Paul Craig Roberts, in what is likely to be his hardest-hitting column ever, excoriates five lying liers who have relentlessly violated the Constitution, making them traitors to the United States. Yet, they have not been arrested and put on trial.

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The Five Criminals: In America the Gestapo Has Replaced The Rule Of Law

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February 13, 2014 | Original Here                                              Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter

The Five Criminals In America, the Gestapo Has Replaced the Rule of Law

Paul Craig Roberts

RT is the best English language news source available to Americans. On January 29, RT published a photo of 5 presidential appointees lying through their teeth to Congress.
http://rt.com/usa/intel-hearing-snowden-threats-369/

Picture taken from the PCR-provided link above and pasted in by the blogger.

All five of these Gestapo wannabes are in violation of their oath of office to protect the Constitution of the United States. They have relentlessly violated the Constitution, which makes these five, who are in charge of US intelligence and black operations, traitors to the United States. Yet, they have not been arrested and put on trial. Congress is content to sit there and listen to their ongoing lies time after time after time, despite the fact that these 5 have committed more and worse crimes against our country than the “terrorists” that serve as an excuse for the crimes committed by the intelligence agencies.

Remember, dear readers, it is a crime for you to lie to any federal agent even if you are not under oath or before Congress. How much more evidence do you need that you are not a citizen of the United States but a mere serf of the federal government? Will you ever wake up?

James Clapper, who has the grand title of Director Of National Intelligence, is an admitted liar to the US Congress but nevertheless remains in office. That Clapper is still in office is a good measure of the decline both in the integrity of the US government and in the integrity that Congress, media, and the public expect from the government. President Nixon was driven from office for a very small thing: Nixon lied about when he learned about a burglary with which he had nothing to do. Clapper brazenly lied to the US Congress, denying that he was spying on members of the US Congress.

Clapper is not only in violation of the Constitution, he has committed a felony, especially under the stretched interpretation of laws that is the norm for Department of Justice prosecutions. Huge numbers of Americans are in prison for offenses that are molehills compared to Clapper’s, or for that matter, any of the other five sitting there lying to Congress.

The Five Criminals told Congress that Edward Snowden, who is under the protection of the Russian government, must be made to give back the evidence of NSA spying on the entire world before some US troops or diplomats are killed by terrorists in some future war started by Washington, which routinely dismisses the victims of its war crimes as “collateral damage.”

None of the Five Criminals were able to specify how Congress could make the Russian government hand over Snowden. Rabid Republican warmongers have falsely and propagandistically accused Snowden of being “a Russian spy.” What utter dishonesty! The only reason Snowden is in Russia is that the US, in violation of international law, refuses to allow an airplane to fly from Russia with Snowden to any of the South American countries that have granted Snowden asylum. The fact that Snowden is in Russia is entirely the fault of Washington.

As I have written and said on many occasions, facts mean nothing to Washington, to the presstitute media, and to most of the American population, who prefer comforting lies to reality.

No one in the American media or most Internet sites will dare tell you that the reason the Five Criminals are again lying to Congress is to deflect Congress and an insouciant public and media from the fact that they have violated the law and their oath of office, and that the only purpose of invoking “national security” is to protect the criminal actions of the security agencies from being discovered. “National Security” is the blanket under which the crimes of government are hidden.

All that “national security” means is that “we are not going to let anyone find out that we are nothing but a gang of criminal thugs, and we are going to use the cover of national security to demonize Snowden who told on us.”

The so-called “security agencies” and their media whores have created a wartime atmosphere of fear as if the “world’s only superpower” was about to be destroyed by a handful of lightly armed fighters thousands of miles away who resist Washington’s invasions of their countries in corners of the earth that most Americans cannot find on a map. What kind of superpower is so terrified by peoples that the superpower choses to invade and murder? If the wronged people are so threatening, the superpower should stay at home and leave them alone.

Listen to this bullshit from Clapper: As a consequence of Snowden, “the nation is less safe and its people less secure.” The truth is the opposite of what Clapper states. Snowden alerted us to the fact that Clapper was shredding the US Constitution that is our greatest protection. Clapper, who should be in the dock for treason, has stolen our rights and our shield against harm and abuse from arbitrary government power. Clapper is an enemy of every American.

Listen to this bullshit from Lt. Gen, Michael Flynn, director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, who stupidly asserts that Snowden’s revelations of illegal mass spying on the US citizens and the world caused “grave damage” to “national security.”

What the general means is that it caused damage to his reputation and brought him some cause for anxiety by revealing that he was engaged in criminal activity. But the general knew how to invoke the sympathy and support of the right-wing superpatriots. He declared that the greatest cost of Snowden’s revelations is “the cost of human lives on tomorrow’s battlefield or in some place where we will put our military forces when we ask them to go into harm’s way.” He is, of course, talking about the next time that Washington criminally attacks another country in total violation of the Nuremberg standard.

Senator Barbara Mikulski listening to this bullshit said that what was needed was a Supreme Court ruling “to determine the constitutionality of these programs.” Was this sincere or a cop-out? Why is Mikulski passing the buck? The current Republican Supreme Court is corrupt and will not defend the Constitution. One of the leading Republican lights, as dimly lit as he is, Justice Antonin Scalia, truthfully said that concentration camps are a likely future reality for Americans and that the Supreme Court would not do anything about the tyranny should the executive branch think it necessary.

Senator Ron Wyden told the Five Criminals, “I don’t think this culture of misinformation [that the Five Criminals represent] is going to be easily fixed.”

Nothing will be fixed until the Five Criminals are arrested and put on trial for treason and until Congress defunds the illegal wars and states firmly, backed up with the threat of impeachment, that there is no such thing as “the unitary executive” who is above law, Constitution, Congress, and the federal courts. The Supreme Court will not protect us. Congress must put the executive branch on notice that it is not above the law and the Constitution.

Americans have lost the rule of law. Unless Congress quickly restores it, the country is lost.

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Michael Collins: Lawless Nation, Part I of III

Lawless Nation: The Executive Branch

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Written by Michael Collins
Monday, 04 October 2010

The principal of unfettered executive power, absent political and judicial restraint, was officially established. Executive power, writes Michael Collins, now supersedes established law.

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Selected to run by the powerful and wealthy, promising the public one thing and delivering another after elected, the President of the United States is the focus of a new political doctrine - the unitary executive.  The office of the president has rapidly become a law unto itself over the past ten years. (Image)

Some time before February 2010, the President of the United States authorized the assassination of a U.S. citizen living overseas.  The citizen was identified by the White House as a terrorist.

Unlike previous government programs to kill individuals overseas, this one wasn't a covert operation.  The program was openly announced, without qualification.  Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, discussed the plan in February at a congressional hearing.  A few weeks later, John O. Brennan, the president's National Security Adviser, announced that the marked man was one of "dozens" of U.S. citizens put on the presidential death list because "they are very concerning to us."

The principal of unfettered executive power, absent political and judicial restraint, was officially established.  Executive power now supersedes established law.

We have come to the point where the president can openly designate a U.S. citizen as a terrorist removing all rights, including the right to life.  The administration implied that this was for overseas targets only.  But recall that the illegal wiretapping program was originally for overseas calls only.  It rapidly spread to domestic surveillance as well.

We have laws that require investigations, indictments, and trials prior to applying any sentence, let alone the death penalty.  Those laws were cast aside, replaced by executive fiat.

Who spoke out against this assumption of executive prerogative?  Very few.  What is the next step?

Will terrorists designated by the executive branch be targeted for execution in what is now referred to as the homeland?

This open proclamation of lawlessness by the president was asserted and accepted without so much as a whimper by the other branches of government, political leaders, and the mainstream media.

War Making and other Lawlessness

The broadest premeditated program of lawlessness by the executive branch concerns war making. The U.S. has not declared a war since World War II when President Franklin D. Roosevelt gained congressional approval for declarations of war against Japan and Germany in December, 1941, then Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania in June, 1942.

The military efforts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, for example, were all wars.  Yet, with one exception, every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt committed the nation to war or the continuation of war without the required congressional declaration.

The Constitution couldn't be more explicit.  Only Congress has the power to declare war:  "The Congress shall have power to … Declare war …" (Article I, Section 8).  Calling a war by another name does not justify bypassing the requirement for congressional action.  It's still a war.  Yet the governing law, the U.S. Constitution, has been ignored time and again.

This is the ultimate lawlessness.  It invokes the major efforts of people, material, and ongoing expenditures.  These wars result in injuries, deaths, and destruction in the nations attacked and injury and death to U.S. citizens unlawfully committed.  In addition, the wars fuel substantial ill will and hostility toward the United States.

Congress has been consulted, so to speak, about these wars.  Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, President Bush had to prove that Iraq was an imminent danger to the United States.  The intelligence community produced a report that wrongly indicated that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  But the only scenario listed for a Saddam Hussein attack on the U.S. was in the case that the U.S. attacked Iraq; the very act the president asked Congress to authorize due to an imminent danger that never existed.

In addition, the pretext for war, 9/11, was bolstered with hysterical fear-mongering that the non existent weapons of mass destruction would be used here.  No credible finding was (or has been) made that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 and George W. Bush has explicitly denied any connection.

This illegal invasion and undeclared war were based on a deliberate lie, a 180 degree reversal of the intelligence report used to justify a preemptive invasion.  Lying in order to launch an invasion is a crime.  Nothing was done to punish the lying by the president and nothing much was said by those in power to indicate that a war based on lies needed to be stopped.

Disregard for the law continued after the invasion.  Security threats created by the invasion were used as the rationale for presidential license to violate established law.  The secret, illegal wiretapping of citizens by the Bush administration violated multiple U.S. laws protecting a citizen's right to privacy.

The torture of prisoners captured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was another presidential act in full defiance of established law.  Rather than provide information, the unlawful techniques actually inspired greater resistance.

Architecture of a Totalitarian State

The architecture of a totalitarian state is almost fully in place and the lawless implementation is accelerating.  While the Bush violations of the Constitution and various federal codes were greeted with shock in some quarters, the staid declaration of a presidential assassination order by Nobel Peace Prize winner, President Barack Obama, was met with virtually no resistance by Congress.

The president, can point to congressional authorization for its acts and judicial tolerance when those acts are challenged.  But that doesn't change the fact that the Constitution and the laws it embodies and protects have been savaged.

We are ruled by a lawless executive branch, by presidents who routinely ignore the law.  The chief executive in our system is unchecked.

Presidents also make sure that others are never held accountable for these lawless acts, including their predecessors from the opposition party.  It is a perpetual and predictable process of occasional feigned concern that masks a profound indifference to the law and protects those who do the most damage through that indifference.

Those with any doubts about a lawless nation need only refer to the suit filed against the presidential assassination program.  Two civil rights groups seek to stop the program based on long-standing and clear U.S. and international law.

The administration's response was that the suit should be dismissed since a trial would require the release of state "secrets", i.e., the reasons and motives for their extra-judicial murders and how their information was obtained.  The executive branch simply declares that its decisions are beyond any review.  Our current president continues to animate the unitary executive Frankenstein created by Addington, Bybee, and Yoo.

Unfettered executive power is allowed by an enabling Congress and a complicit federal judiciary.  The three branches of government form a seamless whole of self-supporting lawlessness.

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Special thanks to Michael Green and Andrew Kreig for their very helpful comments.

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Michael Collins is a writer who focuses on clean elections and voting rights. He is the publisher of the web site The Money Party. His Scoop Independent News articles can be found here.

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Reprinted with the permission of the author.

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