Thursday, July 26, 2007

The Next Step

The massive shift to the right that continues to be felt in this country since the Bush Administration came into power has been well documented and indeed, we are witnessing signs of the despotic nature of the present government every day. The most obvious one is the Executive branch’s unwillingness to answer to the Legislative branch’s demands. Other signs are the stringent so-called security reforms which have come about under the umbrella of Homeland Security. This Orwellian Department was created as a means of allegedly fusing the various security and support sections of government beneath it. Furthermore, the FBI and CIA have seen a massive boost in their ability to illegally listen in on telephone conversations and read private mail, whether it be email or regular mail, to an unprecedented extent. Things that were considered to belong only to totalitarian regimes such as the incarceration and torture of prisoners held indefinitely without charges being brought against them, have become an everyday occurrence. The hijacking of the Justice Department by a rabid White House was apparently the icing on the cake.

But it didn’t stop there. I experienced first hand the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing discovery of literally hundreds of thousands of files compounded on ordinary citizens; information which was passed on to the Stasi, the ‘State security Police,’ by thousands upon thousands of informants. People were compromised by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MFS) and were forced, coerced or threatened into spying on their friends, neighbors, husbands, wives, sisters or anyone in their circle of acquaintances. The most mundane aspects of the lives of ordinary citizens were documented in a maddeningly bureaucratic manner down to the tooth-brushing habits of individuals or their breakfast preferences. It was an unfathomable infringement of the rights of the citizens of that country made possible by the gigantic network of clandestine informants that the MFS had recruited over time. This is now coming to America, as Justin Rood of
ABC reports:

The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities.

The FBI said the push was driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush ordering the bureau to improve its counterterrorism efforts by boosting its human intelligence capabilities.

Do not for one minute think that the above scenario, which became part of everyday life in the former German Democratic Republic under its allegedly socialist regime, could not happen in the United States. Consider that it happened there with over 95% of the population opposed to these practices, whereas the fear of terrorism which has gripped this country, driven by an administration which is using fear to bludgeon the mostly undereducated population into accepting its arguments for a need for increased surveillance, has conditioned people into believing that draconian security measures and clandestine wiretapping are a necessary part of life.

They are not. It is as unnecessary to live in fear of a terrorist attack as it is to worry every day that one might die of kidney failure. The instrument of fear is being wielded to control an already cowed population into accepting anything and everything and the non-occurrence of an event, of a terrorist attack, is being proclaimed by such media outlets as FOX News as being the success story brought about by an infringement of our rights as citizens. The America which represented freedom is slipping into a dark world of repressive government legislation disseminated by a cabal of power-hungry, despotic politicians and supported by a Justice Department which has lost all autonomy.

Articles of Impeachment should be drawn up for Bush and Cheney and Alberto Gonzales should be held accountable for perjury and thrown out of his job. Make no mistake; it is better to impeach than to sit back and allow the current trend to continue. The concern of many, that impeachment will not work because the vote will never pass the House, is erroneous. It is the constitutional duty of Congress to impeach and it is the duty of the American people to hold Congress accountable for upholding the Constitution. At worst it will stall this government and prevent it from dragging this country further into the abyss.

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