BY PETER CHAMBERLIN

We the People have “freedom of the press,” but we do not have a free press.

We have a right to speak out and to assemble, but we don’t know what to say, or where to say it. The Internet is opening a path for us to change these deficiencies.

The Internet will replace the mainstream media, if the First Amendment survives the ceaseless assault being waged upon the Constitution in the name of facilitating the “war on terror.” The overlooked ideology of the Internet is an extremely patriotic American nationalism, driving a free market of truth, mixed-in with freely expressed opinions and ideas. The Internet is the only source of actual “news,” in our land of the corporate media.

The most aware of the web news providers must adopt a common strategy, based on a forward-thinking plan to edge-out the corporate news services as America’s principle source of timely information. Saving the Constitution should be sufficient motivation to bring all of them together in common purpose.

Americans are outraged by the war and by the Bush Administration’s apparent lack of concern for the pain and carnage that have unnecessarily become intimate companions to so many American families and their honored sons and daughters, who are sent into the Iraqi meat grinder, only to come home with deadly wounds into the arms of a medical bureaucracy without a plan, or a heart. The inhumanity of the neocon war planners is apparent for the whole world to see, as they push to bring about genocide as the price of their political agenda.

The war that we did not need, at a price that we could not afford, is causing the very threat to America’s foreign policy and economic security that Bush cites in his latest Executive Order, to declare a “national emergency” related to victory in Iraq. The price of this manufactured “emergency” is to be paid in more than dollars; it will be paid with great quantities of American and Muslim blood, and the loss of the Republic, with the destruction of the Constitution (a.k.a. “that “god-damned piece of paper”).

If the exercise of our rights to assemble and to speak freely about this war of aggression will cost us our rights to privacy and our property rights, then the First and Fourth Amendments are already gone. If the First Amendment still lives on the Internet, then it leaves it to the Internet patriots to protect it against those who have taken oaths to “support and defend the Constitution,” but instead bind us to a course leading to its destruction.

The Internet is the “Truth News Network.” It has many channels. It has many viewpoints. But it has one prevailing ideology, Americanism. For us, nationalist Americanism is the opposite of internationalist corporatism. We have to wage the war of ideas that will wrest freedom from “The Corporation’s” choke hold. “The Corporation” is the mother ship, under whose shadow the smaller corporate pirates freely operate, as they dominate America’s news services, the electoral process and representative government itself. America’s valiant soldiers fight and die for “The Corporation’s” interests. America dishonors all those who have fallen in her service in past wars, by allowing what happens each day to today’s warriors. The Truth News Network has to be at the forefront of the fight to challenge those who keep looking for new wars that take the lives and souls of our sons, in the killing of what will be millions of innocents.

The Truth Network must provide the truth in massive doses, gathered together from all over the world. The Truth Network must focus on the many excellent investigations being offered on the web, as well as the moving analysis and commentary that is to be found there. The Internet is emerging as the most powerful democratic force for change on the face of the earth. It will open the way for the educating of the sleeping masses and become a legitimate voice of democracy, with which to oversee our own government. It is a powerful tool that is free to all people. It must not allow itself to be destroyed by a would-be fascist government that is bent on dominating the world and destroying real democracy.

The rest of us free patriots must do what patriots have always done, we stand-up together, for the Republic and for our sacred Constitution. We speak-out, while we still have voices and freedom of movement, to stop the madness from on high, that is risking our democratic-Republic for the sake of The Corporate goal of total world conquest.

When we take a stand for the Constitution, we are taking a stand for the rule of law. This administration has made a mockery of International Law and our national laws, which honor those laws as our own. It has undermined the Constitutional “separation of powers,” by the use of extraordinary powers and signing statements, that have placed America one executive order away from the “national emergency” that will justify the final extermination of freedom and democracy.

The Truth Network must continue to lead the way forward by bringing us massive doses of truth on a daily basis, exposing the devious machinations that are playing out in the Middle East neocon plots intended to start the final war. The Bush/Cheney covert plan to ignite that war is being carried-out on multiple fronts, each of which is an exploratory probing maneuver, meant to find weaknesses that can be exploited in starting the war. Will the end begin in Pakistan with a massive bombing campaign in North Waziristan which will push a real Islamist nuclear-armed state into the enemy camp? Or will the end begin with an Israeli carpet-bombing of Syria, or perhaps with a new terrorist strike here in the homeland?

We know that it is most likely to begin with a nuclear attack upon Iranian reactors by the United States, or even more likely, with Israelis forcing us to join in, backing-up actions initiated by them? That last scenario can only come about with US support, since Israel does not have the aerial refueling capability needed to strike central Iran, or the capacity to conduct any serious long range air campaign against faraway Iran. The people of the United States can stop Israel, by stopping our government from supporting the Israeli aggression. We have the power to prevent the Cheney war plan to grow the Iraq war into a full-scale regional Sunni-Shiite religious civil war. Whatever it takes to pry Cheney’s hands from the Commander-In-Chief’s steering wheel must be done.

Since democracy still restrains his ambitions, he must find or engineer a valid excuse for starting this new war, in order to justify the pupeteer’s actions to the American people. This is why there is still hope for raising the numbers necessary to stop them. They seek to force us to change the “common will,” by ramping-up the fear levels to a justifiable volume. We have to make the people aware, while calming them to the fear-mongers’ cries of “wolf.”

The corporate media is the worst fear-monger of them all. They have failed the American people by letting their fear of economic insecurity cloud their journalistic vision. Only Dan Rather dared to risk the wrath of The Corporation by outing the chicken hawk president with the fragments of truth that were available to him. The Internet has opened the way to the exposing of all hidden truths and political cover-ups.

We know that the Internet has the power to cast doubts over all the “official versions” of the key events that have typified American politics since the time of President Kennedy’s assassination. We know for certain that there is much hidden evidence that proves that the official version of the 9/11 attacks is untrue.

The Truth Network must continue to enlighten the people and to reassure them, by providing the knowledge that there are millions of other concerned Americans who think the same way that they do. Fear will be countered by this personal reassurance of solidarity, when the threat level goes to “Red Alert,” in response to the next attack or prevarication. When people are allowed to clearly see what is happening now, and what has happened in the past, then they will know that there really is hope in numbers. When the truth opens the way before them, then the people will see that there really is a “critical mass” that is within reach, for turning our pilot less ship of state, before the planned Cheney ship wreck that is our intended fate. If we manage to alert the American people to the coming “shit-storm” that Cheney is planning, in time to rally substantial opposition, it will only come via the Internet. If the First Amendment survives what is yet to come, it will be on the ashes of the corporate press.

If we can stop the immediate attempts to stampede us into the Iran war, then we can probably hold them off long enough to have a next election. If we get that far, then there will be no Republican Party left in our wake. The Truth Network will bring forth the new independent party that will replace it. The Internet is a democratic-revolution in the making. The many voices of the people are being heard. Through the expression of these voices a “common will” can be heard. This common will of the people always has been, and always must be, the true “decider” in our free democratic government. By our combined efforts as truth-seeking, freedom-loving patriotic humanists (”humane-ists”), we can open the way to a humane foreign policy, the only way out of our present manufactured predicament.

Peter Chamberlin is an op-ed writer for the Herald-Dispatch newspaper in Huntington, WV. He has been actively opposing all non-defensive war most of his life. Peter’s first petition (as a teenager) was a success in his local community, raising several hundred signatures protesting Nixon’s scapegoating of Lt. Calley for the My Lai incident. He has been very active since 1982 writing letters to newspapers and magazines, as well as recalcitrant national leaders, speaking-out against war, nuclear war, and the impending violent collapse of the Western empire (that is now at hand). Chamberlin has had several hundred letter-to-editors printed in this time.