Americans are the “exceptional” and “indispensable people.” Yet, the civil liberties of Americans have declined the more “exceptional” and “indispensable” that Americans become. We are now so exceptional and indispensable that we no longer have any rights.
And neither does the rest of the world. Neoconservatism has created a new dangerous American nationalism. Neoconservatives have given Washington a monopoly on right and endowed its military aggressions with a morality that supersedes the Geneva Conventions and human rights. Washington, justified by its “exceptionalism,” has the right to attack populations in countries with which Washington is not at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen. Washington is using the cover of its “exceptionalism” to murder people in many countries. http://news.antiwar.com/2013/08/11/us-drones-pound-yemen-but-targets-arent-all-militants/print/ Hitler tried to market the exceptionalism of the German people, but he lacked Washington’s Madison Avenue skills.
Washington is always morally right, whatever it does, and those who report its crimes are traitors who, stripped of their coddling by civil liberties, are locked away and abused until they confess to their crimes against the state. Anyone who tells the truth, such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, are branded enemies of the state and are ruthlessly persecuted.
How does the “indispensable, exceptional nation” have a diplomatic policy? How can a neoconized State Department be based on anything except coercion? It can’t. That is why Washington produces nothing but war and threats of war.
Wherever a person looks, whatever a person hears, it is Washington’s threat–“we are going to bomb you into the stone age” if you don’t do what we want and agree to what we require. We are going to impose “sanctions,” Washington’s euphemism for embargoes, and starve your women and children to death, permit no medical supplies, ban you from the international payments system unless you relent and consent to being Washington’s puppet, and ban you from posting your news broadcasts on the Internet.
This is the face that Washington presents to the world: the hard, mean face of a tyrant.
Washington’s power will survive a bit longer, because there are still politicians in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the NGOs in Russia, who are paid off by the almighty dollar. In exchange for Washington’s money, they endorse Washington’s immorality and murderous destruction of law and life.
But the dollar is being destroyed by Quantitative Easing, and the domestic US economy is being destroyed by jobs offshoring. http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/TAA0731131.html
Rome was powerful until the Germans ceased to believe it. Then the rotten edifice collapsed. Washington faces sooner or later the same fate. An inhumane, illegal, unconstitutional regime based on violence alone, devoid of all morality and all human compassion, is not acceptable to China, Russia, India, Iran, and Brazil, or to readers of this column.
The evil that is Washington cannot last forever. The criminals might destroy the world in nuclear war, but the lawlessness and lack of humanity in Washington, which murders more people as I write, is no longer acceptable to the rest of the world, not even to its European puppet states, despite the leaders being on Washington’s payroll.
Gorbachev is correct. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a debacle for the entire world. It transformed the US from the “city upon the hill,” the “beacon for humanity,” into an aggressive militarist state. Consequently, Amerika has become despised by everyone who has a moral conscience and a sense of justice.
