A war on the
American people
20 Years of Government-Sponsored Tyranny: The Rise of the
Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“I tell you,
freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S.
government will lead the American people in — and the
West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking
life.”—Osama bin Laden (October 2001),
as reported by CNN
September 09, 2021
-- "Information
Clearing House -
What a strange and
harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001,
littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We
have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a
model of a representative democracy to being a model of how
to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep
with a police state.
Our losses are
mounting with every passing day.
What began
with the post-9/11
passage of the USA Patriot Act
has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard
against government overreach, corruption and abuse.
The
citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the
government wants to do in exchange for the phantom
promise of safety and security has
resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down
into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic,
self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle
upon which this nation was founded.
Set against a
backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police,
SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain,
overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body
scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the
like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the
White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have
been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled
down, and generally discarded.
The rights embodied
in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life
support.
Free speech, the
right to protest, the right to challenge government
wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the
right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in
government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily
integrity, representative government: all of these and more
have become casualties in the government’s war on the
American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since
9/11.
Indeed, since the
towers fell on 9/11, the U.S. government has posed a greater
threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or
foreign entity ever could.
While nearly 3,000
people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its
agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of
civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its
police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and
profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to
foreign nations (which too often fall into the hands of
terrorists), and foment civil unrest in order to keep the
security industrial complex gainfully employed.
The American people
have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on,
tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner
of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled,
censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process,
and killed.
In allowing
ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars,
color-coded warnings, pandemic lockdowns and other carefully
constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and
obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the U.S.
government—the government that was supposed to be a
“government of the people, by the people, for the
people”—has become the enemy of the people.
Consider that the
government’s answer to every problem has been more
government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual
liberty.
Every
crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early
beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the
government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer
expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great
Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The
COVID-19 pandemic.
Viewed in
this light, the history of the United States is a testament
to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and
government bureaucracy) grows. Or, to put it another way,
as government expands, liberty contracts.
This is how the
emergency state operates, after all, and we should know:
after all, we have spent the past 20 years in a state of
emergency.
From 9/11 to
COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the
helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the
government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In
turn, the government has been all too accommodating and
eager while also expanding its power and authority in the
so-called name of national security.
This is a
government that has grown so corrupt, greedy, power-hungry
and tyrannical over the course of the past 240-plus years
that our constitutional republic has since given way to
idiocracy, and
representative government has given way to a
kleptocracy (a government
ruled by thieves) and a
kakistocracy (a government
run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and
thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and
has little regard for the rights of American citizens).
What this really
amounts to is a war on the American people, fought on
American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with
a single-minded determination to use national crises,
manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the
American homeland into a battlefield.
Indeed, the
government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency
in the past 20 years has spawned a massive
security-industrial complex the likes of which have never
been seen before. According to the National Priorities
Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies,
since 9/11, the United States has
spent $21 trillion on “militarization,
surveillance, and repression.”
Clearly, this is
not a government that is a friend to freedom.
Rather, this
is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate
partners, views the citizenry as
consumers and bits of data
to be bought, sold and traded.
This is a
government that
spies on and treats its people as if they have no right to
privacy, especially in
their own homes while the freedom to be human is being
erased.
This is a
government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the
public’s biomedical data as a convenient means by which to
penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.
Incredibly, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare
counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm
DARPA) will take the lead in
identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or
violent inclinations among the populace
by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple
Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.
This is a
government that routinely engages in taxation without
representation, whose elected officials lobby for our votes
only to
ignore us once elected.
This is a
government comprised of petty bureaucrats,
vigilantes masquerading as cops,
and faceless technicians.
This is a
government that railroads taxpayers into financing
government programs whose only purpose is to increase the
power and wealth of the corporate elite.
This is a
government—a warring empire—that forces its taxpayers to pay
for wars abroad that serve
no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military
industrial complex.
This is a
government that subjects its people to
scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA
and
VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets
like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth
Vader look-alikes.
This is a
government that uses
fusion centers, which
represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal,
state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry’s
movements, record their
conversations, and catalogue their transactions.
This is a
government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to
a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been
reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or
unless they can prove their innocence.
This is a
government that treats its people like second-class citizens
who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize
and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the
government’s plans for this country.
This is a
government that uses
free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws
to silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict
their First Amendment right to speak truth to power.
This is a
government that persists in renewing the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA),
which allows the president and the military to arrest and
detain American citizens indefinitely based on the say-so of
the government.
This is a
government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which
opened the door to all manner of government abuses and
intrusions on our privacy.
This is a
government that, in direct opposition to the dire warnings
of those who founded our country, has allowed the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a
standing army by way of
programs that
transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police.
This is a
government that has militarized American’s domestic police,
equipping them with military weapons such as “tens
of thousands of machine guns;
nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; a million hollow-point
bullets; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision
equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and
aircraft,” in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons
and the like.
This is a
government that has provided cover to police when they shoot
and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain
way, or moving a certain way, or holding
something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a
gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police
officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat
to their safety.
This is a
government that has created a Constitution-free zone within
100 miles inland of the border around the United States,
paving the way for Border Patrol agents
to search people’s homes,
intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their
belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly
66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million
people) now live within that 100-mile-deep,
Constitution-free zone.
This is a
government that treats public school students
as if they were prison inmates,
enforcing zero tolerance policies that
criminalize childish behavior,
and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote
memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and
critical thinking.
This is a
government that is operating in the negative on every front:
it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from
the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from
foreign governments and Social Security)
to keep the government operating and keep funding
its endless wars abroad.
Meanwhile, the nation’s sorely neglected
infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams,
bridges, airports and roads—is rapidly
deteriorating.
This is a
government that has empowered police departments to make a
profit at the expense of those they have sworn to protect
through the use of asset forfeiture laws, speed traps, and
red light cameras.
This is a
government whose gun violence—inflicted on unarmed
individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized
police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot
first and ask questions later—poses
a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation
than any mass shooter.
There are now reportedly
more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed
with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.
This is a
government that has allowed the presidency to become a
dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless
of which party is in power.
This is a
government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and
freedom fighters as enemies of the state.
This is a
government that has in recent decades unleashed untold
horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the
name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth,
scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all
packaged in the guise of the greater good.
This is a
government that allows its agents to break laws with
immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at
them.
This is a
government that speaks in a language of force. What is this
language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads.
Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass
arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches.
Surveillance cameras. Kevlar
vests. Drones. Lethal
weapons. Less-than-lethal
weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber
bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of
journalists. Crowd
control tactics.
Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.
This is a
government that justifies all manner of government tyranny
and power grabs in the so-called name of national security,
national crises and national emergencies.
This is a
government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this
country’s most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the
United States, the
world’s largest exporter of arms,
has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up
the military industrial complex and maintain its endless
wars abroad.
This is a
government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny
out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential
freedoms are trampled in the process.
This is a
government that routinely undermines the Constitution and
rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry,
eviscerating individual freedoms so that its own powers can
be expanded.
This is a
government that believes it has the authority to search,
seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and
arrest any individual at any time and for
the slightest provocation, the Constitution be
damned.
In other
words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People
and in its fictional counterpart
The Erik Blair Diaries,
this is not a government that believes in, let alone
upholds, freedom.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is
founder and president
The Rutherford
Institute. His books Battlefield
America: The War on the American People and
A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police
State
are available at
www.amazon.com. He
can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford
Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is
available at
www.rutherford.org.