It Is Now Official: The U.S. Is A Police State

From: "Political Prisoner News"
Date: Tue, February 9, 2010

It Is Now Official: The U.S. Is A Police State

By Paul Craig Roberts

09 February, 2010
http://vdare.com/roberts/100208_police_state.htm

Americans have been losing the protection of law for years. In the
21st century the loss of legal protections accelerated with the Bush
administration's "war on terror," which continues under the Obama
administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and U.S.
civil liberties.

The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus in order to
hold people indefinitely without bringing charges. The regime had
acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for terrorists.
Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by
grabbing unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.

The Bush regime needed to hold the prisoners without charges because
it had no evidence against the people and did not want to admit that
the U.S. government had stupidly paid warlords and thugs to kidnap
innocent people. In addition, the Bush regime needed "terrorists"
prisoners in order to prove that there was a terrorist threat.

As there was no evidence against the "detainees" (most have been
released without charges after years of detention and abuse), the
U.S. government needed a way around U.S. and international laws
against torture in order that the government could produce evidence
via self-incrimination. The Bush regime found inhumane and
totalitarian-minded lawyers and put them to work at the U.S.
Department of Justice (sic) to invent arguments that the Bush regime
did not need to obey the law.

The Bush regime created a new classification for its detainees that
it used to justify denying legal protection and due process to the
detainees. As the detainees were not U.S. citizens and were demonized
by the regime as "the 760 most dangerous men on earth," there was
little public outcry over the regime's unconstitutional and inhumane actions.

As our Founding Fathers and a long list of scholars warned, once
civil liberties are breached, they are breached for all. Soon U.S.
citizens were being held indefinitely in violation of their habeas
corpus rights. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, an American citizen of Pakistani
origin, might have been the first.

Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis University,
was seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan, and
was held secretly for five years in the U.S. military's notorious
Bagram prison in Afghanistan. Her three young children, one an
8-month-old baby, were with her at the time she was abducted. She has
no idea what has become of her two youngest children. Her oldest
child, 7 years old, was also incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to
similar abuse and horrors.

Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense. A
British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being
tortured, disclosed her presence.. An embarrassed U.S. government
responded to the disclosure by sending Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial
on the trumped-up charge that while a captive, she grabbed a U.S.
soldier's rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot him. The
charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier's excuse for shooting
Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach, resulting in her near death.

On Feb. 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for
attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was the
charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a
pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was
presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken
100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No
evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell
casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.

Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: "The trial took an unusual
turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from
the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S.
interrogators, did not match hers."

An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a
Muslim. This is the kind of "justice" that always results when the
state hypes fear and demonizes a group.

The people who should have been on trial are the people who abducted
her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international
borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for
the fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two
gunshots to her stomach. Instead, the victim was put on trial and convicted.

This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim
is an American citizen.

Anyone can be next. Indeed, on Feb. 3 Dennis Blair, director of
National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it
was now "defined policy" that the U.S. government can murder its own
citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government's judgment
that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction,
just execution on suspicion of being a threat.

This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential
appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of
Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder
American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat.

I can hear readers saying the government might as well kill Americans
abroad as it kills them at home--Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Black Panthers.

Yes, the U.S. government has murdered its citizens, but Dennis
Blair's "defined policy" is a bold new development. The government,
of course, denies that it intended to kill the Branch Davidians,
Randy Weaver's wife and child, or the Black Panthers. The government
says that Waco was a terrible tragedy, an unintended result brought
on by the Branch Davidians themselves. The government says that Ruby
Ridge was Randy Weaver's fault for not appearing in court on a day
that had been miscommunicated to him. The Black Panthers, the
government says, were dangerous criminals who insisted on a shoot-out.

In no previous death of a U.S. citizen by the hands of the U.S.
government has the government claimed the right to kill Americans
without arrest, trial, and conviction of a capital crime.

In contrast, Dennis Blair has told the U.S. Congress that the
executive branch has assumed the right to murder Americans who it
deems a "threat."

What defines "threat"? Who will make the decision? What it means is
that the government will murder whomever it chooses.

There is no more complete or compelling evidence of a police state
than the government announcing that it will murder its own citizens
if it views them as a "threat."

Ironic, isn't it, that "the war on terror" to make us safe ends in a
police state with the government declaring the right to murder
American citizens whom it regards as a threat.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during
President Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall
Street Journal. paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com




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