03/27/07 "ICH
" -- - My friend Bernie says
ever since the Bush gang stormed the White House in
2000, then stormed the World Trade Center in 2001,
we've done nothing but run in circles like a bunch
of terrified chickens with our heads chopped off.
"We have no sense of direction," Bernie said, "we're
staggering around in a jungle of lies, deceit, and
scandal with no way out -- and that's the way they
planned it."
"You're kidding!" I exclaimed, astonished. "You mean
they
planned this mess? It's nothing but
bloody chaos out there --"
Bernie nodded. "You got that right. Bloody chaos is
the best -- the only -- way to get
what they're after.
Don't be fooled by those little American flags stuck
in the lapels of this bunch," Bernie continued. "The
people in this nation, the hungry and homeless, the
ill, the elderly, displaced Katrina victims, and
especially those returning from war's inferno either
in body bags or maimed physically, psychologically,
and spiritually aren't even blips on their
New World Order
radar screen. They suffer at the pleasure of the
president."
Bernie reminded me that shortly before the 2000
presidential campaign, when Dick Cheney was CEO of
Halliburton, he made a
speech to the
Institute of Petroleum in London where he complained
that oil producers "had to deal with the pesky
problem that once you find oil and pump it out of
the ground you've got to turn around and find more
or go out of business."
Cheney went on to say, "That means by 2010 we will
need on the order of an additional fifty million
barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come
from? Governments and the national oil companies are
obviously in control of about ninety per cent of the
assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government
business...the Middle East with two thirds of the
world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the
prize ultimately lies..."
Bernie grinned. "If that didn't set off alarms,
especially in Iraq, you gotta know they started
going off when, a year later, with his eyes on the
prize, Cheney appointed himself vice president, put
himself in charge of the nation's energy policy,
based that policy on the location of oil fields --
not only in Iraq and Iran but throughout the Persian
Gulf -- then mounted up and headed out to solve big
oil's 'pesky' problem."
I have to agree with Bernie. Cheney and his bumbling
bunch of
neo-conservative henchmen
are obsessed with this really crazy "vision" that
they can control the world. Flip through their
chilling masterpiece
and you'll see that they believe the world is theirs
-- everything, including space and cyberspace -- all
theirs. And, it'll hit you right between the eyes
that every one of these suckers is a flaming psycho.
If it takes lies, they'll lie. If it takes
imprisonment, torture, mass murder, either at home
or abroad -- they'll do that too.
Bernie says folks in this country have no idea what
they're up against. In spite of the draconian
USA Patriot Act,
they still hang onto the illusion that their
freedoms are protected by the US Constitution; yet
they emerge from each succeeding crisis with fewer
and fewer freedoms. "If Americans were willing -- or
capable -- of reading and thinking," Bernie said,
"they'd know that the war being waged throughout the
world began here at home, and the US Constitution
and Bill of Rights were its first victims."
Can't argue with that. The truth's been out there
for years. In December 2002, before the
Washington Post drank the Stepford Kool-Aid, it
published a riveting piece, "In Terror War, 2nd
Track for Suspects," in which writer Charles Lane
exposed Bush's executive power grab to strip courts
of all oversight or authority. Lane sounded the
alarm on the "parallel legal system in which
terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens
alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated,
tried and punished without legal protections
guaranteed by the ordinary system."
Lane went on to say the administration, with
approval of the "special" Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, could "order a clandestine
search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the
information gathered, secretly declare the citizen
an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a
U.S. military base." If the courts were aware of
this activity at all, they would have "very limited
authority to second-guess the detention." .
Lane's article is no longer available on the WaPo
site (surprise!), but can be found on
Common Dreams.org,
as can Jonathan Turley's August 2002
article,"Camps for
Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision," originally
published in the LA Times, but alas, is also no
longer there.
Turley, a straight-talking professor of
constitutional law at George Washington University,
exposed then Attorney General John Ashcroft's
"hellish vision" to incarcerate citizens he decided
were "enemy combatants," i.e., all who were disloyal
to Bush or dared to resist his "smoke-em-out" war on
terror. According to Turley, in Ashcroft's America,
"security precedes liberty." Liberty is nothing more
than a "rhetorical justification for increased
security," and citizens have a choice -- accept
autocratic rule and surrender their rights
peacefully, or be labeled enemy combatants and be
held indefinitely by the government, without
charges, a hearing, or access to a lawyer.
The
camps are there,
fully staffed and ready. In the absence of the US
Constitution, Bush's Executive Orders are in place.
Everything needed to keep this country running has
been contracted out. Halliburton has left the
building. Those in our society still having bragging
rights to civil liberties are illegal aliens, whose
growing numbers give new meaning to the word,
"surge." One swipe of Bush's pen will inflict
martial law and we will discover, too late, that we
live in a police state patrolled by jackbooted
Blackwater USA mercenaries
who will, indeed, serve at the pleasure of the
president..
Blackwater is in place to become this nation's
shadow police force and is its current shadow army.
Go back to the "dry run" of Katrina and take a look
at the heavily armed force that laid seige to New
Orleans, that sped through the streets rounding up
hurricane victims, packing them into a "detention"
arena where they were forced to stay for days
without food or water or assistance. Go back even
further -- the bodies hanging from the bridge in
Fallujah were not US soldiers, but Blackwater
mercenaries -- death squad troops 100,000 strong who
roam the Iraqi streets at will and stir up violence
and hatred against the uniformed US military.
We are awakening to find ourselves in a dark evil
tangle, a "puling sample jungle of woods." Reminds
me of the helplessness I felt on that bright,
sunshiny day when I pulled over at a roadside park
near Atlanta to take a short nap. When I awoke two
hours later, it was pitch dark -- and it was only
noon! Then, I realized with horror that I was
covered with
Kudzu -- I could
hear it relentlessly growing, munching, crunching
around me!
I was faced with a choice. I could hunker down in
fear and hope someone else would save me, or I could
at least make the effort to get out of the mess I
had gotten myself into. Armed with only a dull
pocket knife, I managed to slice my way out of the
jungle by cutting frantically for a few minutes and
then "inching" the car forward. Finally, after a
three-hour battle with the stuff, I was free! I sped
toward the state line with the carniverous vines hot
on my tail. I have never been back to Georgia. Only
the Devil goes down there...
It doesn't matter if that actually happened. The
important thing is that we are now faced with a
choice. We can hunker down and hope for the best, or
we can rise up and take our country back. Texas
Republican Congressman
Ron Paul says we
must act before it is too late and we find ourselves
being herded into camps. Paul says we must contact
every single member of
congress and demand "a repeal of
freedom-crushing legislation such as the Patriot act
and the
Military Commissions Act
and the Defense Authorization Act which essentially
wipes out Habeas Corpus."
They must be forcibly stopped. We must
impeach this unholy
gang of war criminals because they have no intention
of leaving office in 2008, or ever, if they are left
unchecked. We must not allow ourselves and our
children to be forced to live in a Kudzu World -- to
survive only at the pleasure of the president.
