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By Ed Ciaccio

7/14/07

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper”

—-“The Hollow Men” - T.S. Eliot

“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”

–Hannah Arendt

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is ‘not done.’ Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

–George Orwell

‘We face a dire reality. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue with no end in sight. A nuclear strike on Iran may occur at any moment, based on a “false flag” terrorist attack to be blamed on Iran, as noted by Brzezinski and others. The neoconservative mania of the White House breeds war and hatred abroad. Secret prisons and torture have become routine.”

–Cindy Sheehan, July 4, 2007

Among the many rare species endangered by the Cheney/Bush regime over the last six years, too often with the complicity not only of Congressional Republicans, but many Democrats as well, is one which too many of us take for granted: our Constitutional system.

Though this threat to our Constitution has existed as long as our nation has, it has grown much more extreme under Bush, whose administration has been filled with many of those, such as imperial presidency supporters Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who believe in an unrestrained “unitary executive;” and those, such as Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte, who were among many who attempted an alternate U.S. government under the sainted Ronald Reagan, with the surprising assistance of some Democrats, as Sam Husseini reminds us in his article “Killing the Constitution: How I Became a Radical, 20 Years Ago Today”

(http://www.counterpunch.org/husseini07132007.html):

[Many think they now see through the Democrats’ complicity with the Bush administration’s illegal wars and unconstitutional actions. If they think this is new, they don’t know the half of it.

Exactly twenty years ago today, on July 13, 1987, I witnessed the Democratic Party establishment covering up — and therefore helping — the subversion of the U.S. Constitution. It was actually on national TV, but few seemed to care.

For a while, I was admiring of the co-chairs of the Iran-Contra committee, the Democrats Sen. Daniel Inouye and Rep. Lee Hamilton — who would go on to co-head the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Commission.

But, following events closely, it became clear Inouye and Hamilton were covering things up. This became glaring on July 13, 1987 when the following exchange took place as Rep. Jack Brooks, a Democrat from Texas questioned Oliver North:

REP. BROOKS: Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the “continuity of government” in the event of a major disaster?

BRENDAN SULLIVAN (North’s lawyer): Mr. Chairman?

SEN. INOUYE: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch on that, sir?

REP. BROOKS: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

SEN. INOUYE; May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I’m certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.

And go into executive session they would. I expected a firestorm about this. It never happened. The media were largely silent, the Chicago Tribune the next day was rare in having a page one story (which I of course didn’t see till years later) leading with:

Members of the Iran-contra congressional panels Monday questioned Lt. Col. Oliver North about his alleged involvement in a highly secret government plan that reportedly included suspension of the Constitution in times of national crisis.

Sen. Daniel Inouye (D., Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off discussion of the plan, saying it touched on a “highly sensitive and classified area.”

And the committee did go into executive session at various points. In his questioning, Brooks was referring to a few articles like the Miami Herald piece of July 5, 1987 by Alfonso Chardy, which I didn’t find until much later:

Some of President Reagan’s top advisers have operated a virtual parallel government outside the traditional Cabinet departments and agencies almost from the day Reagan took office, congressional investigators and administration officials have concluded.

Investigators believe that the advisers’ activities extended well beyond the secret arms sales to Iran and aid to the contras now under investigation.

Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example, helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.]

While Husseini has done a great service to remind us how willingly Democrats went along 20 years ago with such plans for a “Shadow Government,” in Bill Moyers’ phrase, more recent events should provoke not just alarm, but genuine vigilance and action on our part.

The 342-page, Orwellian-titled USA PATRIOT Act, which threatens the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments, was passed soon after the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks with few, if any, members of Congress having read it. Prominent members such as Senator Patrick Leahy, who, at first, opposed it, changed their minds soon after receiving deadly anthrax in the mail, a crime which has still not been solved. According to some sources, the particular strain of anthrax used in the attacks could only have come from the U.S. Army bio-warfare lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

In December, 2005, the NY Times revealed, and Bush later admitted, that Bush had ignored, more than 30 times, the 1978 FISA law mandating warrants for wiretaps. This lawbreaking has so far gone unpunished.

In early 2006, a Homeland Security contract for $385 million was awarded to KBR, a Halliburton (Cheney’s former company) subsidiary, to build detention centers in the U.S. “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,” according to a February 4, 2006 NY Times article. For years now, under Bush/Cheney’s rule, protesters have been exiled to “free-speech zones” out of the sight and hearing of Bush. Are these “detention centers”the next step?

Bush’s abuse and misuse of “signing statements” to ignore or overrule more than 750 laws he disagreed with, including the McCain Torture Act reinforcing long-existing U.S., U.N. and Geneva Convention prohibitions against torture, has been well-documented.

In October, 2006, the still-Republican-majority Congress, with little Democratic opposition, passed both the Military Commissions Act, which virtually eliminated habeas corpus, and the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007, which made martial law much easier to unilaterally impose by presidential edict.

On May 9, 2007, Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20. As Larry Chin, in a May 21, 2007 Global Research article titled “New presidential directive gives Bush dictatorial power,” writes,

This directive, completely unnoticed by the media, and given no scrutiny by Congress, literally gives the White House unprecedented dictatorial power over the government and the country, bypassing the US Congress and obliterating the separation of powers. The directive also placed the Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of domestic “security”.

Recently, Bush commuted the sentence of “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s aide who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the cover-up of those White House staff members who violated federal law by disclosing the name of a covert CIA operative, ending her effectiveness in tracking WMD’s, endangering (possibly ending) the lives of her contacts abroad, and constituting an act of treason.

Now, after the semi-farce of Cheney’s attempt to create a fourth branch of government unique to him, Bush has obstructed justice by writing letters telling Sara Taylor and Harriet Miers, no longer part of his government, not to testify before the Judiciary Committee. Bush has also refused to provide documents about the “friendly-fire” death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.

As calls for more investigations into Cheney/Bush lawbreaking increase, as talk of impeachment finally breaks through the corporate media blockade, and as the outrage against, and distrust of, Bush and Cheney grow, along with the frustration at Democrats’ ineffectiveness in ending the illegal Iraq occupation and making the Bush/Cheney criminals accountable to the law, this lawless regime’s temptation to provoke a distracting, unifying “incident” with Iran will grow. Such a “false flag” operation is feared and suspected by many of us who have watched this regime over six years, including Cindy Sheehan and Republican Presidential Candidate Ron Paul, M.D.

Following a meeting earlier in the week with NATO and European Union officials, on July 10, 2007, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, told Israeli Army Radio, “If we start military operations against Iran alone, then Europe and the US will support us.”

An air war on Iran by Israel alone (with such tacit U.S./NATO/European approval), by the U.S., or both, would fully ignite the Muslim world, make even more U.S. and European cities terrorist targets, cut off oil supplies from the Persian Gulf, and throw the U.S. and Europe’s economy into a recession.

What if those, such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who counsel against impeachment and advise us to wait for the expected January, 2009 inauguration of a Democratic President who will begin, then, to clean up all the messes created by six years of the Bush/Cheney regime, are whistling past the graveyard of our democracy? What if the 9/11 attacks were, in reality, our own Reichstag fire?

It may be too late, by then, to save our Constitutional system, let alone avert a catastrophic World War. I hope it is not already too late.

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