DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
THOMAS JEFFERSON:
"ALL TYRANNY NEEDS TO GAIN A FOOTHOLD IS FOR PEOPLE OF GOOD CONSCIENCE TO REMAIN SILENT."
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN:
"ANY ONE WHO TRADES LIBERTY FOR SECURITY DESERVES NEITHER LIBERTY OR SECURITY."THEODORE ROOSEVELT:
"A GREAT DEMOCRACY MUST BE PROGRESSIVE OR IT WILL SOON CEASE TO BE A GREAT DEMOCRACY."
WINSTON CHURCHILL:
"DEMOCRACY IS THE WORST FORM OF GOVERNMENT, EXCEPT FOR ALL THE OTHER FORMS THAT HAVE BEEN TRIED."
GEORGE CARLIN:
"I THINK THE HUMAN RACE HAS SQUANDERED ITS GIFT AND THIS COUNTRY HAS SQUANDERED ITS PROMISE. I THINK PEOPLE IN AMERICA SOLD OUT VERY CHEAPLY, FOR SNEAKERS AND CHEESE BURGERS. AND I DON'T THINK ITS FIXABLE."
HOWARD ZINN:
"DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTISM."
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2008 - SEPTEMBER
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"You never know what your history is going to be like until long after you’re gone." —W.
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"The right to peaceably assemble in this nation ends as soon as the assembly begins."
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"The Joint Terrorism Task Force is another example of using the buzzword 'terrorism' as a basis to clamp down on people's freedoms and push forward a more authoritarian government."
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2008 - AUGUST
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Bush has vowed to sprint through his final five months, and is pushing through a vast plan to alter countless federal programs.
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In a series of quiet but sweeping measures, the Bush Administration is codifying the government's capacity to spy on its citizens.
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Although many in this country are paying a heavy price for US domestic and foreign policy decisions, millions of Americans simply continue to shop, spend and satisfy their appetite for cheap oil, credit and the promise of freedom at home.
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Sad but true: Intelligence is a political liability in the US. Author of The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby explains why.
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Bauerlein suggests that young people are suffering not only a decline in reading, but also significant "knowledge deficits" about history, geography, science and art, and an ignorance of civic life that poses a threat to democratic society.
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Completing the transformation of the U.S. political narrative from one of monopolistic Republican iniquity to an even more depressing tale about the overweening power of corporate money and the essentially fictitious nature of our two-party system.
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Michael Moore Dares to Ask: What's So Heroic About Being Shot Down While Bombing Innocent Civilians?Like Iraq, Vietnam was not a noble cause. It's time we stopped letting politicians and the press perpetuate the McCain War Hero myth.
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Widely considered a trial of the military commissions system itself, the Hamdan trial was a two-week exercise in government secrecy and propaganda.
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In a democracy, trials must be governed by fair rules, and judges must be guided by the law and the evidence, not pressure from the government. The military commission system, which falls far short of these standards, is a stain on the United States.
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A war with Iran would ruin our economy and finally kill off our weakened, anemic democracy.
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2008 - JULY
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Veteran journalist Robert Scheer on the media's complicity in war, the rise of the neocons and how even Nixon got some things right.
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"It's sort of like the end of democracy in a way. We don't know what the government is doing. People on the inside don't know what the government is doing. It was from this sort of collective angst that people began to talk to me about the operations."
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Taxpayer dollars are funding activities that result in Iranians being killed and wounded and Iranian property destroyed -- acts of war.
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"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
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"The American people are in doubt as to whether administration officials have fulfilled their oaths of office to preserve, protect and defend our Constitution."
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The claim that Mr. Rove and the White House make is that high-level aides to the president are in a class entirely by themselves -- a separate group that is above the reach of a subpoena and, consequently, above the law.
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The new FISA law uses terrorism as a pretext to permit wholesale spying and would seriously cripple our free press.
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Salon.com has published new details about a top secret government database that might be at the heart of the Bush administration’s domestic spying operations. The database is known as “Main Core.”
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A new class of everyday spies, from paramedics to utility workers, are being recruited to be "terrorism liason officers."
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Dissenting Judge: "To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the President call them 'enemy combatants,' would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution -- and the country"
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What the administration fears is that hearings for any prisoner will reveal how much abuse has been meted out by American interrogators and how thin and tainted the evidence is against most of the Guantánamo prisoners.
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A closer look at the first Guantánamo interrogation to be released on video reveals, above all, a "victimized and exploited" child.
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These acts need to be called by their true names -- war crimes and sex crimes -- and people in America need to demand justice for the perpetrators and their victims.
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“If you’re going to wrap this under the banner of military justice, then it needs to be a fair trial,” Col. Davis said. “What’s taking place now, I would call neither military nor justice.”
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Ms. Mayer’s book helps cement the case that America’s use of torture has betrayed not just American values but our national security, right to the present day.
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America has become little more than an "energy protection force," doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself.
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The whole invasion is a war crime -- indeed the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows, in the terms of the Nuremberg judgment.
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The Iraq disaster and rising gas and food prices have people across the globe in a state of fear and shock. It's high times for Bush & Co.
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The crisis has the potential to transform American politics because, first it destroys a generation of ideological bromides about free markets, and, second, because it makes visible the ugly power realities of our deformed democracy.
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Citing national security, a federal court rules that Maher Arar, who was kidnapped at JFK and sent to Syria by the U.S., had no due process rights.
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2008 - June
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If you listen to Bush's legal advisors, questions about the limits of his authority might not be hypothetical anymore.
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Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: "George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on that matter before the end of his term in the White House."
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In a dramatic speech, Chris Hedges warns that the nation is on the verge of becoming a full-blown corporate state.
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American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism.
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Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors
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The American people either don't care about torture -- or else they don't want to hear about it.
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U.S-based human rights organization says it found evidence of U.S. torture and war crimes, and it accuses U.S. military health professionals of allowing the abuse of detainees,
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Retired General Antonio Taguba, who led the US Army’s investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses, has accused the Bush administration of “a systematic regime of torture” and war crimes.
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Thirty-four anti-torture activists have been convicted for protesting the Guantanamo Bay prison outside the Supreme Court. Twelve are now serving jail sentences.
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A Supreme Court ruling recently gave states the green light to resume executions; two of the first three executed prisoners were mentally disabled.
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The Pentagon is pushing 9/11 trials for McCain's political advantage.
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With four more prisoners charged last week, the Bush administration seems intent on trying as many Guantánamo detainees as possible before November.
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An eight-month investigation by McClatchy newspapers finds the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned, and routinely tortured, scores of terrorist suspects.
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2008 - MAY
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Bush's former press secretary reveals how the White House lied about Iraq to everyone -- and how the media let them get away with it.
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Why do so many in the liberal media simply move on to another topic after stating that Bush took the nation to war based on a lie?
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A new book offers a controversial but ultimately convincing diagnosis of how the U.S. has succumbed to an unacknowledged totalitarian temptation.
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For all of America's shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, "The system works." Now all bets are off.
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"Secret law has been normalized to a previously unknown extent and to the detriment of American democracy"
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His recent books include Dreaming War, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia. His latest is Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir.
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"My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation… I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation"
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The high officials of our government, and the lawyers who advised them, should be investigated and prosecuted by a Special Prosecutor, independent of the Justice Department, for their roles in misusing the rule of law and legal analysis to justify torture
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In a recent speech, the AG said Bush's legal advisers "reached their conclusions in good faith" in accordance with "what the law required."
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How many torture memos does an administration have to promulgate before the public gets the idea they are promulgating torture?
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How has our government managed to justify one of the most egregious assaults on the rule of law?
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It would take an exceptional enemy to damage America’s image and interests as much as President Bush and Mr. Cheney already have with Guantánamo.
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A fatally flawed system that permits conviction by hearsay statements extracted through techniques long considered torture by civilized nations.
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As more Americans are watched, fewer cases are made. The trend concerns civil liberties groups as well as some lawmakers and legal experts.
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The Pentagon pundit scandal was not only a corrupt marriage of propaganda and corporate lobbying -- it was completely illegal.
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In the new film Iron Man, the people cast as terrorists take the fall for what the U.S. has done in the real world.
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Targeting journalists, the Bush administration has engaged in direct assault, intimidation, imprisonment and information blackouts to limit the ability of journalists to do their jobs.
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“Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country.”
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2008 - APRIL
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Susan Jacoby suggests that Anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism flourish in a mix that includes addiction to infotainment, every form of superstition and credulity, and an educational system that does a poor job.
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Why Canadians must fight 'deep integration' with US.
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In his last year of life King condemned American militarism. But we don't see that in retrospectives.
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A year to the day before his assassination, King gave this speech at the Riverside Church in New York
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Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense -- that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization -- begun to lose their hold on our minds?
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COL. SAM GARDINER: I think that there are about four or five levels of problems here. The most profound and the most painful is the disdain of the Pentagon for democracy.
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"If all these cases are going to proceed with empty chairs, what has already been called a kangaroo court will just be highlighted as really a kangaroo court."
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British attorney Philippe Sands reveals new details about how attorney John Yoo and other high-ranking administration lawyers helped design and implement the interrogation policies seen at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons.
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The CIA conducted a research program to develop truth serums & pharmacological approaches to manipulating human behavior & the Yoo torture memo went out of its way to provide legal cover for the use of drugs in interrogations.
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We now have confirmation that the President of the United States gave the OK to torture. Where is the media? Where are the Democrats?
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“It is a very sad day when the President of the United States subverts the Constitution, the rule of law and American values of justice.”
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Eric Lichtblau on his new book, Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice. Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005.
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News that the Bush administration threw out the 4th Amendment after 9/11 is a sobering reminder of the lawlessness of its spying program.
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Eisenhower: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."
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Millions of people in the U.S. can't vote because of felony convictions. Restoring their right to vote means restoring democracy.
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The slave-like conditions in the agriculture industry would shock most Americans.
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For decades these self-professed saviors of the Western world helped precipitate U.S. foreign policy disasters like the Vietnam War.
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2008 - MARCH
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Presidents and prime ministers will lie their countries into war -- but why do We the People keep buying it?
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Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a culture at odds with America’s heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science.
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Conservatism has ruled America for three decades now -- Backward, deceitful, polarizing, warlike, arrogant, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, destructive, intolerant, ignorant, lethal and incompetent -- it's just plain ugly, isn't it?
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America's enemies have used an evangelical, redemptive regime, hell-bent on remaking a fallen world, to lay the seeds of their success.
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The Iraq War -- now ending its fifth bloody year -- represents not only a human tragedy of enormous consequence and possibly the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history but also a systemic failure of American political and journalistic institutions.
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When even public radio parrots the military's official line on the war in Iraq, what hope is there for unbiased, quality reporting?
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Given the common media rhetoric of "supporting the troops" to ignore these same troops when they speak out about the horrors of the war is unconscionable.
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"Americans are bred deep into their psyches to think of America as a good country and, I think, much harder than just the hurdle of getting troops out of Iraq is to get Americans to realize the terrible things we do in the name of the United States."
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Anyone who believes that such a thing as a benevolent foreign military occupation exists is seriously deluded. Soldier after soldier agreed.
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Soldiers spoke of free-fire zones, the shootings and beatings of innocent civilians, racism at the highest levels of the military, sexual harassment and assault within the military, and the torturing of prisoners.
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It's used to devalue and dehumanize the populations of occupied lands, and to motivate soldiers to overcome their natural inhibitions against cruelty.
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The House of Representatives postponed a vote on a spy bill after Democrats agreed to a request from Republicans to hold a rare secret session to discuss what they termed classified security matters.
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US President George W Bush vetoes a law that would prevent the CIA from using torture-like waterboarding and other forms of coercion on prisoners.
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Was it really necessary to invite Bush to entertain them, and then stand to applaud him only hours after he once again disgraced the country? Where are the Edward R. Murrows?
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Bush's anti-torture veto -- and his subsequent radio address -- follow a long tradition of obfuscation and doublespeak.
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Given our singular military and cultural power in today's world, no less than the future of 250 years of human rights development rests on how this internal American battle is resolved.
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Recent publications & public & closed professional events sponsored by APA have made it clear that APA is dedicated to serving the national security interests of the US government & military, to the extent of ignoring basic human rights practice & law.
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The judgments of history will require an accounting from our government leaders for their participation in what can only be seen as a massive step backward in the advance of rationality, humanity, and freedom begun in the Enlightenment.
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False information obtained by torture was part of the main justification that took us to war. Every American military death in this war, every civilian death, every limb and leg that was lost was a life that torture took.
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In 2000, and again in 2006, the United Nations Committee Against Torture condemned the kind of isolation imposed by the U.S. government in federal, state and county-run supermax prisons.
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For years, America has been using a British island as a landing pad for its torture taxis -- only now has the U.K. admitted to it.
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The political and media public space is dominated by images, words and innuendo that overwhelmingly portray Arab-Muslims who are violent, extremist, religiously fanatic and generally alien, and therefore dangerous.
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After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs.
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According to a Vanity Fair article, the Bush administration lied to Congress and boosted military support for rival Palestinian faction Fatah in the aim of provoking a Palestinian civil war they thought Hamas would lose.
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The only way for Democrats to challenge U.S. militarism is to condemn the Iraq war as inherently immoral.
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The negative impact of the war on Iraq, the United States and elsewhere is more than apparent, whether 80,000 or one million Iraqis have died.
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An estimated 50,000 prostitutes, some as young as 13, are among the 1.2 million Iraqis who fled to Syria after Bush invaded.
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Attacks all over the planet by U.S. Predator planes suggest Bush thinks he has the "right" to kill civilians.
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"One in 100: Americans Behind Bars 2008." With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in its prison population, well ahead of China (1.5 million) and leaving Russia in the dust (890,000).
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They are prisoners of an ill-defined and undeclared war on a tactic -- terrorism -- that dates back to Biblical times and will be with us indefinitely.
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Artist Dread Scott argues that the controversy over his art installation only proves his point about "America's abuses of power."
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DECLINE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 2008 - FEBRUARY
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Seven principles that could offer a new model of American power.
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The Reichstag fire helped transform Germany from a democracy to a dictatorship. What can we do to avoid a similar outcome?
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International polls show that even US allies believe "the US contributes the most to world instability along with Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and North Korea," and that the U.S. presence in Iraq is considered a greater threat to peace than Iran going nuclear.
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Report by the Congressional Research Service (via Federation of American Scientists)
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Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has fomented no less than fourteen wars in Africa -- enough is enough.
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Bush rejects charges the war in Iraq has hurt the US economy, his administration has repeatedly low-balled the cost of the war—and even kept a second set of records hidden from the American public.
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If Washington turned its definition of terror on the U.S., America could rise to the top of its own most-wanted list.
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Noam Chomsky says there has been little change in the conventional debate over a US invasion abroad: from Vietnam to Iraq, the two main political parties and political pundits differ only on the tactics of US goals, which are assumed to be legitimate.
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VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: We have to work the dark side, if you will. We’re going to spend time in the shadows.
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Bush & Cheney have overseen a global campaign of kidnapping, illegal detentions, harsh interrogations, torture and kangaroo courts where the accused face the death penalty, confronted by secret evidence obtained by torture, with no legal representation.
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It's easy to forget that the road to Guantánamo began in places like Kandahar and Jalalabad.
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The media missed a damning story that has actual implications for American democracy.
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A controversial new book argues that shadowy intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda and the media simply swallow it wholesale.
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"That's what they're trying to do is narrow the debate so that no one remembers the lies. It's as if the lies become truth if they just stay at war long enough. That's what they're trying to get the American people to believe."
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Life, the Pentagon boasts, is returning to normal. But the truth is a very different story.
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In the land Bush "liberated," violence remains at a staggering level, the national medical-care system has been destroyed; 4.5 million Iraqis have been displaced, 70% lack clean water, and 4 million don't know where their next meal is coming from.
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The President's attack on the Freedom of Information Act is his latest attempt to preserve state secrecy.
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Science is crucial to the management of the nation, and without it we're no better than a medieval kingdom.
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The public has been denied important information on the link between pollution and health problems including lung, colon and breast cancer.
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A U.S. Court has ordered Wikileaks.org to be shut down but it still exists in an extensive network of cover names from which one can access their materials or continue leaking the secrets of governments and the corrupt rich and powerful.
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Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act intending to protect the rights of U.S. citizens and residents, and the president systematically broke that law over a period of more than five years.
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Former UN chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter warns that another war is inevitable, unless we defy Bush's attempts to spin the facts about Iran.
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As the days of Bush's final term in office dwindle, Ellsberg emphasizes that, no matter how much time is left, impeachment is one thing that must happen for the sake of preserving American democracy.
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George Bush winks at indiscriminate killings, further tarring the reputation of the U.S. military.
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What was once the barbarism of air war, its genuine horror, has been transformed into humdrum ordinariness.
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Washington denies responsibility for the effects of chemical warfare, fearing that legal precedent may limit future military endeavors.
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In congressional testimony, CIA director Michael Hayden became the first administration official to publicly acknowledge the agency used waterboarding on detainees following the September 11 2001, terrorist attacks.
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Seems this administration will do anything to defend cruel, inhuman treatment.
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Is extraordinary rendition really a "state secret" anymore?
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Michael Ratner: What is at stake is the future of justice in the US
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In an interview with BBC Radio's Law in Action, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia defended torture, claiming that it is not necessarily barred by the Constitution.
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The Nation magazine reveals the former chief prosecutor for the prison’s military commissions says the Pentagon has foreclosed the possibility of acquittals.
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A new analysis by NBC News reveals that more than a quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Commission Report refer to controversial interrogation techniques. Yet, Commission staffers did not question the CIA about its techniques.
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Restoring the right to vote for felons is essential to democracy and could dramatically change election results.
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"Then they said when -- not if -- martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted."
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We are officially fighting terrorism and defending freedom by paying private companies exhorbitant amounts of money and allowing them to terrorize our own citizens and deny them their civil liberties.
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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA [Book Review]
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Decline Of American Democracy 2008 - January
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Protesters who re-enacted one of Blackwater's worst civilian massacres in Iraq got jail time, while the real killers remain free.
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Welcome to 2008, a year of morally obscene, fiscally unsustainable spending. Watch as the military bloats and our standard of living sinks.
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An exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
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Throughout his presidency, Bush has issued more than 151 signing statements challenging 1149 provisions of laws.
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More evidence that Bush never intended to end the war, and that he still views it as the prelude to an unceasing American military presence in Iraq.
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Last time it was scary speed-boats, this time it's a bogus link to a bombing in Argentina -- one by one, Iran hawks' lies keep unraveling.
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The distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant, despite them.
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The sad reality about America’s historical amnesia – if not outright hostility toward the hard truths of history – will mean that few, if any, lessons will be learned from the eight years of George W. Bush.
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The sixth anniversary of the creation of Bush's legal "black hole" is upon us.
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What might originally have seemed like emergency measures in a moment of crisis is now an institutionalized way of life. Whether we like it or not, these methods increasingly define what it means to be an American.
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The Bush Administration nominates one of its favorite pro-torture lawyers for a top DOJ post. Again.
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This sentencing sends a message to the President that torture is justified for little more than thought crime.
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A Canadian Foreign Affairs training manual has created a diplomatic firestorm. At issue is a list of countries with possible torture and abuse cases. The list includes the United States.
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Real news about just how deeply the new homeland security state is settling into every aspect of our world.
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"This is the way our democracy, little by little, is being stripped away from us."
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"One can only wonder, now that the United States has 'liberated' Iraq from Saddam Hussein, just who will liberate Iraq from the United States"
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The warmongers who got us into Iraq are blaming everyone but themselves for the humanitarian disaster they created.
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One of the severe side effects of imperialism in its advanced stages seems to be that it rots the brains of the imperialists.
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The U.S., the only country with the power to intervene, has become an accessory to murder.
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The DoD is flirting with the idea of medicating soldiers to desensitize them to combat trauma -- will an army of unfeeling monsters result?
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Big pharma has some new customers. Not complying with authority is now, in many cases, labeled a disease.
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One hundred thousand extra deaths per year. That's roughly one every five minutes, around the clock, 24/7/365 -- every year.
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David Cay Johnston reveals how government subsidies and new regulations have quietly funneled money from the poor and the middle class to the rich and politically connected.
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Forty years later, Dr. King's dream of a more just society is a long way from being realized.
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The voodoo economics the Bushies have sold America obscure their systematic fleecing of the nation's public wealth.
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The heartbreaker is that most of those forced to suffer the stingy misery of Texas' poverty are children.
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Somehow, a single corporation has managed to use patent law to gain de facto control of the nation's two biggest crops -- and managed to annul the age-old right of seed-saving over a broad swath of farm country.
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Americans are about to be asked to surrender their Fourth Amendment rights because of a vague and unsupported prediction of the dangers and costs of cyber-terrorism.