Game over — and game begun

It’s been awhile since I gave you a rant — this is pretty close. I told you awhile back that I’d tabled a Constitutional rant … I was sniffing the air and alarmed; well, here it is, refined a bit … and the activity of the last weeks has solidified the stink of garbage and made it all too real. It’s time for a shift in how we do business — we have no choice.

I’m reading Jeff Toobin’s new book on the Supreme’s, “The Nine - Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.” It’s fascinating … and the details of a thirty-plus year design for radical takeover is scaring the hell out of me. It chronicles the rise of the Right Wing … in the judicial arena, that’s represented by The Federalists, self-righteous Neanderthals of the often-religious kind. You know how I feel about this — how dangerous this game has become, how critical each seat in the judicial body, how mindful we must be of the inside deals and politicking that has given us a conservative court even as the numbers show clearly that the American public is more liberal in its habits and concerns than ever before.

Judges, especially Supreme’s, are appointed to be apolitical … much like juries, they are tasked to follow the law while factoring in the sociological complexities of their times. If law is found wanting in regard to those complexities, then new laws are deemed appropriate. The Federalists are purists who believe that there should be no new factoring that wasn’t inherent in the actual document of the Constitution; therefore, it’s their duty to turn back the clock on laws made from “activist judges.” Two Federalist judges are the only clear victory George Bush has given his party; and that was a whopper of a victory.

The paradox is that these jurists THEMSELVES become activist in their turning back of the clock — the only law they pledge to support is anachronistic and hearkens back to a time when women didn’t vote and slaves were property — and vice versa. Their shot heard ’round the world happened in Bush/Cheney v. Gore, when politics most decisively won the day … and sent Justice Breyer into such a tailspin that he considered resigning from the highest court in the land. That was the beginning of the coup — the one we’ve been living under for seven long and hateful years. Most of you reading this knew it then, and know it now. We’ve been waiting for the rest of the nation to get a clue … and now that they have one, we’re stuck in a powerful loop of psyops, corporately-inspired MSM complicity, Executive defiance and Democratic dissembling that keeps us spinning — the Pubs are still in control.

The Republican cogs are still turning, and they’ll grind our bones if they can — bet on it. I’m tired of hearing that they mean well — THEY DON’T. The leadership of the Republican party does not mean well at all; in pursuit of power for powers sake, in desire to remake this nation in their own image, they mean to radicalize their agenda permanently and force feed it to the nation, if need be. The followers of the Republican message do not mean well, either — they are small and petty people, half-cooked in consciousness and tribal at best; I would suggest that they are only barely aware of their own internal bias and hatefulness, which leads them to project out on the “enemy” … and their leaders play their failings like a cheap fiddle. About 25% of the base is lost in their religious crackpottery, so there is no help there — only life itself can wear them down; the rest are at play, kept in the game by the “gotta win” message and fear-tapes that put them in defensive posture. They are old paradigm people in a world birthing a new paradigm … their days are numbered and that makes them even more merciless in their desire to prevail.

Today, the Republican body is demoralized and restless, wondering if it can get its wet dream of Hillary as the Blue candidate and give it another chance to win. Karl Rove, and now the Dubby himself, have crowned her Queen of Hearts, which you KNOW they wouldn’t do if they didn’t have a plan; they have no one to vote FOR, so they can’t WAIT to have their opportunity to parade the considerable Clinton-family-baggage for their base, unifying them and pulling them to the polls for an anti-Clinton vote. It’s already begun. Hil has enthusiastically taken the crown offered her and she’s running with it — she somehow parlayed ALL of the pundit shows last Sunday, an unthinkable fete in itself. Meanwhile, the Blue appears to be gobbling this bait whole with the help of MSM. What the HELL!! We’re getting steamrollered AGAIN by a clueless public and a witless party!

Did you know that Roberts received his appointment as a pay off for his assistance in busting the Florida Supreme’s that resulted in the election being passed to the High Court? Alito was selected for his entire career of radical conservatism, focused on chipping away at Roe. Think back on the Dem’s vetting of these people — how they thought them “reasonable” and took them at their word that they respected law, as it is currently written. You think they didn’t know the deal? They hadn’t heard the rumors? They weren’t aware of the implications? How hard did they try to block these candidates? They just rolled over … Feinstein comes to mind, beholden to her husbands military contracts — the female equivalent of Joe Lieberman.

This is where the rubber meets the road — this is where we’ve lost the game. The Dems have never been big on unity — now they’re not even big on integrity; one article below points out that Bush’s egregious and hypocritical string of veto’s are calculated to prove the Dems unable to lead … its working. Pelosi refuses to bring impeachment to the table because it’s “impractical” — the war could be stopped at any time if Pelosi or Reid refused to bring a funding bill to the floor but that wouldn’t be “patriotic” — who ARE these people? Pods?? They were sent to the Hill with a mandate in November of 2006 … and they’ve been tone deaf ever since! Blue Dogs aside, its clear that the lobbyists, and military industrial-complex, own these people … all of them … and thinks it owns us, as well.

On Anderson Coopers CNN newscast yesterday, Bill Clinton went after the Republicans about the MoveOn hypocrisy, showing some temper. The point … how the Pubs did a bait and switch … went unnoticed; the pundits grabbed that to discuss the possibility of the tandem Presidency the Clinton’s would brings to the nation, and how that would unify the Republicans to vote for whichever dismal candidate won the nod. We can’t discount this! We do so at our peril!

The energy is tricky out there, the situation complicated and difficult and this is not a pleasant post — but after yesterdays groveling Congressional bow to the power-mongers giving them free reign to attack Iran … and with only 22 Democratic Senators seeing the handwriting on the wall, BIG handwriting reading “Armageddon,” for cripes sake … who among us will stand in the way of darker deeds? Not a single Democratic candidate has spoken to our Constitutional woes, either [Chris Dodd's the exception] — you think Hil would turn back the dial on unitary power? You better think again! The ACTUAL emergency in this nation is the one that began 7 years ago, and continues today — the slow strangling of Constitutional supremacy, illustrated by the Republican filibuster of habeaus corpus last week. The touchstone for civilized discourse and humanitarian equity, dismissed like a beggar in the streets. And that’s because these cretins and miscreants have found a BETTER WAY?

I’m beginning to worry that we can’t return to sanity unless we can get Gore to run — and I don’t say that lightly. I love Edwards and Kucinich, I like Richardson and Dodd, I’d like to see them get a fair shake for the candidacy but I don’t know if it can happen, with Fall already here and the primaries moved so far ahead. Money is still calling the tune, and Obama’s second, with a candidacy that seems increasingly lethargic — he also didn’t show to vote in either the MoveOn or Lieberman-Kyl bills, and I find that very disappointing. Both he and Edwards are taking shots at Hil, now, smelling their own blood in the water — I’d like to think it would help, I don’t want another Republican in the White House. “Center” is still in Red territory — and thirty years of backroom deals and conniving has put our Constitutional freedoms in the kind of serious jeopardy that few realize … if they actually did, they’d be in the streets. WHICH … I believe … is the only way we’re going to get this country back; and WHICH … as we twiddle our thumbs and pretend we’re not in a fascist dictatorship … will become ever more difficult and dangerous to do. My hero’s are in Burma, today — THAT is courage; and that is what we’ll need.

We need to put our heart where our mouth is — do you realize that the Internet is the last bastion of truth-telling in this nation? Olbermann and Stewart can’t be counted on to last forever! And how much activism have we dedicated to keeping the net free from attack? It’s just one more [yawn] click to make on one more e-petition. Our lethargy is killing us … literally and figuratively.

I will keep looking for the pony in the horseshit … some indication that Iran isn’t next; but with the exception of a complete economic meltdown in this nation … which is a real possibility … I can’t think of anything standing in the way of the Bush/Cheney ego and their push to dominate the globe. The old game is over — and a new one begun. The fates may be kind and we’ll avoid such a pass, but it won’t be because of anything WE do … nothing we do matters, at this point. We aren’t represented. Period. Not one of the top three Dem candidates will declare for a pullout from the Iraqi civil war … three million of us that participate with MoveOn just got censured by our own Congress for “poor taste and wingnuttery.” We need a new unifying position and we need it quickly. We’ve become a Banana Republic … and we need to behave as our neighbors to the South do when opposing a dictatorship — we need to find our feet and our picket signs and fill the streets.

Gore seems to be the only Big Dog with a vision I can live with and a sure ability to cream the opposition. He’s one of the few people in this nation that talks like a grown up — he captures our imagination. If he wins the Peace Prize, who could stop him? In a time of “closure” with the past, that would seal the deal and tally the books. He says he’s given up on politics and who could blame him, but I don’t see another e-brake out there that the Republic can grab to stop this massacre of a nation. Would he be a great president?

He’d be sane, and slow the cogs … he’d move the nation from glorifying what my son calls “The Great American Penis,” and allow it to look out toward a global community, awaiting our leadership and collaboration. Maybe that’s enough to work toward, considering how low on the moral food chain we’ve become. This much is clear — while we’ve been playing this noxious little game, the world has moved on and we are no longer the only superpower … when this is over, we may not even BE a superpower. At a time when the world desperately needed the highest interpretation of American principal, we took a little lapse into childishness; and from that, we may never recover.

Good. Then maybe we can turn our attention to fixing our bridges, educating our kids, and begin to lick our wounds at home. Maybe we can begin again. Maybe THAT’s the pony in the horseshit!

These are important reads — save them for the weekend if you don’t have time for them now. We’ve got to get realistic about what we’ve got if we’re going to be effective in any way; this country is going to implode from within eventually, and if we’re going to ride that wave we’ll need our wits about us. We need to start voting with our money — boycotting — making the sacrifices in this war against liberty that Bush won’t call for in his war against “evil doers.” It’s time to get smart and tough — past time.

Jude

BREAKING: Lieberman-Kyl’s Iran amendment passes
Think Progress
[open for further links]

By a vote 76-22, the Senate passed the Lieberman-Kyl amendment, which threatens to “combat, contain and [stop]” Iran via “military instruments.” Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) called the amendment “Cheney’s fondest pipe dream” and said it could “read as a backdoor method of gaining Congressional validation for military action.”

UPDATE: Before the vote today, changes were made to the original amendment, with paragraphs three and four taken out completely. This paragraph was also added at the end:

“Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated on September 16, 2007 that “I think that the administration believes at this point that continuing to try and deal with the Iranian threat, the Iranian challenge, through diplomatic and economic means is by the preferable approach. That the one we are using. We always say all options are on the table, but clearly, the diplomatic and economic approach is the one that we are pursuing.”

Read the full marked up amendment here.

UPDATE II: The roll call for the vote is here. The following senators voted against the amendment:

Biden (D-DE)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Byrd (D-WV)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Dodd (D-CT)
Feingold (D-WI)
Hagel (R-NE)
Harkin (D-IA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Leahy (D-VT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
Lugar (R-IN)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Sanders (I-VT)
Tester (D-MT)
Webb (D-VA)
Wyden (D-OR)

Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL) didn’t vote.

Supreme Court to hear voter ID case
A GOP-backed Indiana law requires photo identification to be shown at the polls. In their appeal, Democrats say the policy discourages voters.
David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times
September 26, 2007

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to decide whether states can require voters to show government-issued photo identification before they cast a ballot.

The justices’ ruling, due by the end of June, could have a major effect on the 2008 presidential election and on congressional races in several states.

New photo ID laws in Indiana, Georgia and Arizona have been upheld in the last year, while a Missouri law was blocked from taking effect. By agreeing to hear an appeal from Indiana Democrats, the justices signaled that they wanted this legal dispute resolved before voters go to the polls next fall.

Since 2002, Republicans have championed photo IDs as a means to prevent fraudulent voting. Under the laws, a voter must show government-issued identification — such as a driver’s license or a passport — to prove to poll workers that he or she is indeed the person registered to vote.

Democrats, however, have strongly opposed the requirement, saying it tends to discourage people who usually vote Democratic. Tens of thousands of poor, elderly, disabled, homeless or foreign-born citizens do not have valid photo ID cards, Democrats say.

An AARP survey, for example, found that 3% of elderly registered voters in Indiana did not have a current driver’s license. Even if these people had cast ballots in the past and remained eligible voters, Democrats argue, they might be dissuaded from voting next year because of the photo ID requirement.

What’s more, Democrats say, it is exceedingly rare for would-be voters to adopt another person’s identity to cast a ballot. They contend that fraudulent voting is more likely among those who file absentee ballots by mail.

In defense of the laws, Republicans say states — including Indiana — offer free photo ID cards to any voter who needs one, so long as there are basic documents, such as a birth certificate, to establish identity.

This issue has divided state legislators along partisan lines, and the same split has been apparent in the judicial rulings. The U.S. appeals court in Chicago upheld Indiana’s law on a 2-1 vote, with two Republican appointees in the majority and a Democratic jurist dissenting.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP and the Indiana Democratic Party filed appeals, arguing that the photo rule would act to deprive citizens of the right to vote — as poll taxes or literacy tests did before the 1960s.

On Monday, the Supreme Court justices met for the first time since returning from their summer recess. They spent the day sifting through more than 2,000 appeals. And on Tuesday morning, they announced they had agreed to take up 17 of them, including the photo ID case.

“There’s no right more important than the right to vote,” said Ken Falk, legal director for the ACLU of Indiana. “If recent history teaches us anything, it’s that each vote matters. We are hopeful that the Supreme Court will recognize this bedrock principle of our constitutional democracy.”

But Indiana Atty. Gen. Steve Carter said those challenging the law were exaggerating its effect. “Most telling of all, despite the hue and cry about the supposed burdens of this law,” he said, the lawyers who filed suit could not identify “a single actual voter who could or would not vote because of the voter ID law.”

The Republican drive against voter fraud is a legacy of former White House political director Karl Rove. He had highlighted reports of suspect voting and pressed Republican leaders to move aggressively to combat it.

The GOP was most effective in pointing to problems when it came to registering new voters. Some liberal organizations sponsored drives to register prospective voters, and they paid collectors to gather signature cards. Later investigations found these groups repeatedly signed up people who were not eligible to vote. Some were not citizens, were not residents of the area or were felons who had lost their right to vote.

However, there was far less evidence that such voter drives resulted in fraudulent balloting; usually, the ineligible registrants were wiped from the rolls beforehand. Indiana officials admitted during the lower court battle over the state’s new law that they could not point to an example of a voter who succeeded in casting a ballot by impersonating another Indiana voter.

The Democratic National Committee on Tuesday applauded the court’s decision to hear the Indiana case. “The Supreme Court will have an opportunity to right a wrong perpetrated by the GOP,” said Donna Brazile, chairwoman of the DNC Voting Rights Institute. “Unjust and highly restrictive voter ID laws,” she said, were part of “a reprehensible partisan scheme to suppress voter turnout.”

Republican National Committee officials did not issue a statement Tuesday, but they have stressed in the past that states such as Indiana were not preventing or deterring any eligible voter from casting a ballot.

The Indiana cases, Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board and Indiana Democratic Party vs. Rokita, will probably be heard in January.

‘A Coup Has Occurred’
Daniel Ellsberg, Consortium News
Text of a speech delivered September 20, 2007
September 26, 2007

Editor’s Note: Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming war with Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at an American University symposium on Sept. 20.

Below is an edited transcript of Ellsberg’s remarkable speech:

I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.

If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.

Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.

And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.

It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …

This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.

Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.

Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.

The Next Coup

Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world – in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.

I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.

I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.

That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.

It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president – elected or not – with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.

When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country – but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.

They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”

It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.

Founders Had It Right

Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.

It’s not just “our way of doing things” – it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.

That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …

But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.

Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t, it doesn’t even make it unlikely.

That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – and the public and the media, we have freed the White House – the president and the vice president – from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.

And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.

And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. … I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.

What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.

And … we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.

However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small perhaps – anyway not large – possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.

Restoring the Republic

Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.

Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little…

We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, “traitor,” “weak on terrorism” – names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.

How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.

I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.

And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.

I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.

I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada – who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war – is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously in upholding his oath.

The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.

Congressional Courage

On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate – and frankly of the Republicans – that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.

I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.

Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.” Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?

I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.

We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words “swear him in” when it came to testimony.

I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.

And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves – they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.

That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.

When America Went Fascist
Chris Rowthorn, Smirking Chimp
Sep 25 2007

“Fascism: a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator”

~ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000

It is a truism in the blogosphere that one more terrorist attack will turn America into a fascist state. People speculate about what fascism in America will look like, or how they might fight it. Others boast that they plan to flee the country ahead of the coming fascist takeover of the United States. One cannot read these posts without a sense of bitter irony, because one thing is clear to those who are watching carefully:

The United States of America is already a fascist state.

The United States turned fascist on December 11, 2000. On that day, the Supreme Court essentially appointed George W. Bush president of the United States, stopping the recount of Florida votes, and, hence, the democratic process. The justices of the court then slipped away by night, ashamed of their role in murdering America’s great experiment in democratic rule.

The Supreme Court decision of December 11, 2000 is the modern American equivalent to German President Hindenburg’s swearing in of Hitler as chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. By swearing in Hitler as chancellor, Hindenburg set in motion a process which led to the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. In the case of the Nazis, the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933 was the catalyst they needed to cement their grip on power. In the case of Bush and his backers, the tragedy of September 11, 2001 was the catalyst they needed to complete their full takeover of the American government.

When one looks at present-day America and reads plaintive musings about if and when America will turn fascist, it is useful to ask oneself the following question: When do you think the average German realized that he or she was living under a fascist dictatorship? How about the Japanese or Italians of the same period? Do you think that Hitler, Mussolini or Tojo made a public announcement to the effect of, “Dear Citizens: Please be advised that you no longer have any rights or political power. We have taken control of the government. Opposition and resistance are futile and will be punished.”

The fact is, most of the “good” citizens of these countries clung desperately to the notion that it was business as usual long after constitutional government was dead and buried. Sure, they knew that their governments were a little further to the right than normal, but as long as they kept earning money and eating well, they ignored the grim realities of fascism.

It’s easy to understand why: the “good” citizens weren’t members of officially scapegoated groups or political activists, and thus they never felt the iron first of fascism. It’s not like the government just suddenly started rounding up people at random and trucking them off to camps and executing them. No, it was only the “bad ones” who were carted off. It was the John Walker Lindhs, the Jose Padillas, the illegal immigrants and the Muslim Americans of their day who were carted off.

In fact, for the average citizen of Germany, Japan or Italy, it was only when the military adventures of their fascist governments started to go seriously awry did the reality dawn on them. Until then, if anything, they merely felt the stirrings of extreme patriotism and perhaps even satisfaction as their countries expanded outward. Indeed, for many, it was only when their countries lay in ashes did they fully understand what had happened. Only then could they see that a kind of cancer had run wild in their countries and come perilously close to destroying them.

In 2007, the average American is in exactly the same position as the typical German, Japanese or Italian citizen of the early to mid-1930s. Unless you happen to be a Muslim, a left-wing political activist, or a regular reader of left-wing political websites or journals, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s business as usual in the United States of America. You rise in the morning, read the morning paper, commute to work, get a paycheck, hit the ATM and watch the usual shows on television in the evening. Sure, we’re officially “at war” but other than a few news stories and the usual yellow ribbons and bumper stickers, this doesn’t really intrude into our realities.

But while all of us go about our lives like nothing has changed, the Constitution of the United States has been suspended, and with it, the democracy that it enshrines. Sure, Bush has never announced that he has suspended the Constitution. Rather, he has subjected it to a death by a thousand cuts. For, at last count, George W. Bush has appended 139 signing statements to laws passed by Congress, containing challenges to over 750 individual laws. These signing statements amount to 139 written declarations that George W. Bush and his allies consider themselves to be unconstrained by the law of the land and the will of the people. Or, to quote Mr. Bush: “(The Constitution) is just a goddamned piece of paper!”

On top of this, the Bush administration has repeatedly ignored subpoenas asking for information and directed aides not to comply with requests for information. And, more broadly, the Bush administration has made it clear that it will respond neither to the will of the people nor the will of Congress. Thus, in word and deed, the Bush administration is a dictatorship. And a country under the rule of a dictator is, at least by the definition at the start of this article, a fascist country.

Thus, in the last seven years, the United States has gone from a weak democracy, in which the people had weak but nominal control over their government, to a system where the government is under the control of “a unitary executive.” And, of course, “unitary executive” is how you say “fuhrer” in modern American English.

Of course, this is not news to those unfortunate Americans who are presently languishing in military prisons without access to lawyers or due process. But, for most Americans, it seems absurd or even hysterical to declare that we are living in a fascist state. Arguments about signing statements, unitary executive theory or past Supreme Court decisions are mere abstractions and gain little traction.

Perhaps this is because fascism is like pornography: it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Indeed, the best way to distinguish pornography from art is not logical but aesthetic. Similarly, I would suggest that the best way to determine if a country is fascist is not intellectual at all, but aesthetic.

Fascism has a style, a language and a mood all its own. When enough of these outward signs of fascism are present, you can reasonably conclude that the country in question is fascist. For this reason, I have put together this short guide to some of the more obvious distinguishing features of fascism.

A Brief Guide to the Aesthetics of Fascism:

–Hypnotized by symbols: Whether it be the swastika of the Nazis, the rising sun of imperial Japan or the fasces of the Italian National Fascist Party, simple, visually striking and endlessly repeated symbols are the “look” of a fascist government. Check out any Bush speaking engagement, from his “mission accomplished” speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to the Republican National Convention, and you will see him surrounded by the Stars and Stripes. And where Nazi leaders wore swastika armbands, American fascists wear American flag pins on their lapels. Sinclair Lewis observed that, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” The symbols may be different, but if it looks like fascism, it’s probably fascism.

–Impoverished language: Umberto Eco wrote that, “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” George W. Bush’s tortured syntax is perfectly suited to speaking this language. In describing Newspeak, Orwell declared that words will be “not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be.” Bush’s speeches are peppered with words like freedom and democracy, when in fact, he means slavery and tyranny. Moreover, Bush is fond of accusing countries like Iran of illegally interfering in the affairs of other countries, much as Hitler accused other European countries of aggression as his armies overran the continent. The language may be different, but one fact is inescapable: if it sounds like fascism, it’s probably fascism.

–Mood of pervasive fear: In Bush’s America, people rightly believe that you may be subject to violence, harassment, arbitrary arrest or even torture if you challenge authority figures or speak out against the government. Since I started writing articles on political topics I have heard the comment repeated time and again: “You’re going to be put on a list.” Americans of all stripes live in fear of their government and few, if any, would dare question any authority figure, even if faced with the most blatant and unwarranted abuse of power. It is a sad fact that Americans are the only people in the developed world where citizens actively fear their own government. The tools of torture may have changed, but the essential fact remains: if it feels like fascism, it’s probably fascism.

–The nation as homeland: The exaltation of the nation state as a promised land is perhaps the most basic sign of a fascist state. Twenty years ago, it would have been unimaginable to refer to the United States as a “homeland.” The word would have stuck people as both antiquated and overtly totalitarian. Now, it is bandied about freely and we actually have a Department of Homeland Security. The strikingly fascist overtones of the word itself are troubling enough, but more troubling still is the thinking behind the word: America is an island in a hostile sea, surrounded by enemies who we must either vanquish or be vanquished by. Once again, if it sounds like fascism, it’s probably fascism.

At this point, it is clear that America is in the early stages of fascism; it hasn’t yet metastasized into the outright jackbooted fascism of Nazi Germany. But the country is poised like a boulder at the top of a slope, ready to roll into the abyss. In fact, it will take a miracle to keep this from happening. Consider the factors that could easily unleash outright fascism in the United States: the accelerating collapse of the US dollar; the follow-on effects from the subprime loan debacle; soaring energy prices (peak oil); catastrophic weather events caused by global warming; and, of course, the one thing that Bush’s entire foreign policy seems almost guaranteed to bring about: another large-scale terrorist attack on American soil. Any one of these by itself could trigger outright fascism. Combine two or more, and American fascism is 100% certain.

We must realize that the full machinery of outright fascism is already in place. Private security firms like Blackwater are ready and willing to serve as the new Blackshirts. Patriot Act II has been written and provides the full “legal” framework for completely revoking the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and establishing martial law. The Pentagon has established Northcom to organize military operations in the United States and Canada. The Posse Comitatus Act has been gutted to allow the National Guard to serve in police actions all across the country. And detention centers have been built across the land and plans have been laid to intern millions of Americans.

History teaches that there is a point of no return in the evolution of a fascist state. Once that line is crossed, there is no turning back until the country lies in ashes and millions lie dead both inside and outside the country. If you don’t think it could happen in the United States of America, then you don’t remember how easily Americans let themselves be robbed of their precious civil liberties in the aftermath of 9-11.

Thus, a presidential candidate who does not make restoration of constitutional government the centerpiece of his or her campaign should not even be considered. The first and most pressing order of business must be to repeal the Patriot Act in its entirety. Provisions that Democratic lawmakers deem essential to national security can be restored on a piece-by-piece basis as parts of other legislation. The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which suspended habeas corpus, must be repealed. The Department of Homeland Security must be downsized and brought under full and transparent civilian control.

In the longer term, meaningful campaign finance reform and public funding for elections must be enacted in order to put political power back into the hands of the people and to take it out of the hands of the Pentagon and allied industries. Because ultimately, it is the military-industrial complex, working with the electoral support of right-wing religious fundamentalists, that is behind American fascism.

A final note:

The least discussed news story of recent history appeared in the New York Times on February 4, 2006:

“The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary…KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space.”

Since it seems unlikely that cruise ships loaded with illegal immigrants are likely to wash up on American shores any time soon, one has to wonder what they mean by “new programs that require additional detention space”.

For the love of God, IS THIS AMERICA?

The Attack on MoveOn.org and Other Dangerous ‘Fingerprints’
Naomi Wolf, HuffPo
September 24, 2007

Yeah, I didn’t like the wording of the ad either. But the attack on MoveOn.org by the Senate last week is not an aberration but is part of a dangerous — and accelerating — trend of echoes from the past.

Students of history know that the National Socialists in Germany, before they came to power, made multiple assaults on democracy by pushing for laws and that expanded penalties for opponents’ speaking out against certain subjects. What they — and then Stalin, who studied Hitler — perfected was the identification of a `third rail’ of untouchable subjects that one could never approach critically without facing escalating penalties — job loss, personal attacks, or, just a little later, criminal charges. These subjects were the war, the party itself, and the military. Making these subjects sacred and untouchable allowed National Socialists to commit any number of crimes by explaining that the abusive actions were taken in the name of the off-limits-to-criticism ideals.

Then once they came to power, they developed an ever-expanding network of laws criminalizing ever expanding minor actions critical of the state or of the military or the paramilitary forces; they developed broad definitions of `treason’ and of what it meant to `impugn the honor of the nation’ — so that soon it became a crime against the state, defined as an assault on patriotism and a form of treason, to listen to the BBC or to speak up for an imprisoned Jew or communist.

The precedent set last week, of the U.S. Senate saying that we in America face possible state censure for what can be ANY criticism of the military — on the basis that such criticism can `impugn the honor’ of the military — is dangerous in the extreme if you know your history.

First of all, and I say this with tremendous admiration for the men and women of the U.S. military, this is a ‘duh’ moment if you have read anything about closing societies of the past: in a closing society the leaders will ALWAYS send trusted, admired military personnel to make its case to the population and to apparently legitimize the power grab: Pinochet secured his coup by terrifying citizens about a plan to assassinate military leaders and then sent military leaders to speak to citizens, asking them not to defend Allende. The list of would-be dictators who utilize trusted military men and women for these advance PR purposes is quite long.

The fact is that military leaders in our own and other countries can and do sometimes lie to the people to advance the interests of what are sometimes corrupt leaders. This is not a personal attack but an acknowledgment of history — witness the Vietnam war. Had Colin Powell been called to account for lying to us and the UN about the WMD, nearly four thousand Americans might be alive today; but had this benchmark of state censure for American speech preceded his testimony, even more voices would have been stilled. The Founders placed in Congress the ability to oversee the military precisely because they knew that when pressed by a corrupt executive, any standing army, even an American one, even a standing army made up of nothing but decent men, can be directed to any purpose — purposes not necessarily in the people’s interest.

In my book, End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, I have written about the blueprint for fascism, and about the fact that there are 10 classic steps to closing down a democracy. When I was researching the book, the general principles that leapt off the pages of history, about how leaders crush an open civil society, were alarming enough. Knowing ‘the blueprint’ was even more shocking as I looked around at what was unfolding in America, because it was so predictive. From reading German history, which shows how a ‘fascist shift’ is engineered by expanding the definition of ‘terrorist’ increasingly to include citizens that look more like you and me (a tactic imitated by Stalin, the East German Stasi, the Chinese Politburo and now the Egyptians, who are referencing the Patriot Act as they round up opposition leaders and put them in jail) one could tell in fall of 2006, when laws were passed to make Animal Liberation-type action against property a form of ‘terrorism,’ that environmentalists would start to be targeted and tried as terrorists — which actually happened by March of the next year.

From reading history, one could predict with absolute certainty that within two years of citizens accepting laws that permit the suspension of habeas corpus and the abuse of prisoners by the State, that the State would start to hurt people at home. (I challenge readers to name a single society that has created a network of secret prisons where torture takes place — that then did NOT eventually use force against dissidents, opposition leaders and other members of civil society at home).

So those predictive elements of ‘the blueprint’ are bad enough. But these are still generalizations — you can intellectualize them away. What really set me aback profoundly, though — actually setting my hair on end at times — was what I have come to call ‘historical fingerprints.’ These are the moments when the small details of events in fascist crackdowns of the past are so directly echoed by small details — signature details — of events in the present that it is very hard to avoid the hypothesis that someone influential in this administration has rather brilliantly studied history — not just the politics and tactics of fascism but its culture and imagery and language — and is reusing what has been shown to work.

The National Socialists introduced the term ‘Heimat’ — Homeland. The Bush administration introduced the term ‘Homeland,’ as in ‘Homeland Security,’ to take the place of the more neutral ‘Domestic’ or ‘Internal.’

Stalin coined the hyped notion of what he called ’sleepers’ or ’sleeper cells’ — these were purported to be secret terrorist agents of global capitalism who would pretend to be good Soviet citizens, perhaps for years, but who would rise up at a signal to wreak mass havoc on Soviet society. By 2002 the White House introduced the term ’sleeper cells,’ which was not in common usage in America.

Joseph Goebbels pioneered the ‘embedding’ of reporters with military troops as a way to support favorable coverage; William Shirer was embedded with German troops in the invasion of France and Nazi filmmaker Leni von Riefenstahl was embedded with German troops in Poland.

Early on, Hitler sought legislation that retroactively protected the SS from war crimes. This was a major step to opening the door to the violence against German citizens that followed. The Bush administration has sought to shield its violent interrogators retrospectively from being charged with war crimes.

Lenin set up military tribunals that bypassed the judiciary. Mussolini imitated this and did the same. Stalin imitated Mussolini and set up secretive military tribunals that bypassed the established judiciary. The National Socialists created the ‘People’s Courts’ that bypassed the legitimate judiciary. These courts stripped prisoners of habeas corpus and were characterized by prisoners having no right of appeal.

Stalin pioneered the use of sleep deprivation, extremes of hot and cold, standing (or ’stress’) positions, psychological humiliation, the use of dogs, and a separate facility to punish uncooperative prisoners in the Gulag with prolonged isolation. Guantanamo and U.S.-held Iraqi prisons reproduce the same tactics. (By the way, after a few days in a ’standing position,’ which you recall Donald Rumsfeld supported, innocent prisoners in the Gulag would ’sign anything.’)

Nazi propaganda claimed that Jews hid from arrest in ‘mouseholes.’ When the scene of Saddam Hussein’s capture was presented to the world, talking points, widely picked up by the media, introduced, again, a term that was generally unfamiliar in the U.S.: Hussein had been hiding in what they called a ’spider-hole.’

German troops tormented the imprisoned leader of Austria, Kurt von Schuschnigg, by blasting popular music into his cell day and night; U.S. interrogators do the same with rock and roll in U.S.-held Iraqi prisons.

National Socialists shaved the beards of Jews in streets and in the early days of the secret SA prisons, as a form of psychological humiliation. Incredibly, unbelievably, a U.S. spokesman gave an interview recently in The Washington Post about a detention center he oversees in Iraq — where, he seemed to be saying, prisoners could be kept indefinitely at his discretion, a set of guidelines I am struggling to distinguish from those that formally define a gulag or a concentration camp. He proudly told the reporter that moderate Muslim prisoners had forcibly attacked and shaved the beards of more radical Muslims. Here is how he described the incident:

==We had a compound of moderates for the first time overtake . . . extremists. It’s never happened before. Found them, identified them, threw them up against the fence and shaved their frickin’ beards off of them. . . . I mean, that is historic.

This would be an act of mass prisoner violence that, if this story is indeed true, would surely have been prevented by U.S. troops unless it was seen as acceptable. Human Rights groups have also reported that prisoners in U.S. custody have had their beards forcibly shaved as part of their humiliation in U.S. held prisons.

The Chinese Politburo calls the secret surveillance file that keeps track of the work and private life of every Chinese citizen an ‘iron triangle.’ Bush referred to his former key group of advisers as the ‘iron triangle.’

When the WMD argument ran dry, the White House argued that we had to invade Iraq, a country that was not at war against us, because, the administration claimed, Iraq was a staging-ground for Muslim terrorists to attack us, and because Saddam had massacred ethnic minorities like the Kurds. National Socialists told the German people that the country had to invade Czechoslovakia, a country which was not at war with Germany, because, they argued, it was a staging-ground for Bolshevik terrorists to attack Germany, and the Czechs were butchering ethnic minorities, the Slovaks, Germans, Magyars and Poles.

A U.S. government spokesman, in the wake of the foiled sneaker-bomb plot from London, gave a sound bite that was widely picked up — and one that was unusual, for a government bureaucrat, it its use of dark poetry: if this had gone forward, he said, the world would have stood still. Hitler said of his military plans in 1940-41, that ‘When “Barbarossa” begins, the world will hold its breath.’

Take a look at Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, especially the plane descent. Then take a look at the ‘Mission Accomplished’ photo-op.

Finally, we are seeing fingerprints in the way that our government is conducting surveillance on its own citizens. Consider, for example, the following passage in a recent Washington Post article:

Zakariya Reed, a Toledo firefighter, said in an interview that he has been detained at least seven times at the Michigan border since fall 2006. Twice, he said, he was questioned by border officials about ‘politically charged’ opinion pieces he had published in his local newspaper. The essays were critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, he said. Once, during a secondary interview, he said, ‘they had them printed out on the table in front of me.’

Readers of U.S. war correspondent William Shirer’s Berlin Diary know that this was a tactic perfected by National Socialists to intimidate critics and newspaper reporters: Nazi press officials would interrogate Shirer — while displaying copies of personal telegrams that he had sent to his newspaper editor on the desk between the two men and they spoke.

These echoes of the past are truly disturbing and, as mentioned, are part of a larger fascist shift in this country. The good news is that a revolution is brewing fast. A coalition of organizations including Amnesty International USA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Human Rights Watch — representing nearly five million Americans — has formed to fight back against government assaults on our Constitution and our liberties. It is called the American Freedom Campaign and I urge you all visit the AFC site to learn more and to join the movement to save our democracy.

Naomi Wolf’s Call to Patriots — Today’s Echoes of Goebbels, and the Fragility of Liberty
BuzzFlash Interview
Tue, 09/25/2007

Democracies take nurturing. They’re easy to pull down. The Founders understood that. It’s a very dangerous time.

~ Naomi Wolf, Author, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

We owe a great debt to Naomi Wolf, who cut her teeth in writing about a new generation of Feminist thinking, for writing this wake up call to America.

In interviewing Wolf, we could hear one of her children in the background. And in many ways, young people were on her mind when she penned “The End of America,” because she is profoundly concerned that they may lose the gift of democracy and live under a dictatorship.

After conversing with Wolf, we saw her on “The Colbert Report” and marveled at how she shifted so effortlessly into expertly handling the ironic parries of Colbert. But her message was the same as it was with us, in a dialogue that proceeded in a much more somber tone: we are on the verge of crossing the threshold into tyranny.

Wolf structures her book into identifying 10 usurpations of democracy that are underway. When combined with the other assaults on our Constitutional checks and balances, we agree with Wolf that we are on the precipice of seeing this great experiment in Constitutional democracy disappear as our Bill of Rights is steadily eroded.

Careful to document her thesis with parallels to the rise of fascism in other times, Wolf speaks with a sincere and highly credible sense of urgency. She lays out the roadmap to authoritarian rule — and we are being driven down that road without most Americans even realizing it.

What she asks of us is simple: to awaken to the danger before it is too late, if it isn’t already.
* * *

BuzzFlash: Naomi, you’ve written The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot and A Citizen’s Call to Action. Why did you specifically address this to young people?

Naomi Wolf: I know an actual, real young patriot named Chris Le. He is a 28-year-old activist. As I describe in the Introduction to the book, two things were happening at once in my life. A mentor of mine, who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, kept saying to me: You’ve got to read the histories, you’ve got to read the histories, you’ve got to read the histories. There are echoes. I kept thinking, that’s crazy, but she was so adamant that she basically sat me down and made me read the histories of her parents’ experience, basically. I then went on and read about six other classic cases of societies closing down democracies or democratic uprisings being crushed. Then I understood why she was so insistent that I study and write about this.

At about the same time, I went to the wedding of this young patriot, Chris Le, who is typical of the best of his generation in that he’s idealistic, he’s committed, he wants a better America. He’s extremely worried about the themes I write about in the book.

But like most young people, he wasn’t given a tutorial in what democracy is in a very clear way. He was certainly not given a tutorial in mid-twentieth century history of the closing down of democracies. When I was at their wedding, and I realized these horrible scary storm clouds were brewing, and these signs were so clear, that there were threats from the past that we need to remind people of in the future in a very clear, accessible way, I decided the best thing that I could do for him and his wife and other people who may not be scholars was to write this kind of primer in a super-clear accessible way that reminds us all about how democracies are crushed. It basically shows that there’s a blueprint for doing it, and the blueprint was developed early in the last century, but the tyrants all over the world replicate it.

The Founders totally believed and foresaw that an American despot or tyrant could oppress the American people, and that the greatest threat was not a foreign power. The book is meant as a very immediate reminder and guide to what freedom is, and how our system was set up to protect us in a very personal way. We’ve become so accustomed to our democracy that we really don’t understand how easy it is to close down a democracy, once certain checks and balances are dismantled, and certain pieces are set in motion.

BuzzFlash: You have outlined ten steps to dismantling a democracy, which the Founders of our country also recognized as threats. How did you come to pick those ten?

Naomi Wolf: Basically they leapt out as a pattern in the reading I was doing. I read about these different times of crisis, specifically the Twenties in Italy, the Thirties in Germany, the Fifties in East Germany, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1973 in the coup in Chile, and the late Eighties/early Nineties which saw the crushing in China of the pro-democracy movement.

What jumps up when you read those histories is that essentially, the practice of crushing an open society was essentially invented by Mussolini. It was then developed and elaborated on by the other great tyrants of the twentieth century, and then they studied each other. Hitler studied Stalin. Both of them studied Mussolini. Subsequently, the other dictators all over the world go back and look at what works.

The School for the Americas, basically teach it — this blueprint was passed on to any number of would-be Latin American dictators and military leaders. Tyrants all over the world take the same ten steps. And it really is like a blueprint.

I start the book saying, in Thailand this coup took a week. This is what they did — boom, boom, boom. It’s like they had a shopping list, and, really, they did, because, by now, people who want to crush a democracy know what to do. The people who live in a democracy don’t know what these ten steps are. Otherwise, we would absolutely be thronging the streets right now. We might realize that we’re in a state of crisis rather than just shopping online and watching “America’s Top Model.”

But how did those ten steps arrive on my list? Various writers on fascism try to identify what the key steps are. Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco, and Robert O. Paxton have all written about the elements of the totalitarian or fascist mind. All the writers look at different things, and they don’t all correspond to my list, although Eco’s list had some of the same elements. It just seemed very clear to me from my reading that you see these ten things again and again and again, such that you know what’s going to happen. It’s so predictable; it’s so well-established.

Here’s one. Categorically, in every closing society, someone who wants to crush democracy will establish a military tribunal system which parallels or is outside of the established judiciary. Once you create a prison system outside of the rule of law — I call it a secret prison system, unaccountable, not transparent, where people get disappeared, where people get tortured — can you name a society that did that that did not eventually have fascist rule?

As I was writing the book, someone sent me documentation of the expansion of the definition of terrorists to apply to activists. It was so clear that the definition of terrorist in every fascist shift expands to include more and more, to reach closer to the heart of civil society. You start to see the expansion of the term traitor, treason, espionage. Look at the censure by the Senate of an ad — the notion that criticism is unpatriotic and bordering on treason. Stalin and Goebbels both developed that tactic. You start to see the broader and broader use of accusations of treason and espionage, like the calls we heard after the SWIFT banking story broke to try citizens under the 1917 Espionage Act — an Act which, most Americans do not realize, was used at the end of the teens in this country to round up and arrest thousands of people like you and me; some were beaten in prison. Eugene Debs got a ten-year sentence under the Espionage Act for a speech about the First Amendment. The White House led a drumbeat of voices calling for the trial of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller for “treason” when he published the SWIFT banking stories. The penalty for treason in this country can be execution.

Sure enough, if you go back to history, you find that Nikolai Bukharin, the publisher of Izvestia, was tried in the third Moscow show trial and was in fact executed for treason. So these things are like part of a game plan, part of a blueprint. And there are so many parallels I found, which I point out in the book, that it is very hard to avoid the hypothesis that someone brilliant in this administration studied history and is replaying elements, language, and tactics from violently closing societies that worked in the past.

I really saw the same tendencies happening again and again in the reading I did about how open societies dismantled parliamentary democracies and constitutions, and how they were crushing pro-democracy uprisings.

BuzzFlash: Hannah Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil,” and the reality is that sometimes we find ourselves in a situation where we simply can’t see what is happening to us. One analogy to what is happening to our Constitution being dismantled and the encroachment upon our civil liberties is the idea of a frog being boiled in water. The frog doesn’t realize, until it’s too late, that the temperature just keeps rising.

To the average person, is it just too much to comprehend, too much to think about, it’s not what we’re concentrating on, so in the end we’re the frogs being boiled? We’re busy entertaining ourselves, or working, or being with our families, or going out and having a drink. It’s only people like yourself, or people who really follow this, who are aware that we’re being boiled.

Naomi Wolf: This is the desperately urgent question, and you’re right to ask it. Let me address it on three levels.

First, I deliberately wrote the book in the most accessible possible way, really based on Tom Paine’s prose style. The pamphleteers of the Revolution were really deliberately trying to write in a way that ordinary people — farmers, small shopkeepers, people without an elaborate higher education, people who are not aristocrats — could understand. It was urgent that the ordinary colonist or the ordinary American got it — the kind of threat that was posed by George III — what it meant to have blanket warrants, what liberty meant, what the arguments for liberty were. You know, before Common Sense, most people in the Colonies were not persuaded that they needed a revolution. The American experiment at the time pushed human beings further out into a completely untested model of government. So his very transparent, accessible prose style let people realize for themselves, or think through for themselves, that they deserved liberty and that they needed to act on behalf of liberty.

You and I are in the same position — and everyone on the Internet. We have to switch our model of leadership and return it to the Revolutionary American model of citizen leaders. The Congress is not going to save us. The mainstream media is not going to save us. The pundits are not going to save us. The U.N. is not going to save us. The European Union is not going to save us. There is not a force on earth that can save us, except for our own talking to each other, clearly and urgently, to explain and convey the nature of this threat, and then for us to take radical action NOW. So that’s why I wrote it this way.

Our strategy has to be that thousands, and we hope soon millions, of other citizens who are persuaded by the argument will speak to each other and then mobilize in a hurry to confront these abuses. It depends on citizens acting as journalists, citizens acting as advocates, citizens acting as leaders and revolutionaries to mobilize one another. So that’s A.

B is, you’re absolutely right about the incremental nature of this kind of shift. That’s why I spend so much time looking at the early years of earlier such shifts. Americans tend to think that the closing down of a modern parliamentary society happens in some giant, dramatic explosion. But it doesn’t. In a democracy as sophisticated or resilient as ours had been, it’s going to be closed down incrementally.

If you go back to Berlin in 1931, it wouldn’t have looked so unrecognizable to us. There was a Parliament that was meeting there. There was a constitution. There were abortion rights organizations, human rights lawyers and activists. There were gay rights organizations. There was modern art. People were doing what we’re doing. People were going to the movies. They kept living — and that’s why I draw on diaries and memoirs and personal accounts. People were doing what we’re doing. They were shopping. They were leading their lives, even as the catastrophe was tightening and tightening around them.

There are scenes in the books I cite that are exactly the same as the scene that played out in the University of Florida last week when the kid was tasered for asking a question and everyone sat still as he was dragged out. That scene was described by Count Kessler, by Victor Klemperer, in memoirs of Germany form 1931-1933. And people then were saying what we are saying: surely this can’t get worse; people will come to their senses.

Historians such as Richard Evans point out that, at that point, if the people of Germany had arisen and confronted the abusers of parliamentary process and of the Constitution, the horrors could have been averted. By the way, I am not looking at Germany to make an analogy of any kind about outcomes. I am Jewish and do not take that issue lightly. What I am doing, and I think we honor the victims of the Holocaust by doing so, is looking at how there are threads that recur in the early years of a fascist shift, and lessons we have to learn in time. What we really have to realize is that in a modern democracy, the shift to a closed society doesn’t happen overnight.

And it doesn’t happen even in a clear line on a graph that’s left to right diagonally. It happens in what Malcolm Gladwell would call tipping points. You can chart it, and there may be pressure, pressure, multiple assaults, and, then, a key event that would be like a vertical line on that chart. And then you’re looking at another reality.

The really important thing to understand, which is why I walk the reader so carefully through the way democracies really curve down, is democracies can reach a point of no return. And it’s sudden when that happens. And it’s disorienting. There’s a point at which democracy can no longer heal democracy. People have got to understand that. People need to realize that the day we made it legal, essentially, for the state to torture people, that was one of those vertical lines on the chart. We’re now in a place where it is legal, the White House has claimed, to knock on your door or my door, and say: You are an enemy combatant. Come with us. Then there is what Jose Padilla went through, in three years of solitary confinement — making it difficult to see a lawyer, making it difficult to see his family.

I’m not saying he’s a good guy. But I’m saying the White House is taking the position that the President — and any future president — can say: You, Naomi, you, peruser of BuzzFlash — you’re an enemy combatant. And the President gets to decide what that means. The President gets to decide to hold you. The first time that someone is called an enemy combatant that you and I identify with — that’s going to be another one of these vertical lines, after which you are not going to be having this conversation, because I’m not that brave. The tasering of this student was another vertical line, because, believe me, if they are tasering voting groups in Florida in a disputed 2008 election, dissent will close down pretty quickly. People are just not that brave when they start to get physically hurt.

And that’s how society is closed down. Suddenly, there’s news of someone getting arrested. Or someone being taken. Someone getting a ten-year sentence under the Espionage Act for publishing something in the Wall Street Journal.

And the next day, there are still newspapers. There’s still online shopping. There are still so many aspects of normal society. But what there isn’t is freedom, because people are scared. And that’s why we need to wake up now, because, believe it or not, the President has the power to do that. The President — any president, President Thompson, President Giuliani, President Obama — any president now has the power to make it easier to declare martial law and to declare a state of emergency. The president gets to decide what that is. That is not what the Founders envisioned.

People who are fighting overseas for democracy understand better than we do that we are witnessing the clasic danger signs. They know how dangerous it is to have a leader relegate for himself or herself the power to do that — to seize people and to militarize civil society. Or to declare a state of public emergency or to make it easier to define a threat to public order. Those are classic signposts that other democracy activists around the world recognize as flashing warning lights.

The third point is simply that you’re absolutely right about our psychology. We’ve been so blessed and so spoiled, in a way, by over 200 years of strong democracy, even taking into account the serious moments like the McCarthy era, that we expect the pendulum will always swing back, because the checks and balances have always been in place. I’ve explained in the book why this is different now — why the pendulum isn’t as free as it used to be, why we can’t rely on it, a point Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda made first.

The trouble is that we’re so used to a democratic mindset and we’re so reliant on freedom, that we, A, don’t recognize the dangers, and B, we don’t realize what it takes to resist them. When I talk about these threats, people tend to answer before they’ve thought it through, or before they’ve read the book, with the correctives of democracy. Well, the ACLU will sue them. Or we’ll just vote the guys out. “Vote the bums out.” After you’ve read the book, you’ll realize that you cannot rely on democracy to heal democracy, as you could if our democracy was strong, and checks and balances were in place.

So it is a radical shift in consciousness that we need right now, and we don’t have time. We need to understand right now that this is a crisis. It’s not business as usual. We can’t leave it to other people, to Congress, to activists, or until the next election, because we are much further along than people realize.

BuzzFlash: Your book does a tremendous job of putting together the ten different threats running in parallel and intertwined courses. The power of the ten together leads to a tipping point, as you’ve called it, which, at some point becomes the point of no return. That type of concurrence is described in the book They Thought They Were Free by an American Jew who, after World War II, went back to Nazi Germany to find out how it happened. The Germans thought they were free until they weren’t any longer.

In the mainstream news, and certainly in a lot of the political discourse, the Republicans in general, and Bush, are portrayed as the patriots, the champions of freedom, the ones who are the “strict constructionists” in terms of the Constitution, and so forth. You and I would argue that, in reality, what is happening under the current administration is a radical assault on our Constitution, on our freedoms, on the vision of Founding Fathers. The radicals are the people in the government who are trying to change the very foundation of the country. But they wrap themselves in the wrapping paper — disguise themselves as the champions of the Constitution.

How do you break through to the American public? The mainstream press doesn’t seem to be able to even begin to penetrate the dissonance and the contradiction in the narrative as the administration presents it.

Naomi Wolf: I try to avoid theorizing in the book, and instead just let the reader decide for him or herself what inferences may be drawn about this White House. But it’s very hard to avoid a hypothesis that the White House has studied twentieth century history in some detail. When despots are trying to close down an open society, and Orwell pointed this out, they call something the opposite of what it is. Goebbels, for one, was a master of saying something the opposite of what it was. If you read Mein Kampf, and look at Hitler’s speeches, he is continually invoking democracy and freedom, democracy and freedom, the rule of law. I’m upholding the rule of law; he actually said he was simplifying democracy. Indeed, it was the prior administration that had opened the door to him, and they weren’t even national socialists, but they weakened the constitution so badly that it left the field wide open for him to do what he wanted to do.

I have a section in the book about how lies in a fascist shift serve a different purpose than they do in a democracy. In a democracy, people lie to deceive. In a fascist shift, lies serve to disorient. Lies in the service of a fascist shift make it hard for citizens to trust their own judgment about what’s real and what’s not. Once citizens don’t know what’s real and what’s not real, they are profoundly disempowered. The Bush administration seems to have learned that lesson, and they regularly name things the opposite. And there’s a long historical precedent for making people feel that there is no such thing as truth.

There’s another tipping point in closing down a democracy when the leaders no longer are accountable for disclosing the truth. Why is the mainstream media not more rigorous?

I think has to do with, first, corporate ownership. There are just some issues you really can’t pursue. Recently someone pitched a renewal of a famous program that taught children about democracy, and checks and balances, to a major network. They basically said we don’t want to do anything to rock the boat. Even librarians are affected. I’ve been offering to give librarians copies of the Constitution to distribute, and they say, we can’t do that because that’ll be too controversial. I’m not kidding. The Constitution’s become too controversial.

So the networks have some profound vested interests, which I track in the book, that would be served by a dismantling of the Constitution in this country, and by an ongoing war on terror that never ends. These are powerful industries, and millions of dollars are at stake. And they have lobbyists. They contribute to political campaigns, and it’s not negligible.

The second reason, I think, is, it’s hard for the mainstream media, even when they’re privately owned, to say certain things for psychological reasons. There’s a mindset that it’s taboo to say in America that an American president might try to bring down democracy. There are a lot of taboos. You’re not allowed to look at the history of Germany. That’s a social taboo. You’re not allowed to suggest in a mainstream context that an American president might have radically oppressive motives, just like dictators all over the world. It’s like this collective wish to believe our leaders are always benign, our system will always endure, even if we don’t do anything to protect it. We are always safe. We are always the exception. There’s a kind of regressive, almost infantile fantasizing that Daddy could never actually be abusive– it is this magical thinking — and there’s a lot of it.

BuzzFlash: One thing we’ve talked about a lot on BuzzFlash, is that the Bush administration, and in particular, Cheney, lie with such abandon and brazenness. But you’re absolutely right that a key feature of seizing power is to put so much lying out there you kind of just give up trying to figure out what the truth is. But also, the brazenness is a factor. Americans are largely still a common-sense sort of culture. Just put your cards down on the table. Cheney is still saying that Saddam was connected to 9/11 in some way. The lies are so big that they defy common sense. So you’re thinking, no one would lie that openly and brazenly. That just doesn’t make any sense.

Naomi Wolf: Yes.

BuzzFlash: You may even start to think there’s something there, because no one would be so audacious, having been disproven on so many occasions, as to continue to say the same thing. So you question your own sense of truth. And you don’t want to accuse your leaders, in a democracy. You would almost be reflecting upon yourself if you’re accusing your leaders of intentionally and chronically and daily misleading you. It’s almost like accepting that democracy is so flawed that we have to do something about it. And who wants to take that on?

Naomi Wolf: You’re right that all these threads are well-documented. In the book you see how they fit together. That’s exactly what I try to do.

My readers say that basically the book acts as kind of a key, so that now, when they see the aspects of each of these threads, whether it’s a new development in detainee abuse, or whether it’s a new development of surveillance, the FISA story, or you hear that assets of critics of the war are going to be seized, it makes a different kind of sense to them than it did before. That’s good, even if it is very scary at first, because people really do need to listen differently and watch differently now.

We have a mindset, which is that democracy is the resilient rule. Historically it is fragile exception. Democracies take nurturing. They’re easy to pull down. The Founders understood that. It’s a very dangerous time.

In Italy, in the early 1920s, people just couldn’t believe it. And in Germany, from 1931-1933, they just couldn’t believe it. You read the memoirs, and people were saying, surely, no one’s going to go for this. Surely, this can’t last. Surely, no one will put up with these thugs marching in the streets like this. Surely, we will all come to our senses.

The trouble is, this mindset is very, very dangerous when it’s a different game being played. There is this scene in which Mussolini is marching on Rome, and the members of Parliament are still trying to negotiate with him — offering him various cabinet positions. They think it’s still a democracy, and he just waits for them to get it.

As I say at the end of the book, I feel like there’s very little time left for us to act. I’m very worried about the upcoming elections, and here’s why. One of the things very few people followed up on is that there’s a strong indication that when they fired the US attorneys, they were considering purging all of the US Attorneys — all of them, all at once. That’s essentially what Goebbels did in 1933 with the civil service. The White House has fought any disclosure of the e-mails about the US Attorneys purge, or would-be purge. It’s a classic move in a takeover to purge the civil service, and especially the lawyers and the judges, and replace them with your own cronies — that’s a standard, recognized tactic.

BuzzFlash: TPM Café and Josh Marshall were in the lead on “Prosecutor-gate,” as it’s called.

Naomi Wolf: Right. So had the U.S. attorneys all been purged, basically, the game would be over right now. The U.S. attorneys have the power to harass opposition groups, to bring charges against people who are organizing voters. At the end of the book, I ask readers to look at the record of what the administration’s been willing to do vis-a-vis abuse after abuse after abuse, the systematic dismantling of our democracy and our checks and balances, and ask if it is reasonable to assume we will have fair, transparent elections. Given all these violations of these sacred tenets of democracy, do you really think that George Bush is going to say, fourteen months from now, that the great pageant of democracy — a fair election — must proceed without intervention or corruption? That the people have spoken, the people’s will be done? Is that really common sense?

BuzzFlash: We at BuzzFlash have editorialized and pointed out that it’s naïve, at this late date in their eight-year administration, to still allow them to take advantage of every possibility to seize more power. Why would they want that if they assume there’s a possibility that a Democrat will come in on January 20, 2009? They’re seizing the power for a Democrat? That doesn’t make any sense.

Naomi Wolf: I’m really glad that you’re raising that and editorializing on it. So many decisions of this administration are strategic and not tactical. That’s why I worry about people like Mitt Romney saying that he wants to expand Guantanamo and sort of eternalize Guantanamo to make it a permanent part of the landscape, or Giuliani — who seems clearly to have been anointed to carry this process forward — to say he wants to strip prisoners of even more rights. The building of Guantanamo does not look like a short-term decision. It seems that many of the absolutely systematic changes that this administration is intent on, are strategic rather than tactical decisions. They seem like long-term rather than short-term decisions.

BuzzFlash: They don’t make sense to fight terror. But they do make sense if they’re for the purpose of seizing power.

Naomi Wolf: That’s exactly right. This is another important thing to put across in terms of getting people out of this bubble of innocence, and into fighting anger, and sort of revolutionary ardor. I really believe this issue is a conservative issue, and it’s a liberal issue. It transcends party politics. You know, there are as many patriots on the right as on the left. Many are appalled at what’s been done in the name of conservatism. Why would they be aggregating power?

BuzzFlash: Right. At this late date.

Naomi Wolf: There’s a kind of hypnosis that invoking the war on terror, invoking 9/11 in the mass media, creates. That’s why Congress has been so cowed. Off the record, they say to us that they can’t be more aggressive because they’re afraid of being seen as soft on terror. They can’t be more aggressive about liberty, and protecting liberty, and preventing these power grabs, because they don’t want to be seen as soft on terror. That’s why it’s so important for people to understand that, historically, it is an absolute constant for a would-be tyrant to invoke a terrorist threat — often, a real terrorist threat.

The national socialists continually invoked Bolshevik terrorism and violence. And there was Bolshevik terrorism and Bolshevik violence. There were communist terrorists. By the same token, Pinochet eased his way in by telling Chilean citizens about insurgents who were going to engage in this spectacular act of terrorism, a mass assassination, and he showed citizens the purported weapons caches on television. He used fake documents to hype a real threat, which again is quite common in history — like the fake documents the White House relied on to lie to us about the yellowcake threat.

It’s absolutely standard for would-be dictators to invoke a terrorist threat, and it can be a real terrorist threat. What they’ll do is they’ll hype it, or manipulate the information. Or heighten the fear level. The reason is it enables them to subdue people.

I feel like it’s actually liberating for readers to read about how this has been used in other countries. First, it lets them snap out of that kind of frightened feeling of, oh, my God, the terrorists have struck from al Qaeda. The terrorist threat from al Qaeda changes everything. We must give up our liberties in order to be safe. It’s just not true. There are historical precedents for it not being true.

I also note that Spain and England, which are countries that suffered very serious terrorist attacks, by the same terrorists that threaten us, responded very differently. They responded with transparent trials. Their trials of the accused terrorists are on the Internet. They responded by upholding their values of democracy and openness and freedom. And in England, Gordon Brown says terrorism is a crime, not a cause. Israel has nothing like the red, yellow, orange alert that we do, and they fight terrorists every day.

BuzzFlash: Some conservatives have gotten away with a tremendous framing success in using the word conservative. But as you pointed out, if you’re really a conservative about the Constitution, you support civil liberties. You support the checks and balances in our government. You support an independent judiciary. That’s a true conservative position.

What we have from the Bush administration is a radical position that’s an assault on the conservative position. And for the Bush administration, and Cheney and his aides like Addington, to be called conservative, is an insult to conservatism. That’s number one.

Number two, in relation to your point that they initially floated the idea about firing all the U.S. prosecutors, there was a precedent in the German Nazi judicial system. Basically, in addition to the parallel military system, the Third Reich instituted a civil judicial system. If someone was charged with a violation against the state, and they were a German citizen, they went through this judicial system. It was all rigged in the sense that you only served on the judicial courts, just as the Bush administration was trying to do, if you had been vetted, and you were a follower of the right, and you would basically go along with the recommendations of the prosecutors installed by the state. But they gave the appearance to the citizens that would say: Well, this person has been executed because the court found them guilty.

Naomi Wolf: Exactly.

BuzzFlash: So it wasn’t just that the military coopted the judicial system. They had a parallel judicial system. But they did have a civil judicial system too which the Third Reich was able to say, well, justice has been accomplished. This person has been tried and they had been determined to have violated laws of the state and that execution is warranted. So it wasn’t just that the army took and executed the German citizens. They went through a rigged judicial system, just as the Bush administration was trying to do with the U.S. prosecutors, and which they try to do by appointing judges who are not qualified to be judges. Their only qualification is loyalty to the party.

Naomi Wolf: Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael Ratner, who represented Guantanamo detainees before the Supreme Court, is really eloquent about the legal analogies between what happened in Germany and what’s happening now. And Harper’s recently made some of the same points. What you’re talking about is a process that the National Socialists perfected, called coordination. That’s why looking at Germany is so necessary now — because they coordinated every aspect of civil society. And when you’ve got people who understand that their tenure depends on following the party line, you do get a rigged system.

What’s happening with the military — JAG — lawyers is also important. These are lawyers, so their job is to uphold the rule of law and do good jobs representing their clients. And again and again, these brave, decent, honorable men and women, probably many of them Republicans, have suffered career setbacks or worse simply trying to do their jobs as lawyers, and not sell out their clients, and not hand over their clients to a rigged system.

And you’re right to point out people really don’t understand what fascism looks like. They think it looks kind of like goose-stepping military and barbed wire everywhere. It doesn’t look like that. I give examples of closed societies in the book, and after a society is closed, there will often still be a judiciary. There will be journalism. There will be radio. There will even be television. There will be universities and students. Many aspects of the institutions of civil society continue. What happens, though, is everybody knows how far you can go before you lose your job, or how far you can go before getting arrested. And it’s actually very important for some dictators to maintain a facade of the rule of law, to maintain a facade of elections, and to maintain a facade of a working civil society system, because it gives the regime legitimacy. You saw that in Italy and in Germany. You see it throughout Latin America.

Our system is so fragile. If we woke up to learn that all of the U.S. attorneys had indeed been fired and replaced with lawyers loyal to the machine, it would still be America. We’d still have a lot of the stuff that we have now. It would look familiar. But it would be a different reality. The election campaign would be like election campaigns in weak or struggling democracies where a lot of it is sham. A lot of it is wishful thinking. People who go ahead and register voters or fight for candidates who are not in the party line, who are not ‘coordinated,’ face investigations, face harassment, face warrants for arrest on various minor violations. Would that be America in more than name? Or would that be the end of America?

We’d still have the Internet. We’d still have a judiciary. But it wouldn’t be freedom. And it is really important for your community, for all of us, to understand that it’s going to take a citizen uprising right now — I mean a civil uprising — to hold accountable people who would dismantle our democracy in this way, and to use democracy to heal democracy while we still can, because we still can.

That’s why we started the American Freedom Campaign to parallel the American Freedom Agenda. Millions of Americans can compel Congress to pass the legislative agenda that would rewrite these horrific laws, and would restore checks and balances, and, I think, compel Congress to confront the people who have committed crimes against the Constitution. We’re still in the state where democracy can heal democracy. That’s why we have to act.

BuzzFlash: In a recent editorial we commented on some of the strategic efforts by the Bush administration. Firing the U.S. prosecutors was an effort to control the prosecution system, and one of the chief objectives in controlling it was to be able to indict Democrats, and so help decimate the Democratic Party as an effective opposition party. Let’s remember that most of those attorneys who were put in after the purge are still in place. So, it’s not like this has been rectified.

A key thing in controlling the government and moving it toward a one-party, despotic state, was to indict Democrats. That was one of the major issues in evaluating who was going to be replaced. If you had indicted Democrats, many of those people kept their jobs. If you didn’t indict Democrats and you had been asked to, those were some of the people lost.

The second idea was to use the U.S. attorneys to, in essence, concoct prosecutions accusing the organizations that supported Democrats, or were affiliated with Democrats, or the Democratic Party itself, of “voter fraud.”

Naomi Wolf: Exactly.

BuzzFlash: And they make those anti-Democratic cases high profile before elections, to influence the elections. Then, since most of the cases have no justification, they drop them after the elections. And, again, this is not stopping. As you indicated, this is why it’s so much of a threat.

Another priority for them is to have, at the state level, laws passed in as many states as possible where Republicans are governors and control the legislature, and to suppress the vote by requiring more identification, more ability to challenge voters when they show up, more claims that they don’t live at that address and so forth. In essence, they use state laws to suppress the Democratic vote by picking criteria that will suppress the demographics that would go for Democrats.

Another part of the strategy is the spying issue. The reason that bypassing FISA is so important is that a despotic power wants the ability to be able to spy at will. This is an issue we have pointed out, which went virtually completely unnoticed by the traditional press. When Alberto Gonzales was testifying about the FISA issue when it first came out — and this we just happened to catch this by watching his testimony on the C-SPAN tape — but he was asked if the illegal spying powers that had not been authorized by FISA, had ever been used for political purposes. And he said he couldn’t answer that question.

Naomi Wolf: Yes.

BuzzFlash: That was astonishing, and the mainstream press didn’t pick that up at all. The ability to spy at will on American citizens, without any oversight, is just too great a temptation, even if you had a benign view of the Bush administration.

Naomi Wolf: The surveillance of ordinary citizens is an absolute cornerstone of a closed society. It’s an absolute cornerstone to control the population.

BuzzFlash: The third issue is one-party control of the judiciary. Well, if you control the referees, you control the game. You’re constantly giving calls that the favor the team you’re supporting. So they have judges who are either Federalist Society members with pedigree, or people who don’t have pedigrees who are lousy judges, perhaps racist, misogynist, who knows? They’ve certainly got a lot of them, like David Sentelle and many of these people that they’ve put in who are just wretched lawyers. You have partisan people on the courts who are not chosen for their ability to adjudicate cases, but are chosen to make the right referee’s calls on crucial cases that have to do with the balances of power within the United States between Congress and the Executive Branch.

Naomi Wolf: Right. May I add one thing? It’s that Americans, even in this worst-case scenario of all these threads continuing to tighten — “Oh, my God, they’ve coordinated the U.S. attorneys, they’re using the Watch List to keep critics of the administration from flying, they are tasering professors now for asking questions in a lecture hall, or people registering voters, or they have sent NSA letters to the heads of environmental groups, antiwar groups,” — Americans still imagine that, well, we’ll organize. We’ll march.

BuzzFlash: Yes.

Naomi Wolf: Americans imagine that there is still recourse. Ordinarily, there is recourse, with checks and balances in place. What we need Americans to think about is how the ability to physically threaten Americans on a most personal level will change that.

None of us knows in our bones what it’s like to live in a police state. My warning is that, when you get a state using violence against the individual in the act of suppression of democracy, you change your whole reality. Most Americans have a sense of physical invincibility. If we sign a petition somewhere, if we register as a Democrat, someone might know about it, but we still can’t believe that anyone would ever hurt us in our democracy.

But people should be aware of how aggressively this administration has sought to assert the right that it has to call any American an enemy combatant and to mistreat them on a physical level. They’ve been very clear. Think of the abuses against Jose Padilla. And Dick Cheney has said he’s outside the system, right?

But what happens after you are arrested, or I am arrested, or someone we identified with is called an ‘enemy combatant’, or after the first journalist or an editor is charged under the Espionage Act, or after more people like Brandon Mayfield experience break-ins in your home? And their computer’s taken. Their kids come home to find that their house has been broken into by the state. As that begins to become not a bizarre exception but part of the landscape, I promise you, based on the historical record, the kind of recourses we assume we have as free people protected by the Constitution will vanish, because people just aren’t willing to take physicals risks — understandably.

I, personally, as a mother, am willing to risk arrest in a strong democracy, because I assume that my innocence will protect me, or the First Amendment will protect me, that the courts are fair, that I’ll get good representation and I will not get hurt in prison. But would I be willing to risk three years in a Navy brig? In solitary confinement? No.

And history shows that it doesn’t take many such cases to close down an open society. Author Greg Palast was investigated by Homeland Security, and it’s kind of a joke. But when fifty critics of the administration are investigated, it is a tipping point. And history shows things get quiet after that very very fast.

Everyone has to draw the line somewhere — and this is also a lesson we need to learn from Germany. How can so many good people have done nothing? Because once you introduce state terror against the individual, you completely change the landscape of what we’re willing to risk, understandably. And I just want to kind of conclude by saying we need to reverse these laws, because all of the actions that we can still take in a democracy to restore democracy, we will be scared to take after that next tipping point. Let’s conclude on a happier note though.

BuzzFlash: Maybe not, because the reality is what needs to penetrate people. What you have indicated, and what we are constantly pointing out on BuzzFlash, is there’s an urgency here. If the Bush administration had started backing off this effort to seize power, perhaps one could have felt they realize they aren’t going to achieve their goal. But instead of backing off, they are actually redoubling their efforts. That seems to indicate they have confidence in maintaining one-party control. And it seems to indicate that they must have reasons to maintain that confidence, and we aren’t aware of what that basis is. But it is there, and therefore we need to forge forward.

You have a call to action at the end of your book. And you mentioned a couple times you are associated with the American Freedom Campaign. There’s a great deal of frustration. Your book is very cogent, and we highly recommend people read it, even if they are regular BuzzFlash readers and exposed to a lot of this information. You give a tremendous historical context, and I think people need to see it, and in one document, in order to understand the gravity of the threat to this great democracy we have. But the concluding question, which you address in your book, is what can American patriots who support our constitutional guarantees do at this critical juncture?

Naomi Wolf: Really, this is where we choose. History will look back and say, either we saved the country or we didn’t. Either we stopped it at a point where we could restore democracy, or we didn’t, and someone else will be writing the histories.

This is what you need to do. First, educate yourself. It is so important, as you say, to get the historical perspective.

The second thing is we urgently need to drive Congress. Congress can still confront these abusers and dismantle their power. The same could have been true in Germany or Italy, early on, had people driven their representatives to act. So I would say, all of your community and their friends need to immediately sign up with the American Freedom Agenda on the right, or the American Freedom Campaign on the left. We represent a number of cardinal organizations. Total membership now is almost five million in the AFC. We’re growing all the time.

BuzzFlash: Just for clarification purposes, the American Freedom Agenda, on the right, I assume is a civil libertarian group working for the Constitution? It’s not the traditional concept of the Bush right, but it’s the libertarian right.

BuzzFlash: Yes.

Naomi Wolf: We’re organizing, hopefully, millions and millions of Americans to compel, demand, force Congress to restore balance. We’ve got a ten-point legislative agenda, which if we forced Congress to pass it, would do a lot to get us breathing room. It includes restoring habeas corpus, and protecting journalists from prosecution. That would do a lot to give us some time. If we don’t restore these laws we have almost no time, according to the blueprint. And we know there is a strong impeachment movement.

Nancy Pelosi has said that impeachment is not on the table. I am not taking a position on impeachment, and the American Freedom Campaign hasn’t taken a position, but what I am saying is that in a true democracy movement, which is what I’m calling for, it is the people that decide. And that is a debate that hasn’t happened yet — not a rigorous, principled, Constitutional debate, which was what the Founders envisioned in the event of a dramatic crisis such as this one.

What did the Founders intend to have happen when there was a leader that systematically dismantled their checks and balances, and systematically dismantled our system of government? That debate hasn’t happened in a principled, educated, patriotic way, and that debate has to happen. What do you do when there are assaults like this? I don’t think it’s Nancy Pelosi who decides preemptively. I think in a democracy, it’s the people who decide.

And the abuses are escalating every day. The Senate just censured MoveOn for speech — and argues that criticizing anyone in the armed forces is a sign of treason. This is exactly what the National Socialists did. They created these third rail subjects and created strictures that expanded all the time, criminalizing or punishing speech as unpatriotic and eventually criminalizing opposition itself. This is a horrific development, no matter what you thought of the wording of the ad, and Congressional democrats who do not stand up to it — indeed Republicans as well — should know they are playing into a very dark development historically.

Most urgently, we need to drive Congress to confront these abuses and restore the rule of law now, long before the election. And we need to take seriously what the founders intended; they did not mean for a professional class to enact democracy for us or to defend it for us or to rise up when a despot threatened to destroy it. They intended for us, on the left and the right, to be the revolutionaries in defense of liberty.

BuzzFlash: This has been wonderful. You did a great job in the book.

Naomi Wolf: Thank you.

BuzzFlash interview conducted by Mark Karlin.

The President’s Last Stand
No lame duck, Bush has big plans to push through an imperial legacy before he leaves
Nat Hentoff, Village Voice
September 18th, 2007

On January 20, 2009, when the next President of the United States swears to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” will he or she instruct the new Congress to undo the subversions of that document perpetrated by George W. Bush during his final months in office?

At a Justice Department meeting last month, a range of civil-liberties lawyers asked administration officials if the president would agree to be limited by even the hugely expanded powers in the new Protect America Act, which allows his administration to engage in warrantless spying on Americans’ e-mails and phone calls. It became alarmingly clear that the answer was no: The president remains convinced that he has an inherent constitutional power to do whatever he (and he alone) considers necessary to protect the national security.

Bruce Fein, a conservative constitutional lawyer who served in the Reagan Justice Department, was at that meeting, and said during an August 15 Bill of Rights Defense Committee conference call:

“The president claims he doesn’t have to obey any law under the Constitution’s Article II powers,” an article that begins with the words, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

At the Justice Department meeting, as reported in the August 18 New York Times, Justice Department officials repeatedly refused to give “an assurance that the administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by Congress.”

Democratic congressman Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii voted against the Protect America Act:

“We cannot give the president an unrestricted license to snoop and bully [U.S.] citizens. He’s seeking the power of kings, and I’m not about to make the president of the United States a new king.”

But there was enough Democratic support to assure passage of the Protect America Act.

Among the additional new extensions of surveillance power over us by the king and his ministers is a plan to give national and local law-enforcement officials much more access to photos taken by spy satellites and aircraft sensors that, as the August 16 Washington Post warned, “can see through cloud cover and even penetrate buildings. . . . [This] broader domestic use of secret overhead imagery” can begin as early as this fall. However, officials at the Department of Homeland Security and in the office of the Director of National Intelligence give us “total assurance” that our civil liberties will be protected. Play it again, Sam.

Meanwhile, another ceaseless guardian of our civil liberties, the FBI, is working on a project, the System to Assess Risk (STAR), that will allegedly detect traces of terrorist “sleeper cells” here at home before they can strike.

The Bush administration has already set national (and, I expect, world) records for databasing its citizens. But the FBI, in its budget request to Congress for the STAR project—as reported by National Public Radio’s ever-watchful Dina Temple-Raston on July 17— “expected the new center would be sifting through some six billion pieces of data by 2012.” (Emphasis added.)

Temple-Raston added: “That translates to 20 records for every man, woman, and child in America.” It’s too soon for my newest grandchild, two-year-old Ruby Hentoff, to be included, but if STAR continues under the next president, then Ruby—considering her already-databased grandfather—could well become “a person of interest.”

Focusing on this president’s belief that Article II of the Constitution enables him to appoint himself dictator, the conservative columnist George Will reminds us of President Harry Truman’s 1952 attempt to assert his own “inherent powers” in order to take over the nation’s steel mills and prevent a wartime strike (the war in question being the Korean War). The Supreme Court confronted Truman—like Van Helsing waving a cross before Dracula—with the Constitution’s separation of powers. In a concurring opinion that I hope the members of the current Supreme Court are familiar with, Justice Robert Jackson thundered:

“No penance would ever expiate the sin against free government of holding that a president can escape control of executive power by law through assuming his military role . . . .

[Historians] have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law. . . . ”

Among the Democratic presidential candidates, only Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut has introduced a bill, the Restructuring the Constitution Act, that cuts out some of this president’s most dangerous exclusive powers under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Unlike Dodd, the two leading Democratic contenders, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have not focused on this regal assumption of unconstitutional authority, which few Americans are likely to have in mind when they vote in November 2008 (though Dennis Kucinich has spoken of it).

But as George Will angrily writes in Newsweek’s August 13 issue, the Military Commissions Act, building on the Bush administration’s previous arrogation of dark powers, “treats all of America as a battlefield on which even American citizens can be declared ‘enemy combatants,’ seized and held indefinitely, as intelligence can be collected by any means the president orders”—something that Bush’s July 2006 executive order on the CIA’s torture techniques further asserts.

Back in December 2002, a member of Congress about to retire spoke to us all:

“We, the people, had better keep an eye on our government—not out of contempt or lack of appreciation or disrespect, but out of a sense of guardianship.”

He was giving his farewell address at the National Press Club, and he ended by fervently addressing his colleagues in Congress:

“How do you use these tools we have given you to make us safe in such a manner that will preserve our freedom? . . .

Freedom is no policy for the timid. And my plaintive plea to all my colleagues that remain in this government as I leave it is, for our sake, for my sake, for heaven’s sake, don’t give up on freedom!”

This latter-day Minuteman was the very conservative House majority leader, Dick Armey. The same Dick Armey who, while still in office, defied George W. Bush and John Ashcroft by tearing out a provision of the “Freedom and Security” section of the administration’s Homeland Security Bill, a plan (”Operation Tips”) that would have given millions of Americans the authority to formally report, via a toll-free number, “suspicious” or “unusual” activity (otherwise undefined) that struck them as terrorist-related.

Roared Representative Armey as he killed that section, at least for a time: BB”Citizens will not be informants!” At the same time, Democratic congressional leaders Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt were both conspicuously silent on “Operation Tips.”

In the current Democrat-controlled Congress, what will the leadership do regarding the FBI’s STAR program and the surveillance of American citizens from on high by spy satellites? I know I can count on senators Pat Leahy and Ron Wyden—but how many other Democrats, fearful of being tarred as soft on terrorism by our commander-in-chief, will once more refuse to take a stand?

Bush the Saboteur
Marie Cocco, TruthDig
Sep 27, 2007

WASHINGTON—If a candidate for any office ran on a promise