"It all comes back to our foreign policy of global intervention and our continuing and relentless “war on terrorism.” What we are experiencing, as we sink into the morass of democratic despotism, is the domestic “blowback.” The terrorist networks that pulled off the 9/11 attacks were established during the cold war era with the invaluable assistance of the US and Saudi Arabia, in the name of fighting communism in Afghanistan. This symbiotic relationship has continued even after 9/11, albeit in a different form. Every drone strike that takes out innocents and violates the sovereignty of other nations swells these networks with new recruits. As Michael Scheuer points out in his invaluable book, Imperial Hubris, Uncle Sam is the best friend Al Qaeda ever had – a point the Obamaites may be in the process of confirming beyond a reasonable doubt, as the “let’s help the Syrian rebels” movement gains new momentum within the administration. Imperialism is the fuel that keeps the machinery of domestic repression running and it is operating just as early critics of the Empire, such as John T. Flynn, said it would. Writing during the darkest days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reign, Flynn said “All that is needed to set us definitely on the road to a Fascist society is war. It will of course be a modified form of Fascism at first,” clothed in the fabulous raiment of “patriotism” and necessity. While FDR did his best to target his political enemies using the vast powers at his command, he didn’t have the Patriot Act and Total Information Awareness at his disposal. The monster State Flynn and others of the Old Right saw arising from the ashes of the war took half a century and more to reveal its full malevolence, but with the marriage of technology and overweening statism, we are seeing the worst imaginings of the dystopian writers coming true. In this dark time, liberty has few defenders, at least in the Congress of the United States. But one of them is Sen. Rand Paul, who has introduced legislation – the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013 – which would block our rapid progress down the road to a police state. In response to the Greenwald revelations, the Senator averred: “The revelation that the NSA has secretly seized the call records of millions of Americans, without probable cause, represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. I have long argued that Congress must do more to restrict the Executive’s expansive law enforcement powers to seize private records of law-abiding Americans that are held by a third-party. When the Senate rushed through a last-minute extension of the FISA Amendments Act late last year, I insisted on a vote on my amendment (SA 3436) to require stronger protections on business records and prohibiting the kind of data-mining this case has revealed. Just last month, I introduced S.1037, the Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act, which would provide exactly the kind of protections that, if enacted, could have prevented these abuses and stopped these increasingly frequent violations of every American’s constitutional rights. “The bill restores our Constitutional rights and declares that the Fourth Amendment shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States government to search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause.” You’ll note when the Senator introduced his bill – well before the Guardian published its blockbuster story. This is what political leadership is all about: seeing the problem well before it is all too apparent. " - original.antiwar/justin/2013/06/06/police-state-progressivism/#.UbLPZgXLisM.facebook
Posted on: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 14:20:24 +0000
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