U.S. Government Using Terrorism Against the American People
Violence and Threats Being Used to Intimidate and Coerce the American Public for Political Purposes
We’ve documented that – by any measure – America is the largest sponsor of terrorism in the world.
But remember, terrorism is defined as:
The use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.
The American government has also been using violence and threats to intimidate and coerce the American public for political purposes.
For example, the U.S. government is doing the following things to terrorize the American public into docility and compliance:
U.S. constitutional law has taught for hundreds of years that chilling the exercise of our liberties is as dangerous to freedom than directly suppressing them.
For example, as we’ve previously noted, reporters censor themselves:
Initially, there is tremendous self-censorship by journalists.
For example, several months after 9/11, famed news anchor Dan Rather told the BBC that American reporters were practicing “a form of self-censorship”:
There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around peoples’ necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions…. And again, I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism.
What we are talking about here – whether one wants to recognise it or not, or call it by its proper name or not – is a form of self-censorship.
Keith Olbermann agreed that there is self-censorship in the American media, and that:
You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble …. You cannot say: By the way, there’s something wrong with our …. system.
As former Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin wrote in 2006:
Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . .
There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.
If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.
I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter – whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or whatever it is – out of the way.
Former Fox News reporters say the same thing.
Any reporters who don’t censor themselves are harassed. Whistleblowers are prosecuted … or even tortured by the government.
The fact that the government is spying on all Americans – and using the information to launch political witch hunts – makes us all watch what we say, and makes us careful about who we talk to. As the ACLU notes:
Peaceful protesters should not be treated as potential terrorists nor spied upon by federal government agents. Not only is this a misuse of public funds that could be used to find real terrorists, it chills free speech activities and inhibits the public debate on important issues.
A federal judge found that the NDAA’s provision allowing indefinite detention of Americans without due process has a “chilling effect” on free speech. And see this and this.
The threat of being labeled a terrorist certainly dissuades and chills our willingness to exercise our rights.
Especially when power has become so concentrated that the same agency which spies on all Americans also decides who should be assassinated.
The bottom line is that – like Stalin, Mao or Hitler – the U.S. government is using violence and threats to intimidate and coerce its own people for political purposes … to consolidate power and suppress dissent.
Postscript: fear of terror makes people docile and stupid … and the government has also intentionally whipped up an exaggerated hysteria of terror by “others” in order to scare the people. This is another form of terrorism.
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Certainly you are not just waking up to that?
You are one of the most nuanced thinkers on this board. So, I am just wondering what about that particular blog set you off? When I first saw a Jeep Rubicon idling beside me at a light I instantly wondered if this name was some kind of corporate joke, knowing as I did that the majority of 4WD's don't go off-road but that the government had been off the res for a long time. Maybe you had an epiphany; the Hindus, I understand make a big deal out of the difference between knowing and realization.
Around the late 70's Time did a cover story on a certain Dr. Nork who they stylized as America's leading malpractitioner. When Dr. Nork, after a surgery, sent down his lab samples the pathologists were aghast. It seems that they often didn't know what they were looking at because they weren't used to seeing healthy tissue as, you see, Dr. Nork cut out everything. What is interesting about the case is the wave of litigations that ensued. Several lawsuits were filed against Nork and unfortunately I can't remember the exact amounts but they were the highest for their time. One of the suits that Time mentioned was interesting as so large was the amount that it was inferred that the jury was sending a signal. Since the award was larger than the Dr. could pay or that he was indemnified for the signal was that this was an indictment of not only Nork but the institutions that spawned him. In other words: "and the horse you rode in on!" I don't have the link for the Time article but here is the jist from another publication: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=950&dat=19751013&id=d7daAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Q1gDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5892,2695122
Well what we have now, like the above example, is malpractice and malfeasance in the highest form. Does anyone remember The People's Court ? I am talking about the original one with Judge Wapner, Doug Llewelyn and Rusty, the Bailiff. It seems that law students used to watch that show. The program arose from an overflow of litigation in California as retired judges were sworn back in and held after hours courts to reduce the work load. In a Beatlesque you can syndicate any boat you row move someone decided to document the process and make a buck off of it and The People's Court was born. The differences between it and the ones to follow was that Wapner was a real judge and made real decisions based on law. Rusty, the Bailiff, was the Bailiff at the Manson Trials I think. Although subsequent shows often had real judges they, like our courts, devolved into clown shows not unlike the recent one wherein a judge decried the fact that she couldn't untangle the nested algorithm of lies that the law has degenerated into; this so-called thicket of laws that Obama is hiding behind.
So what we have now is misfeasance or it is malfeasance, or it is malpractice and the truth lies with just what your definition of is is; that, right there, is an impeachable offense, the raping of a crippled, unwieldy but otherwise perfectly functional language (like having "consensual" sex with a mentally challenged person wherein everyone just knows it is wrong on the face of it).
How did we get here? Does anyone, um, remember, um, Caroline, um Kennedy, um? She ran for The United States Senate in New York before disappearing like a fiver in a 3 Card Monte game. Well, um, it seems, um, that um our beloved Caroline once had a job at a think tank the duties of which included making sure that a third party movement didn't arise in the United States because, in her words, that would be messy . She really said that and her job was to pervert the cause of democracy. Caroline Kennedy: The More You Know the Less She Says : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfpqMfCs8lU
Then and Now
I'd love to go to the Tiergarten with you Freida, but Dr. Goebbels' class starts in half an hour. In the vernacular of today it would be "oh I'd love to go to Starbuck's with you Becky but John Yoo's class is starting. He's a really cool professor!" Can you believe that people actually sign up for John Yoo's Class at Berkeley of all places. Berkeley is the home of the Sather Gate, and Mario Savio a place I made a bee-line for the first time I went to San Francisco, very much in the same way I went to The National Archives to see the loaner of The Magna Carta. Well I guess it was just a loaner, after all. Yoo, along with Viet Dihn are responsible for creating the Patriot Act and many other crap opinions that we labor under. And what is frustrating, is that they didn't, like Wapner who had much less responsibility, go into chambers and actualy consider his opinion; no they didn't do that. They didn't Lawyer (to coin a phrase) these documents. The didn't write these documents nor did they frame them. What they did was: they secreted these notions from the backs of their glands .*
*phrase courtesy of Vladimir Nabokov.
If anyone has not seen Chasers War on Everything-John Yoo , it is literally a must see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EwTPQjT0hA
On the outside chance that anyone has not seen the Mario Savio speech which is considered by many to be a benchmark of empasioned oratory, here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhFvZRT7Ds0
Yoo who?
Berkeley has a number of problems nowadays, and John Yoo is a symptom of them. It's become a fairly conservative place. Students are content to graduate and make a living, so if they have a Yoo connection so much the better to get a "law" job. They have a large nuclear engineering dept that gets many foreign students and it gets gov support of course. Their popular physics professor mostly retired, Richard Mueller, told his students and it was all over the internet that the Towers fell because the steel melted. So it's not the same place as when Savio spoke.
Thanks
When physicist Richard Feynman, who had worked on the Manhattan Project, was approached to work on the Space Shuttle Challenger investigation he didn't want to do it as he had some kind of disaffection with the Federal Government; friends later talked him into doing it. He went on to create his now famous and elegantly simple ice water O ring test. Ironically, the government then went on to screw him on his per diem. A Nobel Prize winning physicist with some kind of enmity against the government, now that's a physicist!