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to Table of Contents Pageby
Allisone Heartsong
© 2002 In God We Trust
We are currently living in a world which has become increasingly fraudulent during the past century. Simply put, this means that our world is no longer what it pretends to be.
Not only have many of our institutions, including our governments, lost their integrity, but humanity itself appears to have lost its moral compass.
Thus, whereas the illusion is that we are living in an enlightened society of civilized human beings who have voluntarily agreed to renounce the use of deception and coercion, the reality is that we are living in an unenlightened society of uncivilized human beings where force and fraud have become the name of the game.
Although the vast majority of people in this world seem to be fast asleep, increasing numbers of us are beginning to wake up to the fact that our money is fraudulent, our income tax is fraudulent, our political system is fraudulent, our public news media are fraudulent, our educational system is fraudulent, and a substantial portion of our scientific beliefs, our religious beliefs, and even our historical records are also fraudulent.
For those of us who are willing to open our eyes and confront the truth, it is clear that the world as we have known it is dying and is now in its terminal phase of corruption and decadence.
The immediate reason for this may be found in the fact that a conspiracy of darkworkers, who are overtly known as the global elite and covertly known as the Dark Illuminati, have not hesitated to use deception and coercion in their all-out effort to create a totalitarian New World Order for the purpose of subjugating humanity while pretending to protect humanity. This worldwide conspiracy, which was dismissed as crackpot speculation until quite recently, is now an acknowledged fact of life.
During the past century, the Dark Illuminati have succeeded in converting a substantial portion of humanity from a spiritual or theistic orientation to a secular or atheistic orientation. Thus, while those of us who are lightworkers continue to acknowledge and align to the Source of our being, there are many unenlightened people on this planet who are out of alignment with their inner being for the simple reason that they no longer acknowledge their Source.
What is more, during the past few decades, the global elite have succeeded in subverting and bankrupting virtually every nation in the world through the unscrupulous use of their fraudulent money system based on taxation, usury, and debt. As a consequence, the United Nations has now been transformed from a community of sovereign nations to an organization of bankrupt nations, whose political leaders no longer have any choice but to follow the orders of the international bankers who control them like puppets from behind the scenes.
Although our situation may appear to be hopeless at this point, such is by no means the case. However, if we wish to find the solution to humanity’s problem, we must be very careful to define that problem correctly.
Although the immediate reason for our dilemma may indeed be found in the worldwide conspiracy of darkworkers which has been using an unscrupulous combination of deception and coercion for the malevolent purpose of trying to enslave us in the name of protecting us, the ultimate reason for our dilemma is to be found in the fact that we have been allowing the global elite to enslave us in the name of protecting us by wittingly or unwittingly accepting and cooperating with their agenda.
To be more specific, rather than choosing to take responsibility for exercising our sovereignty and claiming our mastery, we have foolishly chosen to give our power away to those who are trying to enslave us in the name of protecting us. And we have done this because we were lacking in discernment.
In short, the essence of our problem consists in the fact that we have been mentally and spiritually asleep. And from this it follows that the solution to our problem is simply to wake up.
There is an old saying which describes our situation perfectly: "When your dream turns into a nightmare, that means it is time to wake up."
It is no exaggeration to say that, during the past century, humanity’s dream of progress has become transformed into an insane Alice In Wonderland nightmare of corruption and decadence. Clearly, it is time for us to wake up, not only to what has been going on behind the scenes in this polarized world of labyrinthic illusion, but also to the realization of who we really are.
Whereas the illusion is that we are human beings having some spiritual experiences, the reality is that we are spiritual beings having some human experiences. And whereas the illusion is that we are helpless creatures who appear to be the victims of circumstance, the reality is that we are powerful creators who are capable of becoming the masters of life.
The key point to grasp is that the moment we wake up to the truth of who we really are and realize how we have been deceived, we will withdraw our consent and refuse to cooperate with this fraudulent system by means of which the global elite are attempting to enslave us in the name of protecting us. Once we have done this, that system will collapse, and we will then be free to replace it with a healthy system based on honesty and integrity, which will allow us to prosper.
It only remains to point out that to be asleep means to be in third-dimensional separation consciousness and to wake up means to shift out of third-dimensional separation consciousness into fourth-dimensional unity consciousness.
To use a simple analogy, human beings are like myriad sunbeams radiating out into the darkness from one central sun. So long as we are looking outward into the darkness through our physical senses, we appear to be separate from one another and separate from our Source. However, the moment we make the empowering choice to look inward into the light, we are able to see very clearly that we are all integral parts of one whole and are not really separate from one another at all.
Thus, the key to waking up consists in making the empowering choice to acknowledge and align to the Source of our being. Once we do this, it will then become clear that we are all integral parts of One Universal Being, including all of the darkworkers who are still asleep in third-dimensional separation consciousness because they have not yet made the empowering choice to acknowledge and align to the Source of their being.
The final thing to understand is that we are currently in the midst of a 25-year process of planetary ascension which began with Harmonic Convergence on 17 August 1987 and will be completed by 21 December 2012.
As a consequence of this planetary ascension process, our Mother Earth is now beginning to shift out of the third dimension and through the fourth dimension into the fifth dimension of consciousness. This frequency shift is being facilitated by: 1) the halo of photon energy surrounding the Pleiades (within our Milky Way galaxy), which was discovered by Paul Otto Hesse in 1961 through satellite instrumentation, 2) the halo of gamma-ray energy surrounding our entire Milky Way galaxy, which was discovered by Dave Dixon in 1997 through satellite instrumentation, and 3) the merging of our third-dimensional universe with a parallel fifth-dimensional universe, which was predicted by the I AM Presence of the ascended master Saint Germain in 1987.
What this means is that we are now in the midst of a radical process of planetary transformation which is without precedent in human history.
Those human beings who have made the empowering choice to be lightworkers by acknowledging and aligning to the Source of their being are now in the process of being carried by our beloved Mother Earth from the third dimension, which is characterized by separation consciousness, through the transitional fourth dimension into the fifth dimension, which is characterized by unity consciousness.
Conversely, those human beings who have made the disempowering choice to be darkworkers by disacknowledging their Source are now in the process of having increasingly discordant experiences, which will soon make it impossible for them to remain on Planet Earth unless they wake up by making the empowering choice to acknowledge and align to the Source of their being.
In short, we are currently in the midst of humanity’s final examination prior to graduation, and the dividing of the ways is now upon us.
ADDENDUM #1 (29 September 2006)
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By William A. Cook
PalestineChronicle.com
http://palestinechronicle.com/story-09290662353.htm
“If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic … It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” (President George W. Bush, Sept. 15, 2006 report by AP’s Terence Hunt)
Citizens of the United States of America bear an
awesome responsibility to maintain control of their government’s behavior
since that government derives its powers from the consent granted it by the
citizens. When the government ceases to act in accord with the dictates of the
respective consciences of its citizens as determined by its foundational
documents – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of
Rights -- , when it violates the established principles that give this nation
legitimacy before the nations of the world through mutually accepted
agreements, charters, and conventions, when it abrogates the inalienable
rights granted the citizens by the Creator, when it declares unequivocally
that the citizens cannot dissent with an action or actions taken by the
government, then it is the right and the duty of the citizen to “alter or
abolish” that government.
For the past five years, the present government of the United States,
including the Executive branch, the Congress and the Senate, has committed a
“long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object
(that) evinces a design to reduce them (the citizens) under absolute
despotism.” As a citizen of these United States for 70 years, I refuse to be
ruled by a tyrant who imposes despotic, autocratic control on the citizens of
these United States through a series of clandestine actions that usurp the
rights of the people.
I refuse to accept as my government actions by the
current administration and its obsequious servants, the Republican Congress
and the Republican Senate, that include
* spying on its citizens without their knowledge or consent, an action
contrary to existing law;
* elimination of personal privacy through the Patriot Act, an action that presumes culpability, not innocence until proven guilty;
* preemptive invasion of other nations determined by the unilateral judgment of an all powerful executive that eviscerates the power of the peoples’ representatives;
* acts of extrajudicial execution and the
abandonment of rule by law thereby making the President, in effect, judge,
jury and executioner;
* acts of torture and the unilateral infliction of “acceptable” torture
techniques thus casting America before the world as an amoral nation beholden
to no international agreement and placing at risk the soldiers who defend it;
* imposition of illegal actions of war instituted through an orchestrated control of lies communicated to the citizenry thereby negating their democratic right to know that they might vote in accord with their conscience;
* levying an incredible tax burden on the citizens to pay for the consequences of these lies that will cost them and their children dearly for decades to come while corporations reap a windfall of profit from closed bids and corruption;
* infliction of a forced military occupation on a nation against the desires of its people and enabling that occupation to use illegal weapons of war contrary to the Geneva Conventions thus implicating its citizens in acts against humanity;
* development of diverse nuclear weaponry in direct violation of the UN Charter even as it decries other nations for attempting to acquire their own nuclear weaponry;
* acceptance, indeed, complete complicity and support of the barbaric and genocidal actions of the state of Israel against the people of Palestine, and most recently, and most deplorably, the abandonment of all pretense to the behavior of a civilized nation through its almost unanimous acceptance of a resolution written by the American Israeli Political Action Committee to endorse the Israeli state’s wanton destruction of the state of Lebanon.
These are not the actions of a democratic state; these are the actions of an autocratic state, an amoral state, an arrogant state that rules by force and acts more ruthlessly than the “extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective,” negating by its actions the unthinkable comparison the President decried.
For six years I have tracked the deception of this government as it surreptitiously acted to acquire more and more power by instilling in the American people the fear necessary to propel the autocrat to absolute power. Fear suppresses individual inquiry even as it enables control of the people, ostensibly to provide protection for them. Fear creates victims, especially in the minds of those who have not been violated. It is the unknown, what might be that metastasizes into the mental slave, the compliant citizen who marches to the drum of those who would control a society. It is the instrument of tyrants and dictators.
This government hobbles its citizens by using fear to manipulate their belief in end time prophecy, by implanting fear of imminent threat from “Islamofacist” fanatics, and by immersing the people in a false sense of “victim hood” that links them with the state of Israel as the only “friend” in the mid-east suffering from the same terrorist scourge. It is time to dispel this fear that enslaves. It is time to declare that this government no longer serves the people, that, indeed, it surpasses in its behavior “the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” It is not the “compassion and decency of the American people” that is in question; it is the absence of “compassion and decency” in this administration that is at fault.
It is time to withdraw recognition of it as the
government of these United States.
How can a citizen withdraw recognition, one might ask? I would answer simply
that no person with a conscience could recognize the validity of this
government that commits the actions listed above, each more heinous than the
last, the worst being its near universal acceptance of the genocide
perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinians, actions that are inclusive enough
to incorporate almost all the others. If every person of conscience gave sign
of their aversion to the behavior of this government by wearing a black
armband or posting a black flag or ribbon on the door or window ledge or by
flying our flag upside down, the numbers who distrust this government would be
manifest for the nation and the world to see and we would not have to wait
till election time to cast our conscience on the screen.
I tell you this, each day that passes casts more gloom over this nation as hundreds more die and thousands more are maimed, and all for a lie and all in our name. Appealing to our representatives accomplishes nothing; they are but lackeys to the administration and to the primary lobbing groups that determine for them America’s foreign policy, AIPAC and the lobbies for the military/industrial complex. We can no longer wait for the ballot box to determine our future; it may not be our conscience that is voted to office. Should we not act to declare this government unjust and hence unfit to be our government, then we will be no better than those who dictate and inflict these atrocities on the innocent. I will not have my conscience held hostage by an elite few who rule without a conscience. The honest citizen carries no weapons against his brothers and sisters; the honest citizen marches forward in tune with reason and common sense not fear and ignorance.
Think how many Lebanese died, how many were maimed, how many went homeless, how many die now after the cease fire because Israel left its calling card in the form of miniature mines for children to play with, how much destruction and wanton devastation this government inflicted in our name while our representatives waited for AIPAC to pen the resolution that gave license to such slaughter. If any justice came from this invasion it was this: the world was witness to the savagery and barbarism of Israel that ruthlessly devastated another people out of sheer anger turned to vengeance, a behavior that it has inflicted at will on the Palestinians behind locked gates and its Wall of Infamy.
Think now of the holocaust being inflicted on the people of Gaza, the reign of fire that comes with missiles launched into crowded civilian neighborhoods randomly killing mothers and children, a reign of terror that has lasted over three months as the Israelis lock the gates to prevent access to medical care, food, employment, and business, a reign of terror that starves the children, denies the people electricity and water, a reign of terror that is calculated, vicious, and inhumane. But it is done behind the Wall, out of sight of our conscience, locked out of public view by the Israeli IOF and its government that has closed access to Gaza by air, sea, or road. Americans cannot complain because our representatives have capitulated to an Israeli government gone mad, driven by racism as it surreptitiously rampages through schools, refugee camps, factories and homes killing, demolishing, executing at will a population that is cornered, starved, and near total death; yet America supports this mayhem justifying it as “self-defense.” How does an illegal occupying force operating on stolen land defend what they do not own and call it self-defense? What non-sense guides this crippled republic that our representatives would defend such dementia?
Where does one turn for guidance out of this morass? Will our Christian leaders proclaim the teachings of Jesus from the steeples of their churches? Will they condemn the government for its ruthlessness? Will they march in the streets to demand change? Will they echo Tolstoy’s astute observation, “to kill is incompatible with man’s uprightness…(for) A Christian, whose doctrine enjoins upon him humility, non-resistance to evil, love to all (even to the most malicious), cannot … join a class of men whose business it is to kill their fellow-men.” (Writings on Civil-Disobedience and Non-Violence). Oh, there are those who cry in the wilderness, congregations that have divested themselves of the atrocities inflicted by Israel and they are to be praised even as they are ignored by our representatives. There are the Christian Arabs in Bethlehem who weep each day as they see their flock decimated and their brothers and sisters murdered, maimed, and humiliated as that malicious Wall surrounds the birth place of their God and our representatives turn their backs. And there are voices for peace, millions of voices that decry the wanton brutality of this regime, Christian and Jew and Muslim, men and women who know they are drenched in the blood of the innocent because this despotic “President” has determined how they must think and how they must behave and our representatives kneel on bended knee before his throne.
But the horror of America today rests not just in the dementia of its leaders but in the distorted madness of its evangelical fanatics who have cloaked themselves in the armament of prophecy declaring themselves God’s voice on earth as they propel their sheep to wage endless war against God’s creatures. Men who follow not in the footsteps of the humble and peaceful Jesus but in the footsteps of prior fools and idiots that ran rampant in other days and times inflicting mayhem and death on the innocent. These fanatics do not know the teachings of Jesus; they read from a gospel of fear that has metamorphosed Jesus into a General who wields a bloody and fiery sword, stomping over the hills and valleys of the earth wreaking havoc and death, thus does the God of light and peace, of brotherly love, become the new Satan to whom these TV evangelists pay homage.
They are men of war who stand behind their pulpits in glistening cathedrals of gold and glass while they send the children of their congregations to slaughter. These men are criminals not Christians. They do not understand the bells of penitence for sin; the only bells they ring intone the opening of the Stock Market or the cash register.
Pastors like John Hagee, Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, Benny Hinn, and all the others who crowd the Cathedral of Television lead their respective laity into battle each day, marching at their head, holding aloft their missiles of fire and brimstone, tearing incendiary passages from the Old Testament and Book of Revelation that pour like acid from their mouths and flame forth against perceived disbelievers and infidels. Their exhortations on behalf of their malicious God pits dementia against the teachings of Jesus, pits vengeance against brotherhood, pits fear against love, and power against compassion.
Have we transformed a nation respectful of all, protective of the rights of all, assertive of the inherent rights that give personal authority to our conscience, into a nation that denies these values in order to inflict our will on all peoples of the mid-east? Has this nation granted to its President and Congress absolute authority to determine what we as a citizenry must obey if we are to be Americans? Have we returned to the days of McCarthy, days of fear and loathing, forcing on all the demented ideology of a few? Have we willingly accepted their lies that brought forth the invasion against the Iraqi people, the subterfuge that perpetuates the genocide of the Palestinians, the fear they use to compel loss of individual rights? Have we handed to this administration the one force that gives us power in this nation, our right to dissent? Liberty is not liberty if it is defined for you; freedom is but a word if it does not give you peace of mind; and conscience does not exist if you do not exercise it.
I would assert that as long as the compassion and decency of the American people are defined by this administration, we are a nation without compassion and without decency and as long as this administration directs the behavior of this nation, any comparison to Islamic extremists who “kill innocent women and children” pales in comparison with the hundreds and thousands this administration has slaughtered in our name in Palestine and Iraq and Lebanon. There is but one response and that is to deny it my consent.
-William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Depception: Bush's Mideast Policy He can be reached at: cookb@ULV.EDU.
Dear Friends:
In writing and publishing this personal declaration of independence from the
illegitimate and fraudulent United States government,
Professor William A. Cook has set an admirable and timely example for all
American citizens to follow.
It is time for the American people to wake up and reclaim their power by simply
withdrawing their consent from the illegitimate and fraudulent United States
government which no longer represents them.
In Love's pure Light,
All-is-one Heartsong
This crucially important article by the well-known and highly-esteemed
American journalist Chris Floyd on 2 October 2006,
regarding the unlimited power that has been granted to our corrupt and
fraudulent President by our corrupt and fraudulent Congress,
deserves your top-priority attention precisely because it reveals the core of
the problem to which Professor William A. Cook's
personal declaration of independence constitutes the appropriate response.
As I stated very clearly in the article which I wrote in 2002, over four years
ago, the solution to humanity's problem is for the
American people to reclaim their sovereign power by simply choosing to
withdraw their consent from the totally corrupted,
completely subverted, unmistakably fraudulent, and absolutely illegitimate
United States federal government.
Fatal Vision: The
Deeper Evil Behind the Detainee Bill
By Chris Floyd, TO UK Correspondent
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 02 October 2006
There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country - if the people lose their confidence in themselves - and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
- Walt Whitman
1.
It was a dark hour indeed on Thursday when the United States Senate voted to end the constitutional republic and transform the country into a "Leader-State," giving the president and his agents the power to capture, torture and imprison forever anyone - American citizens included - whom they arbitrarily decide is an "enemy combatant." This also includes those who merely give "terrorism" some kind of "support," defined so vaguely that many experts say it could encompass legal advice, innocent gifts to charities or even political opposition to US government policy within its draconian strictures.
All of this is bad enough - a sickening and cowardly surrender of liberty not seen in a major Western democracy since the Enabling Act passed by the German Reichstag in March 1933. But it is by no means the full extent of our degradation. In reality, the darkness is deeper, and more foul, than most people imagine. For in addition to the dictatorial powers of seizure and torment given by Congress on Thursday to George W. Bush - powers he had already seized and exercised for five years anyway, even without this fig leaf of sham legality - there is a far more sinister imperial right that Bush has claimed - and used - openly, without any demur or debate from Congress at all: ordering the "extrajudicial killing" of anyone on earth that he and his deputies decide - arbitrarily, without charges, court hearing, formal evidence, or appeal - is an "enemy combatant."
That's right; from the earliest days of the Terror War - September 17, 2001, to be exact - Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life and death over the entire world. If he says you're an enemy of America, you are. If he wants to imprison you and torture you, he can. And if he decides you should die, he'll kill you. This is not hyperbole, liberal paranoia, or "conspiracy theory": it's simply a fact, reported by the mainstream media, attested by senior administration figures, recorded in official government documents - and boasted about by the president himself, in front of Congress and a national television audience.
And although the Republic snuffing act just passed by Congress does not directly address Bush's royal prerogative of murder, it nonetheless strengthens it and enshrines it in law. For the measure sets forth clearly that the designation of an "enemy combatant" is left solely to the executive branch; neither Congress nor the courts have any say in the matter. When this new law is coupled with the existing "Executive Orders" authorizing "lethal force" against arbitrarily designated "enemy combatants," it becomes, quite literally, a license to kill - with the seal of Congressional approval.
How arbitrary is this process by which all our lives and liberties are now governed? Dave Niewert at Orcinus has unearthed a remarkable admission of its totally capricious nature. In an December 2002 story in the Washington Post, then-Solicitor General Ted Olson described the anarchy at the heart of the process with admirable frankness:
"[There is no] requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant," Olson argues.
"'There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this,' Olson said in the interview. 'There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.'"
In other words, what is safe to do or say today might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the "law" is merely the whim of the Leader and his minions: their "instincts" determine your guilt or innocence, and these flutterings in the gut can change from day to day. This radical uncertainty is the very essence of despotism - and it is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government.
And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder. Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people: a president ordering hits like a Mafia don? But that is our reality, and has been for five years. To overcome what seems to be a widespread cognitive dissonance over this concept, we need only examine the record - a record, by the way, taken entirely from publicly available sources in the mass media. There's nothing secret or contentious about it, nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know - if they choose to know it.
2.
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush signed a "presidential finding" authorizing the CIA to kill those individuals whom he had marked for death as terrorists. This in itself was not an entirely radical innovation; Bill Clinton's White House legal team had drawn up memos asserting the president's right to issue "an order to kill an individual enemy of the United States in self-defense," despite the legal prohibitions against assassination, the Washington Post reported in October 2001. The Clinton team based this ruling on the "inherent powers" of the "Commander in Chief" - that mythical, ever-elastic construct that Bush has evoked over and over to defend his own unconstitutional usurpations.
The practice of "targeted killing" was apparently never used by Clinton, however; despite the pro-assassination memos, Clinton followed the traditional presidential practice of bombing the hell out of a bunch of civilians whenever he wanted to lash out at some recalcitrant leader or international outlaw - as in his bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, or the two massive strikes he launched against Iraq in 1993 and 1998, or indeed the death and ruin that was deliberately inflicted on civilian infrastructure in Serbia during that nation's collective punishment for the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Here, Clinton was following the example set by George H.W. Bush, who killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Panamanian civilians in his illegal arrest of Manuel Noriega in 1988, and Ronald Reagan, who killed Moamar Gadafy's adopted 2-year-old daughter and 100 other civilians in a punitive strike on Libya in 1986.
Junior Bush, of course, was about to outdo all those blunderbuss strokes with his massive air attacks on Afghanistan, which killed thousands of civilians, and the later orgy of death and destruction in Iraq. But he also wanted the power to kill individuals at will. At first, the assassination program was restricted to direct orders from the president aimed at specific targets, as suggested by the Clinton memos. But soon the arbitrary power of life and death was delegated to agents in the field, after Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval for each attack, the Washington Post reported in December 2002. Nor was it necessary any longer for the president to approve each new name added to the target list; the "security organs" could designate "enemy combatants" and kill them as they saw fit. However, Bush was always keen to get the details about the agency's wetwork, administration officials assured the Post.
The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen, along with several foreign nationals, by a CIA drone missile in Yemen on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred on December 4, 2005, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al-Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner's son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.
However, there is simply no way of knowing at this point how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside all judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally. As a Pentagon document uncovered by the New Yorker in December 2002 revealed, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to ... enter countries surreptitiously."
What's more, there are strong indications that the Bush administration has outsourced some of the contracts to outside operators. In the original Post story about the assassinations - in those first heady weeks after 9/11, when administration officials were much more open about "going to the dark side," as Cheney boasted on national television - Bush insiders told the paper that "it is also possible that the instrument of targeted killings will be foreign agents, the CIA's term for nonemployees who act on its behalf.
Here we find a deadly echo of the "rendition" program that has sent so many captives to torture pits in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere - including many whose innocence has been officially established, such as the Canadian businessman Maher Arar, German national Khalid El-Masri, UK native Mozzam Begg and many others. They had been subjected to imprisonment and torture despite their innocence, because of intelligence "mistakes." How many have fallen victim to Bush's hit squads on similar shaky grounds?
So here we are. Congress has just entrenched the principle of Bush's "unitary executive" dictatorship into law; and it is this principle that undergirds the assassination program. As I wrote in December, it's hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and good in America have done.
But this should come as no surprise. They have known about it all along, and have not only countenanced Bush's death squad, but even celebrated it. I'll end with one more passage from that December article, which sadly is even more apt for our degraded reality today. It was a depiction of the one of the most revolting scenes in recent American history: Bush's state of the Union address in January 2003, delivered live to the nation during the final warmongering frenzy before the rape of Iraq:
Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists" had been arrested worldwide - "and many others have met a different fate." His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: "Let's put it this way. They are no longer a problem."
In other words, the suspects - and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects - had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything to end his torment, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds - or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world.
Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called "the meaning of American justice." And the assembled legislators ... applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little man's bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his sneering contempt for law - our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, brute, ignorant, ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day, not ever.
And now, in September 2006, we know they will never raise that protest. Oh, a few Democrats stood up at the last minute on Thursday to posture nobly about the dangers of the detainee bill - but only when they knew the it was certain to pass, when they had already given up their one weapon against it, the filibuster, in exchange for permission from their Republican masters to offer amendments that they also knew would fail. Had they been offering such speeches since October 2001, when the lineaments of Bush's presidential tyranny were already clear - or at any other point during the systematic dismantling of America's liberties over the past five years - these fine words might have had some effect.
Now the killing will go on. The tyranny that has entered upon the country will grow stronger, more brazen; the darkness will deepen. Whitman, thou should'st be living at this hour; America has need of thee.
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