How Is America Going To End?

Thanks to Disinfo.com for the following...

http://www.slate.com/id/2223962/

How Is America Going To End?
The world's leading futurologists have four theories.
By Josh Levin
Posted Monday, Aug. 3, 2009

The Global Business Network answers the same question for all its corporate and government clients: What happens next? GBN handles a lot of different whats, and even the occasional what-in-the-hell. In 2003, the group's chairman, Peter Schwartz, and his colleague Doug Randall whipped up a not-so-rosy, 22-page report on "abrupt climate change" for the Department of Defense ("The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries"). Last year, the municipality of Amsterdam asked the firm to help figure out how it might deal with immigration. GBN has also loaned out its brainpower to Hollywood, advising Minority Report director Steven Spielberg on whether Congress and the Constitution would still exist in 2054. (The answer: yes, with a few buts.)

GBN, which since 2000 has been a part of the management-consulting firm the Monitor Group, specializes in scenario based forecasting. Professional futurologists have long used complex computer models to prognosticate, say, what the Middle East will look like in 2050. The Global Business Network comes up with stories. Schwartz, the group's lead philosopher, argues that "scenario planning"—coming up with a broad array of yarns, "good and bad, expected and surprising"—brings rigor to the inevitably imprecise art of forecasting. "It is critical to push people's imagination out to the very edges of believability to see the full range of the possible," Schwartz and Randall explain in the book Blindside. The best way to reach the outer limits of the imagination, they believe, is to tell a good tale.

Today, I've asked the world's leading provider of futuristic consulting to help me think about America's downfall. I'm at a conference table in the group's San Francisco office with six forecasters, including GBN founders Schwartz, Napier Collyns, and Stewart Brand. Our mission: plot scenarios by which the United States could end in the next 100 years. GBN's head of marketing and communications, Nancy Murphy, suggested the time limit. "Beyond 100 years it gets so science fiction-y," she explains.

Before my meeting, I collect some pointers from Schwartz's foundational scenario-planning text, 1991's The Art of the Long View. He suggests that wannabe futurists inhale science and tech news, embrace fringe cultures (though Schwartz admits that his chats with UFO aficionados "offered no insight about the future"), and look for social trends in nascent cultural phenomena such as gangsta rap and America's Funniest Home Videos. (Forgive him: The book was written 20 years ago.) The big picture: If you want to glimpse the future, seek out remarkable people and open your mind to loony-sounding ideas.

I also learn from Schwartz's book that the sensible futurist prefaces everything by saying "This is not a prediction of the future" — the professional forecaster is not an oracle. That said, Schwartz has made his share of good calls. When Schwartz was the head of scenario planning for Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1980s, his team told the company's higher-ups to watch out for an unknown Soviet pol named Gorbachev. If Gorby were to assume a leadership position, Schwartz said, it would be a strong indication that the USSR would open to the West and oil and natural gas prices would drop. When the price plunge came, Shell execs—having anticipated this eventuality—swooped in and bought oil reserves at a discounted rate.

This morning, in a conference room full of fellow forecasters, Schwartz happily plays the emcee for the end of America. He speaks more quickly and authoritatively than anyone else, and he's the one patrolling the line between what's crazy enough to destroy the United States and what's just plain crazy. His first idea: racial warfare. By 2050, whites will no longer be a majority in the United States and Hispanics will make up an estimated 29 percent of the population. "Most violence is committed by males 18 to 35," Schwartz explains. "Now picture a very large, low-employed Hispanic population of males not too pleased with their lot or their ability to control a white-dominated world. … That population then becomes violent and disruptive. And now you get into racial and identity politics—it's all those illegal immigrants we let across the border." Add in a flailing economy, mega-droughts in the Southwest, and the "Colombianization" of Mexico and you've got The Road Warrior crossed with an unusually rabid episode of Lou Dobbs Tonight.

This is just the beginning. For nearly three hours, we run through America-killers that range from the believable to the science fiction-y: rising sea levels, a collapse of entitlement programs, an attack by a foreign power on American soil, a pandemic 10 times worse than the 1918 flu, global domination by a space-faring nation that uses geo-engineering to "turn off" climate change, and the emergence of a transnational class of biologically enhanced supermen and women ("They're all about 6-2—and that's the girls," Schwartz says) who identify more with one another than with any particular nation.

Despite the fun of imagining America succumbing to the Super Friends, Schwartz believes the most likely scenario for the next 100 years is "that the city of Washington will still be a capital of a nation-state on this continent." America has abundant natural resources, relatively low population density, and—with oceans on both coasts—a built-in security system. The collapse of a country with those inherent advantages sometime in the next century would require a low-probability series of events. But low probability isn't no probability. Schwartz ends our exercise by sketching out the possibilities in a two-by-two box.

Most scenario-planning sessions end with the world stuffed inside a grid. The "scenario matrix" is a means of transforming everything we've learned into a range of credible stories—four futures that are as different as you can possibly make them, covering the broadest range of possible outcomes. Joel Garreau, a longtime Washington Post writer and editor who regularly works with GBN, explains that the scenario matrix is a framework for thinking logically about an illogical subject—a way to minimize the "oogabooga" that's inherent in futurism. When he was contemplating whether to buy a generator in the run-up to Y2K, for example, Garreau drew a matrix of four possible post-Y2K worlds. The generator, he found, would come in handy in only one of his four futures; he didn't buy it.

Ultimately, the American collapse probably won't occur in the next century. If it does, though, it might take one of these four forms. Without any further oogabooga, here's Peter Schwartz's matrix for the end of America:

Collapse: In this scenario, the country has devolved after a series of catastrophes: unchecked climate change, a pandemic, nuclear war—the stuff that Jared Diamond books and disaster movies are made of. A catastrophe that breeds internal division, Schwartz argues, is more likely to eradicate America than any kind of external threat. A country is like a family, he theorizes. If you feel threatened from the outside, you band together—rather than tear the United States apart, 9/11 galvanized us against a common enemy. The laggard response to Hurricane Katrina, on the other hand, meant that our own government became the common enemy. A long, uninterrupted series of nationwide Katrinas—and a concomitant series of bungled federal responses—is the recipe for collapse.

Schwartz submits that government incompetence might not be enough to trigger America's implosion. After all, we could always just vote out the bozos who let us down. What we need to destroy the country, he argues, is Zimbabwe-sized corruption: a succession of executives who pilfer the national treasury and refuse to hold free elections. In that case, the country could fall apart as our national creeds of freedom, democracy, and openness are gradually abandoned.

Friendly breakup: In future No. 2, the country dissolves peacefully because the overhead of running a large nation becomes unmanageable. Schwartz likens this to the breakup of the Soviet Union, a case where the cost of holding the country together proved too great and the advantages too small.

While Igor Panarin—the Russian who forecasts America's demise for 2010—would certainly agree with that idea, making parallels with the USSR seems a bit dubious. Unlike the Eastern bloc, the United States isn't an agglomeration of states with strong ethnic identities. It was foreseeable that a socialist republic like Lithuania, which had its own long-standing culture and language, might someday become an independent nation. In modern America, where English predominates and a highly mobile population flits from place to place, is it possible that some state or region could develop enough distinctiveness to split from the union? GBN's Michael Costigan suggests that self-segregation could lead to an amicable parting of the ways. If Democrats migrate to Democratic cities and Republicans cluster in GOP strongholds, we could reach a point where the redder-than-red states and the bluer-than-blue states decide to go it on their own. Hey, it's the future—it could happen!

Global governance: In our third future, the national government declines in importance relative to the world community. Barack Obama's recent brief in defense of American exceptionalism is just one indicator among many that the United States is nowhere near willing to cede its position as the greatest of the world's great powers. But Slate contributor Robert Wright argues in his book Nonzero that humankind must come together to head off the challenges of the "non-zero-sum," globalized world: climate change, biological weapons, pandemics. While Wright tells me that "you wouldn't need something so centralized" as a souped-up United Nations, he believes that if in the next 100 years "America's identity has not dissolved into some sort of larger body of global governance, then chaos will reign."

Global conquest: The final scenario and the grimmest of all: a figure described variously as a "global Napoleon," "a much more empowered Hitler," and "a super-Mao" conquers America and the rest of the world via brute force. This idea, which Schwartz classifies as the least likely of the four, leads us to debate whether it's harder to subjugate the world than it used to be—Schwartz believes it is, as there are "more people with military competence spread across the world." That's followed by a discussion of the best method to exercise dominion over the globe. "I think the way you conquer the world these days is from space," he says. "You can put weapons up there and shut down the world."

A real GBN client would use this scenario matrix to initiate a change in behavior—a shift in corporate strategy perhaps, or a call for new public policy. For me, the end-of-America scenarios are the stopping point. I'm trying to foresee our pathways to societal upheaval, not prevent it from happening.

Futurologists are generally fairly sanguine about man's ability to save himself, even if they do delight in thinking up dystopias. Jamais Cascio, a former GBN employee who now consults for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Institute for the Future, is a connoisseur of disaster scenarios—worlds torn asunder by ocean acidification and nanoscale weapons—that you weren't aware you should be terrified of. For IFTF's Ten-Year Forecast spring retreat—attended by corporations like Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Nokia, and Wells Fargo—Cascio went beyond the program's usual decadelong timeframe to write up three 50-year forecasts, each laying out a distinct vision of the next half-century. One of the timelines, the "Long Crisis," begins with "global storming," a run of catastrophic weather events around the world. By 2023, the United States has defaulted on its debts to China. Eventually, in the aftermath of Global Famine II, the U.S. breaks into eight pieces. On the plus side, African biohackers find a cure for AIDS in 2026. Yippee! (You can read Cascio's whole "Long Crisis" scenario here.)

Cascio insists that the "Long Crisis" isn't merely a scary story. Rather, his goal is to goad policymakers into dealing with the century's biggest challenges: climate change, Sino-American relations, the global food supply. "What futurists and scenario planners provide is a wind tunnel of sorts," Cascio says. "The scenarios we construct allow organizations to test their strategies, to test their decisions, to say, If we follow Course X, what kinds of outcomes might we expect as the world around us changes?"

For more of Cascio's thoughts on futurology—why it doesn't matter that every detail he comes up with will be wrong, his belief that the United States could break apart in the next 50 years, and how America and China might forge a partnership to fight off an asteroid strike—watch the video below.

Cascio clearly believes that humanity has the ingenuity and the smarts to beat back threats to its continued existence. He doesn't, however, assume that the persistence of the United States is necessarily the most-desirable outcome. It's possible America will collapse as we try desperately to save it—or perhaps the country will shrivel up and go away when its time has come and gone. "It's not necessarily how America will survive," Cascio says, "but how do the values we hold dear … survive even if some of the institutions don't?"

You've seen what the professional forecasters think. Now we want your thoughts on America's demise. With our "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" tool, you can pick the scenarios you think are most likely to terminate the United States and compare your selections with those made by the rest of the Slate audience. At the end of the week, I'll file a report on the most popular choices and investigate what clues your favorite scenarios give us about the American psyche.

UN Security Council meets on Kosovo

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080218/ap_on_re_eu/un_kosovo

UN Security Council meets on Kosovo
By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer
Mon Feb 18, 2008

Russia tried to block Kosovo's independence during a closed-door emergency session of the U.N. Security Council on Sunday, saying it is deeply concerned about the safety of Serbs living in the territory.

The discussion of the 15-member council continued to expose divisions among members on the future of Kosovo. Russia backs its close ally Serbia, while the United States, Britain, France and other European Union members support Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanians.

China, a veto-wielding U.N. Security Council member that had close ties with the Yugoslav government of Slobodan Milosevic, expressed its "deep concern" Monday over Kosovo's declaration and called on the province to reach a "proper solution through negotiations" with Serbia.

The council met at the request of Serbia and Russia, which argue that Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia made earlier Sunday violates a 1999 council resolution that authorizes the U.N. to administer the territory.

The session got off to a rocky start; shortly after it began, it had to be suspended for a couple hours because of a lack of interpreters.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Serbia's president told him that Kosovo's declaration carries no legal weight, while Kosovo's prime minister assured him he was committed to "equal opportunities and no discrimination" against anyone in Kosovo.

Ban urged all sides to "refrain from any actions or statements that could endanger peace, incite violence or jeopardize security in Kosovo and the region."

The Security Council resolution on Kosovo remains in force and the U.N. "will continue to implement its mandate in the light of the evolving circumstances," Ban said.

Before the session, Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Moscow was "highly concerned" about Sunday's decision by Kosovo's parliament in Pristina "to declare unilateral independence of Kosovo."

The government said in a statement it regretted Kosovo's unilateral declaration and hoped it would not bring about fresh tension and conflict in the Balkan region. It said U.N.-backed principles of upholding the territorial integrity of developing nations must be supported.

The past Security Council resolution means the U.N. still runs Kosovo and "it is not obvious at all what could possibly be the legal basis for even considering" Kosovo's declaration of independence," Churkin said.

He specifically addressed the estimated 120,000 Serbs living in enclaves in Kosovo.

"Our concern is for the safety of the Serbs and other ethnic minorities in Kosovo," Churkin told reporters. "We'll strongly warn against any attempts at repressive measures, should Serbs in Kosovo decide not to comply with this unilateral proclamation of independence."

U.S. and other Western countries said there was little danger to the Serbs in Kosovo and that the 1999 resolution does not preclude Kosovo's independence.

"We've knocked it down over and over again. This is an unprecedented situation, it creates no precedent," Alejandro Wolff, the U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N., told reporters before the session

Wolff said the United States is not "particularly concerned or sees no particular danger to be worried about" with regards to the safety of Serbs in Kosovo.

"We're pleased by the commitments made to respect for religious and ethnic communities in Kosovo," he told reporters. "We're very much pleased that the declaration also reflects a position of the United States that's longstanding."

Council member Indonesia, concerned about its own secessionist movements, said it was following the situation closely but was not yet prepared to recognize Kosovo's statehood.

Kosovo's 2 million population is 90 percent ethnic Albanian, mainly secular Muslims, who do not want to be part of Serbia, a predominantly Christian Orthodox nation.

Kosovo has been under U.N. and NATO administration since a NATO-led air war.

In April 2007, U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari recommended that Kosovo be granted internationally supervised independence — a proposal strongly supported by the province's ethnic Albanians, the U.S. and most of the European Union, but vehemently opposed by Serbia and Russia, a traditional Serb ally.

Russia blocked the Ahtisaari plan. An additional period of negotiations failed to bridge the differences between the Serbs, who have offered wide autonomy, and Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leaders, who insist on independence.

Kosovo hopes for international recognition that could come on Monday when European Union ministers meet in Brussels, Belgium. Russia, which has veto power on the council, insists Kosovo is a Security Council issue — not an EU issue — and argues that Kosovo's move sets a dangerous precedent for separatist groups globally.

On Tuesday afternoon, a more formal and open debate is planned by the Security Council at Serbia's request. Churkin said Russia insisted it should be an open meeting, and the president of Serbia will attend.

However, diplomats said it was unlikely the council would be able to reach agreement on a resolution or statement.

Putin visits Iran, sends warnings to US

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071016/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_russia

Putin visits Iran, sends warnings to US
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press Writer
10-16-7

Russian leader Vladimir Putin met his Iranian counterpart Tuesday and implicitly warned the U.S. not to use a former Soviet republic to stage an attack on Iran. He also said nations shouldn't pursue oil pipeline projects in the area if they weren't backed by regional powers.

At a summit of the five nations that border the inland Caspian Sea, Putin said none of the nations' territory should be used by any outside countries for use of military force against any nation in the region. It was a clear reference to long-standing rumors that the U.S. was planning to use Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, as a staging ground for any possible military action against Iran.

"We are saying that no Caspian nation should offer its territory to third powers for use of force or military aggression against any Caspian state," Putin said.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also underlined the need to keep outsiders away from the Caspian.

"All Caspian nations agree on the main issue — that all aspects related to this sea must be settled exclusively by littoral nations," he said. "The Caspian Sea is an inland sea and it only belongs to the Caspian states, therefore only they are entitled to have their ships and military forces here."

Putin, whose trip to Tehran is the first by a Kremlin leader since World War II, warned that energy pipeline projects crossing the Caspian could only be implemented if all five nations that border the Caspian support them.

Putin did not name any specific country, but his statement underlined Moscow's strong opposition to U.S.-backed efforts to build pipelines to deliver hydrocarbons to the West bypassing Russia.

"Projects that may inflict serious environmental damage to the region cannot be implemented without prior discussion by all five Caspian nations," he said.

Other nations bordering the Caspian Sea and in attendance at the summit are: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.

The legal status of the Caspian — believed to contain the world's third-largest energy reserves — has been in limbo since the 1991 Soviet collapse, leading to tension and conflicting claims to seabed oil deposits.

Iran, which shared the Caspian's resources equally with the Soviet Union, insists that each coastal nation receive an equal portion of the seabed. Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan want the division based on the length of each nation's shoreline, which would give Iran a smaller share.

Putin's visit took place despite warnings of a possible assassination plot and amid hopes that a round of personal diplomacy could help offer a solution to an international standoff on Iran's nuclear program.

Putin's trip was thrown into doubt when the Kremlin said Sunday that he had been informed by Russian intelligence services that suicide attackers might try to kill him in Tehran, but he shrugged off the warning.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini dismissed reports about the purported assassination plot as disinformation spread by adversaries hoping to spoil good relations between Russia and Iran.

Putin has warned the U.S. and other nations against trying to coerce Iran into reining in its nuclear program and insists peaceful dialogue is the only way to deal with Tehran's defiance of a U.N. Security Council demand that it suspend uranium enrichment.

"Threatening someone, in this case the Iranian leadership and Iranian people, will lead nowhere," Putin said Monday during his trip to Germany. "They are not afraid, believe me."

Iran's rejection of the council's demand and its previous clandestine atomic work has fed suspicions in the U.S. and other countries that Tehran is working to enrich uranium to a purity usable in nuclear weapons. Iran insists it is only wants lesser-enriched uranium to fuel nuclear reactors that would generate electricity.

Putin's visit to Tehran is being closely watched for any possible shifts in Russia's carefully hedged stance in the nuclear standoff.

The Russian president underlined his disagreements with Washington last week, saying he saw no "objective data" to prove Western claims that Iran is trying to construct nuclear weapons.

Putin emphasized Monday that he would negotiate in Tehran on behalf of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members — United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — and Germany, a group that has led efforts to resolve the stalemate with Tehran.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the U.S. government expected Putin to "convey the concerns shared by all of us about the failure of Iran to comply with the international community's requirements concerning its nuclear program."

Putin's schedule also called for meetings with Ahmadinejad and the Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

While the Kremlin has shielded Tehran from a U.S. push for a third round of U.N. sanctions, Iran has voiced annoyance about Moscow's foot-dragging in building a nuclear power plant in the southern port of Bushehr under a $1 billion contract.

Russia warned early this year that the plant would not be launched this fall as planned because Iran was slow in making payments. Iranian officials have angrily denied any payment arrears and accused the Kremlin of caving in to Western pressure.

Moscow also has ignored Iranian demands to ship fuel for the plant, saying it would be delivered only six months before the Bushehr plant goes on line. The launch date has been delayed indefinitely amid the payment dispute.

Any sign by Putin that Russia could quickly complete the power plant would embolden Iran and further cloud Russia's relations with the West. But analysts said Putin's trip would be important for Iran even if it yielded no agreements.
___
Associated Press writers Ali Akbar Dareini and Nasser Karimi contributed to this report.

The outlaw president outlaws all war protest

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2218.shtml

The outlaw president outlaws all war protest
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
Jul 23, 2007

I protest, as of the very first line of Bush’s July 17 “Executive Order” (meaning not necessarily read or approved by Congress). I protest this “Order,” which itself is in flagrant violation of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the right to freedom of speech, the press, and to protest, despite the fact that that right has been violated by various courts in various eras in contentious situations like the one we have today.

I protest also that the Bush “Order” sanctions its own unconstitutionality by invoking the Constitution for its enforcement in the first line: “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.” Remember the Constitution is the document Bush called “just a goddamned piece of paper,” as he went forth to dismiss the right of habeas corpus and fought for renewal of the illegal USAPATRIOT Act.

The outlaw protects his illegal war

Yet, in this new illegal stroke of a pen Bush outlaws all protest in the United States against his scurrilous Iraq war. And with this law, he turns all of us (US) who do not nod in bobble-doll agreement with him into “the enemy." That is, if any act [of ours], provision of funds, goods, or services by [which can he mean anything], to, or for the benefit of same threatens the ‘stabilization of Iraq,’ which can equally mean anything.

I also maintain that the ‘stabilization of Iraq’ can be best achieved by a quick and diplomatic withdrawal of all troops from that beleaguered country, whose physical, spiritual, and human toll is destabilized each additional day we remain there. Our stay encourages resistance, as does our asserting ourselves as ‘an occupying force.” What’s more, we have totally failed at replacing the infrastructure we destroyed, and we have depleted Iraq’s human resources due to death, disease, and flight.

Exactly what and who ‘destabilized’ Iraq?

Moreover, the ‘destabilization’ of Iraq was created by illegal means, by the assertion of Bush and his band of outlaws, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, et al, and their knowingly untruthful assertions that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological, and were prepared to use them; and that, in fact, President Hussein had procured ‘yellow cake uranium from Niger” to use in the production of WMD for imminent use on America.

These assertions were proven to be a pack of lies by no less than Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had gone to Africa, found the “yellow cake” assertion to be fiction not fact, and asserted same in his New York Times op-ed, What I Didn’t Find in Africa. For this Wilson, an international business consultant and Untied States ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995 had his wife, Valerie Plame, outed as a CIA officer, also jeopardizing the operatives working under her command. This ended her career not to mention endangering or ending the lives of those who worked for her.

In fact, outing a CIA officer is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. As is lying the United States into a unilateral, preemptive war a crime -- a war which drew the protests about its illegality from our allies and the United Nations.

Subsequently, the leaking of Valery Plame’s identity was traced to the office of Vice President Cheney, which begat a Department of Justice investigation into this crime, headed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. On October 28, 2005, the VP’s chief assistant, I. Lewis Libby, was amazingly the only one indicted for the crime of passing Plame’s name and identity along to news reporters. Libby was subsequently sentenced on June 14, 2007, to 30 months of prison time and a $250,000 fine. Quelle dommage as the French say -- what a horrible thing. Ah, but then not so horrible because President Bush amazingly commutated the felon’s sentence. And Bush might, given his kingly druthers, completely pardon Scooter.

Additionally, UN fact-finder Hans Blitz and his investigators could find no trace of facilities for the production of WMD throughout Iraq. Blitz’s lack of findings compounded the evidence of the high-crime of misleading America into war. And still no one was fully prosecuted and imprisoned for that crime, which borders on treason.

What about the outlaws’ involvement in 9/11?

Nor were there any firings, denunciations or prosecutions for the administration’s failures to prevent 9/11, which event wrongly contributed to the war on Iraq. Truly, quelle dommage, considering the largest intelligence organization in the world, the CIA, and the largest Department of Defense, with a compound budget of $600 billion plus, were unable to stop 19 rag-tag “terrorists” with box-cutters from cruising airliners-as-missiles into the World Trade Towers on 9/11. Could we possible have more outlaws at large here, above and beyond the seven of the purported hijackers living in the Middle East today?

In fact, at this point not only do I protest but I accuse the government of criminal negligence, if not active participation, in the execution of 9/11’s horrific events. These very events gave the Bush administration to complete their the coup d’etat.

This change gave the administration the power to first preemptively, illegally, declare war on Afghanistan and attack it, supposedly in search of Osama bin Laden, of whom a look-alike confessed to the crimes on a poorly made tape, most likely by the CIA. The day before 9/11, bin Laden had checked into a Pakistan hospital for his kidney condition. As of July 2001, he had entered the American hospital in Dubai for dialysis and met with his CIA handler; so much for homemade patsies and their producers. As to explanation of the events of 9/11, please take a look here at what really happened.

The larger outlaws’ purpose of 9/11

The larger purpose of 9/11 was to be the inciting incident to create “The War on Terror” to secure Afghanistan and build pipelines to tap the oil and gas of the Caspian Basin countries and send those precious resources down to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean for export. Of course, the larger purpose of invading Iraq was to secure its oil as well, and provide a steady flow for the Texas-driven, price-gouging outlaws and the insatiable thirst of their SUV-driving clientele, et al.

The Bush gang goes on and on, like the James brothers roaming across the spiky landscape of the Wild West, as of now the Wild Western World, hell-bent on demonizing and scape-goating Muslims, to keep Americans hungry for war with the world and their so-called attackers. This is for the purpose of creating a global American empire.

Thus 9/11 was a classic false-flag operation, ala Hitler’s Reichstag Fire, which I thoroughly protest, including the 3,000 lost souls on 9/11, the 3,800 American soldiers subsequently lost in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans lost in their respective countries, and the squandering of some $650 billion dollars, if not more, to do so.

So add mass murder and colossal financial theft to the tab of the outlaws’ crimes, which have generated more Wanted-for-Impeachment posters on the Internet than ads to meet pretty singles.

Thus, given this egregious list of crimes, this endangerment of the US population, the wanton attacks on two countries, the raising of hostilities with Muslim countries worldwide, as well as with Russia and China, I refer to you for study, guidance and precedence for action, not just a piece of paper but The Declaration of Independence,

America’s first great legal document says . . .

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States . . ."

Do King George of England’s offenses sound like King George of America’s offenses?

“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”

“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.”

“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

“For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:”

“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:”

“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:”

“He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation . . ."

“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. . . ."

If you feel King George of America has failed the Declaration of Independence’s litmus test to lead, perhaps you should continue to protest, and protest even more loudly for his impeachment, along with Vice President Cheney’s, so as to put an end to their remorseless tyranny.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.

How extensive is police state spying in the US?

http://wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/come-m18.shtml

World Socialist Web Site

Former Justice Department official’s testimony raises question:
How extensive is police state spying in the US?
By Joe Kay
18 May 2007

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey’s testimony before a Senate panel May 15 raises a number of important questions about the extent of domestic spying in the United States. Comey’s testimony gives further credence to reports that the monitoring programs set up by the American government to spy on telephone calls and e-mails are far more expansive than anything that has been officially acknowledged.

In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey provided details of a confrontation in March 2004 between himself and top White House officials over a warrantless wiretapping program operated by the National Security Agency (NSA). Even in the form later acknowledged by the President, the program violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Comey, backed by then Attorney General John Ashcroft and then FBI director Robert Mueller, refused to give Justice Department approval for the program’s reauthorization. He grounded his position on a finding by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that the program had no legal justification. Comey’s stance provoked a sharp conflict with the White House, particularly with then White House counsel and current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and then White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, backed by Vice President Cheney. (See “Former Justice Department official describes illegal actions by Bush administration in defense of domestic spying”)

According to Comey, certain changes were made in the program after he and others objected, and these changes were sufficient to allow the Justice Department to ratify the program’s legality. The unanswered questions, however, remain: what precisely were these changes, and what was it that Comey and others opposed? How expansive was the spying program authorized after the September 11 attacks? These are not simply historical questions. There can be little doubt that all these domestic spying operations continue today, even if in a different guise.

Editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post on Thursday touched on these matters. The Times wrote, “The really big question ... is what exactly the national Security Agency was doing before that night [when Comey refused to reauthorize the program], under Mr. Bush’s personal orders. Did Mr. Bush start by authorizing the agency to intercept domestic e-mails and telephone calls without first getting a warrant?”

In December 2005, after an article appeared in the Times describing aspects of the NSA program, Bush acknowledged the existence of an operation he insisted only involved communications that either came from or were sent to someone residing outside the United States. The Times is suggesting that prior to the confrontation with Comey, the program may have included warrantless spying on communications entirely within the United States—an even more flagrant violation of FISA.

The nature of the dispute with Comey is illuminated by Congressional testimony given by Gonzales in February 2006, after he had assumed the post of attorney general. In that testimony, which the Bush administration insisted not be conducted under oath, Gonzales said that there had been no “serious disagreement” from Comey or other administration officials “about the program that the president has confirmed.” He said, however, that there had been “disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into.”

It its editorial Thursday, the Times noted that Gonzales must have been referring in this testimony to the program that included the modifications after an agreement had been reached with Comey. This is the same program whose existence has been acknowledged by Bush.

The Post raised the same point in its editorial on Thursday, asking, “What was the administration doing, and what was it willing to continue to do, that its lawyers concluded was without a legal basis?”

The very fact that both these newspapers of the political establishment raise these questions is a good indication that they have information that the spying programs are in fact much more expansive than has been acknowledged.

Vast databases of information gathered

There are a number of possible elements of the program that might have been the source of opposition within the Justice Department. One relates to the power claimed by the administration to justify the program even though it violates FISA.

The rationale favored by Gonzales, Cheney and top Justice Department aids in power following the attacks of September 11—figures such as John Yoo and Jay Bybee—was that the President has virtually unlimited powers as commander in chief to carry out the “war on terror.”

In 2003, a new group of officials came into the Justice Department, including Comey and Jack Goldsmith, the new assistant attorney general. According to a number of media reports (including a February 6, 2006 article in Newsweek, “Domestic Spying: Bush Appointees Revolt”), these officials resisted the blanket executive power argument, which gave the President essentially dictatorial powers to override the law. They favored basing the rationale for the spying program on the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress following the September 11 attacks.

To use AUMF as a rationale for warrantless spying, however, was not only a groundless application of that resolution (which says nothing about spying), but it would also constrain the targets of the actions to “those nations, organizations, or persons [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorists attacks” of September 11.

This would imply that prior to March 2004, the program involved spying on broad sections of the American population, without even the pretense of restricting targets to associates of Al Qaeda. The new program as acknowledged by the President would have to be at least nominally more restrictive, though the additional powers could be shifted to other programs that have not been acknowledged.

Another possibility is that suggested by the Times, namely that the communications monitored included those entirely within the US. One reason to suppose that purely domestic spying was involved was the close involvement of Mueller, the head of the FBI, in the dispute between Comey and the White House. The FBI is involved primarily in domestic spying, while the NSA and CIA spy internationally. According to Comey, Bush met personally with Mueller to help work out a compromise. The NSA was apparently not involved at all in these discussions. Why was Mueller involved? Was he upset about the encroachment of the NSA into the FBI’s traditional field of operations?

Most likely, the basis of the disputes was a combination of these factors—the program was so expansive and unconstrained that it encompassed virtually anyone. It is worth recalling the description given by the Times in its original December 2005 article revealing the program’s existence. Citing “senior government officials,” the newspaper reported that: “when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the NSA. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials.”

The newspaper wrote at the time that these unnamed officials were “apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation.”

Moreover, the press itself has reported the existence of programs extending far beyond what has been officially acknowledged. The Times reported on December 24, 2005, that “The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged ... It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries.”

In 2006, a former technician at AT&T, Mark Klein, produced documents showing that the telecommunications giant was routing large amounts of internet communications directly to the NSA “Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue,” Klein said at the time, “it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet—whether that be people’s e-mail, Web surfing or other data.”

In the spring of 2006, USA Today reported that three telecommunications companies—AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth—had handed over to the NSA the calling records of hundreds of millions of telephone customers, including 80 percent of the landline and 50 percent of the wireless users in the US.

Framework of a police state

These programs constitute the framework of a police state in the United States. They provide the government with information that can be used to intimidate, undermine or blackmail any individual or group it chooses, including political opponents.

The expansion of spying powers is part of a much broader attack on the most fundamental democratic rights of the population in the US and internationally. The “war on terror” has been used to justify torture, the denial of habeas corpus, the creation of drumhead military commissions and the imprisonment of “enemy combatants”—including US citizens—indefinitely and without charge.

All of this has been justified as a response to September 11, an event that has never been seriously investigated. These attacks, for which there is substantial evidence of some level of government involvement, have become the pretext not only for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also for a frontal attack on the constitutional order in the United States.

The spying programs continue to this day. Whatever changes may have been made when Comey raised objections, they most likely involved shifting certain operations from one program to another. Russel Tice, a former NSA employee, has said that the agency has been authorized to engage in much broader spying than the government has admitted as part of a top-secret “special access program.”

As for those officials who raised objections, most have been pushed out of the Justice Department in one way or another. Gonzales meanwhile has become the attorney general.

The methods of criminality and gangsterism—including the revelation that Gonzales and Card went to the hospital bed of the ailing Ashcroft in order to pressure him to override Comey and endorse the program—reflect the nature of the regime and the aims it is pursuing. The firing of the US attorneys is part of this. The principal aim of these firings was to push an attack on voting rights in order to manipulate the 2006 elections.

Five years after the spying programs were initiated, and a year and a half after hints of their existence were revealed in the American media, the public still has no knowledge of what information the government is collecting and what it is being used for. The Bush administration has refused to provide any details, citing “national security.”

What is perhaps most striking is the way in which all of this has produced no serious opposition from the Democratic Party or mass media. Aside from a few revelations, the media has not pursued the issue. It is worth recalling that the Times sat on the initial story on the NSA program for over a year at the request of the White House, helping to ensure that it did not come up as an issue in the 2004 elections. The Times editorial on Thursday ends merely with the hope that Congress will conduct a “vigorous investigation.”

The Democratic Party has also made very little of the spying programs and has not pursued the issue since gaining control of Congress in January. No leading Democrat has called for an end to the programs, and there has yet been no call for the impeachment and prosecution of those who have clearly violated the law on an unprecedented scale.

The reaction of the Democrats to this massive assault on the constitution has been characterized by both cowardice and complicity. They are unwilling to explain to the population what is really taking place and why these domestic spying programs have been implemented. The entire political establishment accepts the lie of the “war on terror,” and, to the extent that there are criticisms, they proceed from the premise that the Bush administration has “overreached” in prosecuting this war.

In fact, these measures have nothing to do with combating terrorism. Laws such as FISA were put in place following revelations of spying on political opponents of government police. These laws are now being repudiated, and an even more expansive database of information is being collected, primarily for use in countering the inevitable explosion of social tensions and mass political opposition in the United States.

The main threat perceived by the political establishment, including both the Democrats and the Republicans, is not Al Qaeda, but the broad mass of American working people, which is coming increasingly into conflict with the right-wing and militarist policies of the American ruling elite.