Based on the May 2014 Supreme Court’s non-action regarding the 2012 NDAA law that allows the US military to come into our homes and arrest us and then throw away the key forever without any legal rights, I had to write the following article.
General Eisenhower as Commander-in-Chief knew better than anyone the ominous threat and fatal danger posed by a growing arms industry wedded to war makers and how its tyranny could destroy American democracy and liberty. Unfortunately his grave warning in his presidential farewell address in January 1961 went unheeded. And now as a result in this post 9/11 era, we face the monster that is now destroying America and our way of life, simultaneously taking seven billion of us on this planet hostage by making the entire world more armed and dangerous than any prior time in human history.
Meanwhile, since the 9/11 prearranged attacks, the Patriot Act and the prearranged Iraq and Afghanistan War debacles, American citizens have had their constitutional rights to privacy and due process totally stripped from them. Ever since the Authorization for Use of Military Force Act (AUMFA) voted in and signed by Bush within a week after the twin towers were pulled a little more than a dozen years ago, America’s president, regardless of party, has assumed God-like power to decide who the enemy is and destroy them through any means necessary. And now with this week’s Supreme Court decision, it’s official – if anyone important in the government now desires you behind bars, all they need do is label you an enemy sympathizer and all your rights to legal representation, due process protection, contact with family are now completely nonexistent.
After passage of Obama’s 2012’s the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), courageous author-journalist Chris Hedges and others representing all US citizens mounted a legal countersuit challenging the 2012 NDAA. A bold decision of one district court judge ruled in favor but was later overturned by an appeals court judge deferring the matter to America’s highest court the US Supreme Court. In a landmark decision that has nightmarish implications, earlier this week the Supreme Court elected to not even bother hearing the case, which in effect renders Hedges et al’s countersuit dead in the water, giving full power of the NDAA to authorize the misuse of the American military to legally break into our homes without a search warrant and arrest us, effectively eliminating our sixth amendment right to a speedy trial.
Now if you are suspected of being a terrorist or even a sympathizer, without any legal judge or warrant or charge, you can be arrested and not even notified of why you are arrested. As long as the US government’s open-ended “war on terror” (itself a convenient fascist fabrication) continues, you can be locked up forever. In this disturbing climate of increasing security surveillance and extreme punitive and oppressive control, the military’s role domestically at home insidiously expands to ensure total fulfillment of a fascist Orwellian police state.
A closer examination of US history sheds light on this dark cast that has been in the making for some time. Going back to the Second World War, purely out of racism and paranoia, President FDR in 1942 signed an Executive Order 9066 rounding up 120,000 Japanese Americans and placed them in forced labor camps for the next two and a half years for the duration of the war. Shortly after World War II, the Cold War produced the Red scare of McCarthyism that harassed and ruined the lives of many innocent Americans falsely accused of being Communist or Communist sympathizers.
Under the misguided bigoted leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI and US government have had a long history of illegally compiling government watch lists and targeting selected groups of the American population deemed a threat or danger to political status quo. Hence, Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Vietnam War protesters all became victims of the FBI’s surveillance and harassment campaign during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Selected Black Panthers in various cities as well as Native Americans at Wounded Knee were even assassinated in racist FBI raids and assaults. The FBI lied claiming that its counterintelligence operations were suspended by 1971 when actually government surveillance continued on indefinitely. In 1979 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came along as a national recovery plan set up in response to natural disasters to ensure that political and social order be restored.
In 1993 when agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) raided the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, it quickly spun out of control. So under the direction of President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno, the FBI and US Army were called in to take over, mounting a 51-day siege. Under the Posse Comitatus Law that originatedin 1878 during post-Civil War Reconstruction and then updated in 1982, the US military role in incidents of domestic civil unrest is unlawful where state National Guard and civilian law enforcement have clear jurisdiction. But the FBI held press conferences repeatedly making false claims that the FBI was in charge of the operation. But in reality, a half dozen years before committing his war crimes over Kosovo, General Wesley Clark commanded the military operation that resulted in at least 82 deaths of family members, dozens of whom were women and children belonging to the religious cult. Yet the federal law at Waco was blatantly violated and covered up.
It was later confirmed that the initial BATF unit that raided the compound had just been given prior military training at the Army’s Home of the Armor branch, Fort Hood, and utilized two M1A1 tanks, one tank retrieval vehicle, nine Bradley fighting vehicles, and five combat engineering vehicles all operated by borrowed Fort Hood Active Duty Army personnel. Because original search warrants included suspicion of drugs, the BATF was authorized to receive Army training and equipment despite no drugs ever being found at the compound. However, with military involved in the attack, a federal law was definitely once again broken and many innocent Americans were needlessly murdered.
After the Oklahoma City bombings two years later, the FBI and federal government stepped up its surveillance toward potential homegrown terrorism. With use of corporate media, the public was barraged by hype of increasing danger from domestic terrorists like the Unabomber. Thus, numerous organizations on watch lists began being targeted for systematic harassment. Any citizens who were publicly promoting gun rights, property rights, constitutional rights, home schooling or religious groups labeled as cults all became prime suspects that were under highest priority surveillance and increasingly harassed throughout the 1990’s right into this century.
In 1999 the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle attracted 50 to 100,000 anti-globalization protesters from all over the world. Police brutality was rampant, multiple arrests were unlawfully made and many of the victims whose rights were violated were detained at a nearby Navy installation center, again a violation of both free speech and the Posse Comitatus law. These protests spawned the government’s first use of so called “free speech zones” designated far away from WTO activities, in effect cordoning off and limiting free speech dissidents from gathering where they can be seen and heard. Corporate media was overtly absent from the event, but then any coverage finally given was slanted and biased against the demonstrators. Independent media did ensure that evidence of unlawful abuse damning to law enforcement was documented, leading to the Seattle police chief’s resignation.
Those same restrictive, brutally oppressive tactics were also deployed against protesters in Denver in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention and more recently used to crush the Occupy Wall Street uprising in cities across the nation. The civil disobedience movement represents the growing awareness and unrest building amongst Americans that today’s extreme economic and social injustice must be challenged by us 99% have-nots.
Last year’s aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings was but a convenient preparatory practice drill for US martial law in the modern militarized US police state, a mere litmus seeing of how US citizens would react.
Of course ever since 9/11 under the Bush-Cheney neocons, the Patriot Act ushered in an era of over-the-top abuse with unconstitutional practices violating free speech, privacy and due process rights, many of which were secretly signed into law by presidential executive order. In 2002 Bush created a whole bureaucratic extension of the military industrial complex when he announced the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. The secrecy and lack of accountability of funding such a cumbersome unbridled entity that overlaps and duplicates both functions and agencies of both the State and Defense Departments have allowed enormous runaway federal expenditures again at taxpayer expense and burden.
In 2003 Bush placed FEMA under Homeland Security. Then in 2005 Hurricane Katrina struck, and the Posse Comitatus law again was violated when soldiers straight from the battlefields of Iraq were deployed to the designated urban war zone known as New Orleans. FEMA’s total lack of response many days after the flooding provided the overwhelming evidence that Bush’s mobilizing the military in a militarized police state took precedence over rescue efforts to save hurricane victims that were primarily the poor and black left behind in the most defenseless areas of the city. As a result, war criminal Bush has 1464 dead Americans on his bloody hands from that fiasco alone.
In that same year 2005 the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) was opened. MIAC was a fusion center that was 28% funded by Homeland Security to work with local and state intelligence agencies to sniff out terrorists. A MIAC report entitled “The Modern Militia Movement” was leaked to WikiLeaks exposing the illegal profiling of individuals driving cars with “Ron Paul for President” bumper stickers as tied to militia groups. The same month it was discovered this kind of homegrown fascism was quietly suspended and shut down in 2009, four years after it began. But many state fusion centers across the nation still remain open. As extensions of Homeland Security, they illustrate the covert nature of such far reaching entanglement as flagrant first amendment violations due to the over-arching abusive and monolithic security agency.
William M. Arkin, author of “American Coup: How a Terrified Government Is Destroying the Constitution,” states that this self-serving monster of a governmental entity has grown exponentially in the ten years it has existed to involving a colossal 33% of the total adult American population between ages 20-64. The Department of Homeland Security counts as “part of the regimented conglomeration of troops, government workers, first-responders, private-sector enlistees and civilian volunteers.” This level of intrusive, secret spying and informing on your neighbor smacks of Nazi Germany. Its abuse of power is massive and blatant, not to mention sinfully wasteful.
In October 2006 Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law that if even as an American citizen you are deemed an enemy of the state by the government, your right to habeas corpus, or right to defend yourself in a court of civil law, is forfeited and replaced by military tribunal. The right to habeas corpus is the oldest human right in the English speaking world regarded to be among the most important parts of the 1215 Magna Carta. One by one, under the boldface lie of security, Bush was effectively killing our liberties and rights guaranteed under the US Constitution. Fortunately in 2008 the US Supreme Court found this law unconstitutional, restoring the writ of habeas corpus and access to federal courts to any detainee, American citizen as well as foreign.
Army Regulation 210-35 drafted in 1997 and then reformulated on Bush’s watch in 2007 provides military installations with a civilian inmate labor program as well as prison camps on military grounds. In 2006 Kellogg, Brown and Root (or now known as KBR, formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton and the largest non-union construction company in America) signed a lucrative $385 million dollar contract with Homeland Security to refurbish old military posts into civilian prison camps. The government holds the not-so- secret plan to fill up these military prisons with American citizens.
Despite all these too obvious ties to the Bush administration with sitting Vice President Cheney Halliburton’s ex-CEO and their flaunting record of no bid contracts, corruption and cronyism during the Bush years quietly went unchallenged both legally and in the media. Meanwhile, KBR has had numerous lawsuits of women allegedly gang raped while working in Iraq as well as charges of exploiting human trafficking victims for cheap slave labor.
As a generously paid consultant of the Carlyle Group, GW’s dad had just cemented a huge defense contract. So where does junior decide to visit? A Carlyle owned company fresh off his photo ops session on an aircraft carrier where he infamously and prematurely declared false victory in Iraq, stopping off for yet another photo op to celebrate his family making millions more in another shady deal engineered by daddy Bush. Yet not one media outlet bothered to connect these all too obvious shameless dots. Bush and Cheney’s unprecedented level of in-our-face corruption was so out in the open, complete with those cocky, smug twisted smiles of pure evil personified, knowing with certainty there would be no repercussions or consequences for being such blatant war criminals or for being the most crooked presidency in American history. Money and Israeli-Saudi bin Laden connections simply buy impunity.
With the ultimate betrayal of the demonically executed inside job of 9/11, the Bush-Cheney regime set into monstrous motion what dictator Obama has only accelerated, an unholy globalized merger between US Empire bullied national governments and Fortune 500 transnational corporations along with un-repayable IMF and World Bank loans, all serve the controlling shareholder interests of one-one hundredth of one per cent of the total world population that owns and controls virtually everything on our entire planet. This most obscene and perverse abomination is what humanity has tragically devolved and degenerated into on a global power structure scale. A corrupt and sinister caldron of unprecedented epic proportions presently forecasts only doom and gloom for an ailing planet earth and all its inhabitants.
Operation Garden Plot is a military plan developed in response to the civil unrest in the 1960’s. Its 253 pages represent the established protocol the US Army and National Guard have in place for responding to any major domestic civil disturbances within the United States. The plan is now under the control of the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM), providing federal military and law enforcement assistance to local governments during times of major civil unrest and crises.
For those who still dismiss all these in-our-face warning signs of how the US government has plans to lock up Americans who disagree with its unconstitutional practices and policies, declaring dissidents enemy sympathizers, as just more hocus pocus conspiracy theory gone mad, citizens need only check out the Department of Defense (DoD) document released in February 2010 entitled “Internment and Resettlement Operations” or FM-3-39.40. This document shows that with Obama in power, it predates the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that Obama signed authorizing without warrants the military to be able to round up, arrest and detain US citizens for an indefinite period of time, denying all access to legal representation and constitutional rights. This same Obama signed law nullifies the previous Comitatus Law protecting Americans by prohibiting US military from arresting US citizens. And now that the US Supreme Court this week has opted not to even examine much less challenge the 2012 NDAA, USA tyranny is officially here to stay.
The 325 page document called FM-3-39.40 acts as undeniable evidence that in fact our government’s sinister agenda is very real, outlining in very specific detail how the DoD, FEMA, Homeland Security, and the United Nations together will be operating the military detention camps within US borders and beyond, targeting American political dissidents and citizens of the world for detainment. Psychological Operations Officers will be responsible for developing and executing indoctrination programs to reduce and remove antagonistic attitudes as well as identifying political activists. It calls for conditions that justify use of lethal force, in effect killing anyone caught trying to escape. This in itself proves detainees are not there for benign humanitarian disaster relief purposes.
Page 260 of this document covers the physical layout of these detainment camps that include interrogation areas, military tribunal areas and mortuaries. Mortuaries indicate that human deaths are part of the facility’s function that will house up to 4000 detainees. Clearly dissidents who oppose the tyranny of our government will be rounded up and imprisoned in these resettlement camps. Tactics utilized at these camps may well involve torture techniques similar to those currently used on foreign detainees at infamous Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib prisons. Another page describes civilian resettlement facilities housing 8000 people that include many rows of barbed wire fence areas within the camp as well as around the camp perimeter along with fourteen guard towers. This proves that any American citizen who dares to speak out and resists our government’s tyranny as a dissident will be locked up and incarcerated.
And with extreme surveillance and names being added daily on dissident watch lists, the government has been preparing and is ready to execute this demonic plan that to most Americans is just too unimaginable and unreal. But unfortunately this document proves that imprisonment of American dissidents in America is very real, signed by Joyce E. Morrow, Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Army John McHugh.
Just as telling and alarming as civilian labor and resettlement camps on military installations might be, the fact is since 2009 the US Army actually has want ads out with the title for those military personnel who will be employed as prison guards at these military internment camps. The Army is currently advertising unlimited openings for “Internment Resettlement Specialists,” complete with a full training program preparing these soldiers to become armed prison guards at all the labor camps. The US prison industrial complex and Homeland Security complex right along with the military industrial complex are all growing exponentially gluttonous and ever more dangerous. The most shuddering, chilling thought is that our very taxpayer dollars we are now toiling away so hard to earn may inadvertently be funding the very same prisons where we end up incarcerated.
As if the civilian inmate camps manned by military Internment Resettlement Specialists is not shocking enough, a bill that died in committee in 2009 as of January 2013 was back in the House of Representatives, the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act (H.R. Bill 390). It proposed that six more massive emergency centers capable of holding thousands of people and families be built on military installations in America for “temporary housing under emergency situations.” What constitutes emergency situations? President Obama and the Director of Homeland Security will dictate those parameters.
Concerned skeptics of this massive proliferation and privatization of detainment centers across the country believe it is another ominous sign that proves what our government is expecting and planning for us. Multimillion dollar prisons for profit are not built to remain empty. So reasons why any particular group of American citizens risk being rounded up like the Americans who happened to be Japanese during World War II is a growing worry amongst those who see their once cherished liberty, rights and freedom being rapidly replaced by a tyrannical militarized police state. America is simply one false flag or natural disaster away from martial law and FEMA concentration camp roundups.
In this era of pervasive invasion of privacy, internet and drone surveillance and increasing dissident watch lists, it is not a paranoid stretch to speculate who will be the first group to be rounded up. To curb and/or eliminate any civil disobedient protest, unrest, riot and looting in the streets, angry, potentially armed citizens determined to take back their country, any persons caught outside their homes disobeying martial law curfew, the nation’s debtors, the chronically unemployed, anyone who looks like an illegal alien or “suspicious” at all, including anyone unwilling to go along with the government’s fascist agenda, all will most likely become targeted victims. Any and all of these reasons will meet the criteria our government sees fit to lock up American citizens. The scenarios are really endless as to who will be selected to end up detained indefinitely at one of these foreboding concentration camps.
Ironically as a cadet I stopped the unconstitutional practice at West Point that had been going on for nearly two centuries of railroading out any cadets at the academy deemed unfit, “suspicious” or unruly. Operating above the law meant that higher ranking officers possessed the right to arbitrarily run up demerits on false charges if they so much as did not like you and there was nothing a cadet could do about it for 170 years… until 1972 when I won in New York federal district court, forcibly ringing in the constitutional right to due process at this most honored service academy.
Now the same thing applies to all citizens in America. If someone higher up in the government happens to not like you, they now possess that same unconstitutional God-like power to round you up, throw you in prison and there is nothing you can do about it, since legal access when labeled an “enemy sympathizer” or even “political dissident” no longer exists. But instead of false charges in demerits, as a dissident it has now become false charges branding you an enemy sympathizer simply because you do not agree with the tyranny and fascism growing all around us. Just as I was vocally critical of an inhumane, unjust, totalitarian West Point system as a dissident, and without due process paid the price of being terminated from the Academy, with today’s stakes of no due process so much higher for all of US citizens, as dissidents our very lives can now be terminated.
Short of assassination for being a dissident, the government at the very least can indefinitely throw you in one of these prison camps where you no longer have any legal access to due process. Many of us aware of what has been unfolding fear that the government will next conveniently manufacture a national crisis in order to justify a population round-up, using typical propaganda ploys to demonstrate how Big Brother acts in our best interest to keep us safe, help take care of the poor, needy and most vulnerable among us during national emergencies and times of international crises.
By his repeated actions, in the name of security President Obama has declared war on anyone courageous enough to tell the truth about his administration’s misuse of power. The obvious question becomes whose security? Certainly not ours the public. If you dare disagree or speak out against this tyranny, you risk your life and freedom. Everything currently in America is inversely juxtaposed from the way it morally should be. Look at former Nobel Peace Prize nominee Private Bradley Manning’s fate – thirty five years in prison for exposing America’s war crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prior to Russia granting him asylum, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a fugitive on the run charged with violating the Espionage Act for disclosing how Big Brother and NSA are violating our privacy as never before.
More individuals under Obama have been indicted on espionage act violations than all previous presidents combined in US history! Labeled criminals by the true criminals in our government, these valiant whistleblowers are being excessively punished for their bravery, honesty and true patriotism. Exposed and on the defensive, Obama and company are out to hang them in a ruthless effort to set an example of what happens to those brave enough souls who in good conscience are willing to tell the truth about the government’s murderous web of lies and deceit.
Demonstrating how the tide of public opinion is slowly turning in favor of recognizing the truth, a new year’s Op-Ed article featured in the mainstream embedded New York Times stated unconditionally that Snowden has already been vindicated and should be credited and ascribed the rights of a whistleblower:
In the near year since 33-year old investigative journalist Michael Hastings was likely assassinated last June 18th, it is clear that he was not a victim of just a freak car accident. Weeks earlier the Obama regime had declared open warfare on free journalism with aggressive surveillance and punitive retribution on AP reporters, even selected corporate media news reporters, clearly targeting those willing to reveal potentially damaging or threatening information about the US government’s tyranny. Hastings had a very high profile history since his June 2010 Rolling Stone article featuring Afghanistan War commander General Stanley McChrystal and his staff’s harsh critique of their Commander-in-Chief, subsequently resulting in McChrystal’s forced resignation. Hastings also wrote an unflattering article about General David Petraeus in the February 2011 Rolling Stone indicating “King David’s” losing proposition for turning the war in Afghanistan around with his surge on that warfront clearly a failure.
The very day he died, Hastings contacted friends and associates to report that he was under an FBI investigation, that he feared his car had been tampered with, and was about to release a major bombshell of a news story involving unlawful covert operations deployed by US intelligence agencies, specifically focusing on current CIA Director John Brennan. The UK’s Daily Mirror published an August 15, 2013 article stating that the CIA contractor Stratfor’s president claimed that Brennan was on a “witch hunt” for investigative journalists… sounds just like his boss Obama. Also a friend of the journalist came forth with the statement that Hastings had actually asked her if he could borrow her car the very day he died sharing his concern that his car had been tampered with.
Another friend US Army Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs who spent three months with Hastings while doing the first Rolling Stone article also believes that Hastings was murdered. Biggs stated that the journalist’s life had been threatened should he proceed with publishing the McChrystal article. The sergeant was among those contacted by Hastings just prior to his death reporting the FBI investigation and that he needed to lay low to write the story exposing the US intelligence system.
His recent Mercedes Benz model was likely cyber-hacked. Research scientists at the University of Washington and UC San Diego three years ago released findings indicating how electronic systems in modern cars can easily be hacked and its functions remotely controlled, further corroborated since by the government’s own reputable Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Even ex-CIA counter-terrorism expert under Clinton and Bush Richard Clarke alluded to the possibility that the car explosion and expulsion of the engine 100 feet from the vehicle is consistent with cyber-hacking. That along with eyewitness accounts of a fiery explosion prior to the car hitting the tree all raise serious questions that foul play may well have caused the death of the bold young journalist who undauntedly vowed to expose shady truth no matter the risk. Michael Hastings’ uncompromising integrity and defiance to seek the truth no matter what most likely cost him his life.
While Obama is going after anyone bold enough to confront his lies of tyranny and oppression, he also has designs of turning groups like the Boy Scouts of America and AmeriCorps into an enormous civilian national security force to work alongside the government and military as their junior counterpart contingent – all too eerily reminiscent of prewar Nazi youth groups.
Even the US Census Bureau is doing its part to tighten the noose around citizens’ necks. For the first time during the 2010 census workers used GPS to identify and track any persons they encountered who failed to cooperate by refusing to fill out and submit required information. Those who resist are now violating federal law and subject to a $5000 fine and perhaps their names have been added to the next FEMA roundup list.
At the time of the so called 9/11 terrorist attack, West Point in all likelihood was still teaching the same outdated elective course that I took as a cadet thirty years earlier on counterinsurgency. Thus to quickly fill its obvious void, private funding established the Combating Terrorism Center
(CTC) at the US Military Academy a mere year and a half later. The single biggest financial contributor establishing the CTC was 1977 West Point grad Vincent Viola, former Chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, current owner of one of the largest electronic trading firms Vitro and NHL team owner of recent Stanley Cup finalist the Florida Panthers. Another major CTC financier was Annapolis graduate, former third party presidential candidate and multi-billionaire Ross Perot. My West Point roommate, current Council on Foreign Relations member and longest running commander of both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars from 2003 to 2007, retired General John Abizaid, currently sits as the CDC’s Distinguished Chair. Though a private think tank for the US military, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center is additionally part of the Academy’s Department of Social Sciences providing instruction to cadets as well as compiling research and issuing reports on its findings.
A research report entitled “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right” was published last year by the CDC. According to Wikipedia, the report “provides a conceptual foundation for understanding different far-right groups and then presents empirical analysis of violent incidents to identify those perpetrating attacks and their associated trends.” In actuality the study seeks to brainwash America’s future leaders as well as Americans in general into believing that any and all US citizens who value and espouse lesser government interference in their lives, who oppose the US government’s totalitarianism and who support the US Constitution guaranteeing individual rights to privacy, due process, civil liberties and freedom are the real enemy of the state.
The 148-page report warns military personnel to be on the lookout for those individuals calling themselves true patriots standing up to the federal government’s oppression and tyranny. The research study’s author, Arie Perliger is an assistant professor in West Point’s Social Sciences Department and the Director of Terrorism Studies at the Combating Terrorism Center. Like the CDC’s Chair Abizaid, Perliger is also a current member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and former instructor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.
The pro-Israel lobby and power in America and its foreign policy looms so large that critics contend the American government is but a puppet of Israel. The apartheid Israeli government’s subjugation and oppression of the Palestinians and the tacit approval by the US government has long been a barrier to peace and stability in the Middle East. Much has also been made of both the American banking and entertainment industries being controlled nearly exclusively by prominent Jewish Americans. Though some critics of the prominent Israeli-Jewish lobby in America may be fueled by underlying anti-Semitic bias, nonetheless there exists overwhelming concrete evidence substantiating the Israeli-Jewish connections’ inordinate amount of power. Perliger in his key position is but one anecdotal example. Speaking of the disproportionate power base of the Israeli-Jewish connection, it is worth mentioning the disclaimer that there is a complete difference between criticizing the strong Israeli-Jewish influence and power in America and criticizing Israeli citizens or Jewish people. Just as it is of paramount importance to distinguish between the American government and American citizens, the exact same principle applies.
In any event, in one broad stroke in his report Perliger appears to lump all American constitutionalists, freedom lovers, libertarians, progressives, left wing political activists and all government dissidents in with numerous ultra-conservative, violent far-right fringe groups, declaring all these citizens on both the left and right along with their A-Z group affiliations as serious threats to US national security.
In Perliger’s own words, he casts dispersions on those who “espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights.” He even targets groups “driven by a strong conviction that the American political system and its proxies have been hijacked by external forces interested in promoting a New World Order.” In other words, anyone with awareness of what’s really going on in America and is highly concerned with these extremely disturbing developments since 9/11, is now on the government’s “shit” list, or more aptly put “hit” list. Perliger conveniently groups together all people critical of the federal government, both those leaning toward the left and the right. In this way he kills two birds with one stone, demonizing both those progressives critical of the government as well as all those so called fringe elements and organizations singled out during the 1990’s as potential homegrown terrorists – right wing extremists classified as anti-federalists, tea-partiers, fundamentalist Christians, survivalists, gun-rights advocates, pro-lifers and those who oppose high taxation.
When America’s Combating Terrorism Center’s research director and card-carrying CFR member, considered among the foremost experts on terrorism, emphatically declares anyone critical of the US federal government and its fascist agenda for increased police state security as enemies of the state, we are all in deep shit. The transparency of Perliger’s tactical move to link all government dissidents and political activists with violent far-right extremist groups is resorting to the age old slanderous ploy invoking guilt by association. This old divide and conquer strategy is designed to turn American citizen against American citizen, pro-constitutionalists vs. anti-constitutionalists, socioeconomic class against socioeconomic class and race against race.
As Bush alluded to in post 9/11 era, “You’re either with us or against us.” To have such dangerous, derisive, and toxic black and white thinking coming from someone in such powerful position to influence and mold the minds of America’s future leaders at West Point is but one more alarming sign of the times. President Obama and his power crew have been methodically prepping America for martial law and the hard times ahead by splitting the American populace into two opposing camps, the pro-government tyranny camp under the false notion of security and the anti-government individual freedom camp. Constitutional law professor and former dean of the Regent University School of Law Herbert W. Titus accused, “Perliger is not a serious scholar, but a propagandist for the existing regime.”
With last year’s IRS scandal that found the Internal Revenue Service guilty of singling out the exact same right wing elements that Perliger cited, conservative fundamentalist Christian organizations were clearly targeted for harassment with their filed applications to the IRS seeking federal tax breaks under religious tax code affiliation.
That along with the mounting draconian laws and the increasing militarized police state systematically now violating search and seizure laws and privacy rights of Americans, fast rising incidence of cold blooded murder of US citizens who posed no threat to SWAT teams police forces across America, all of this has become over-the-top evidence that America today is not the democracy we once thought it was. Scholars from Princeton and Northwestern Universities made it official last month, the US is now an oligarchy. With the US Constitution completely dismantled and rendered inoperable since 9/11, NSA and Homeland Security abuse have now become so blatant and utterly out of control.
Every personal aspect and private domain in every single American’s life are no longer personal and private at all, but compiled and stored data instantly accessible to be analyzed in one centralized location in an enormous NSA complex in Utah. With their across the boards practice of unconstitutional violations, systematic spying on every aspect and activity of our daily lives, scrutinizing and analyzing our every move that includes tracking all internet activity, all emails, all online instant message conversations, all filed documents, all website visits and contacts, as well as all personal phone calls, all text messages, and all postal snail mail correspondence, and with GPS tracking even our everyday comings and goings movement, the Orwellian nightmare is already here. We as a people are so closely monitored and controlled that anyone who dares to speak out against this unprecedented, insanely illegal, Big Brother government- run-amok tyranny and fascism is immediately placed on a watch list for even closer surveillance and control, and undoubtedly moved to the very top of the list to be rounded up under martial law and involuntarily imprisoned forever in FEMA concentration camps without any legal rights, representation or court access. This unfortunately is what America the land of the no longer free has become.
In the last decade alone a disturbing trend has unfolded nationally where one in three adult Americans is now in some way connected to either Homeland Security or the Department of Defense. Citizen turning in fellow citizen is fast becoming the despicable norm in this post 9/11 police state where a growing climate of fear, disinformation and propaganda not unlike prewar Nazi Germany rule. Obama’s crusade to amass an enormous “civil defense” corps amongst the US population that remains loyal to his tyrannical and sinister government abuses is but a case in point of what is happening right under our noses. And with an estimated eight million Americans already on an ever-expanding dissident watch list, the FEMA roundups of all dissidents and political activists are pre-eminent. A relatively benign glimpse into the dark future lay in our recent past with the post Boston Marathon fiasco. House to house searches and detainments conducted by armed active duty military personnel that we think can only happen in places like Africa or the Middle East in direct violation of the Comitatus Act is coming to a neighborhood near you sooner than you think or imagine. As the prophetic 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film “Network” sounds the alarm, it is high time we get “mad as hell and we’re not gonna to take it anymore!” if we as a people are ever to don’t let the bastards get us down.”
Sadly I must say as a West Point graduate, former US Army officer and still patriotic US citizen, I am no longer proud to be an American. Like millions of fellow citizens, I am both alarmed and outraged over how the US government has betrayed us all, resorting to the same totalitarian tactics of human rights abuse toward its citizens that Obama so frequently and hypocritically accuses of recently re-created cold war enemies Russia and China. With its Empire killing machine, America has tragically regressed into another pre-World War II Nazi Germany as the world’s worst human rights offender. With Americans the last to know, for years much of the rest of the world as victims of US Empire’s criminal aggression and oppression have viewed the US as global public enemy number one. It thoroughly sickens me to realize how this country I grew up loving, willing to at one time die for, and still very much love, has morphed and degenerated into the world’s most villainous “bad guy thug,” enslaving us who love our nation in police state bondage. How could our own government betray America and its own people? Stay tuned…
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former Army officer. His written manuscript based on his military experience examines leadership and national security issues and can be consulted at http://www.redredsea.net/westpointhagopian/. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in psychology and became a licensed therapist working in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now focuses on writing.
