On September 11, 2001, America was attacked Pearl Harbor-style. Every single one of those dirty, murdering bastards died on that day, on what became just another shitty day in paradise formerly known as a "pre-9/11 world", if one were naive enough to believe there ever were such a thing as a "pre-Pearl Harbor, pre-9/11" peaceful world prior to these attacks, in the first place. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it "a day that shall live in infamy", after the Imperial Japanese surprise-attacked the first Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, him telling an isolationist American Congress to get ready for WWII, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto's own words foretold their future, that he feared all they did was awaken "a sleeping giant" that was soon to be coming to a Pacific theatre near him. He wouldn't live to see the prescience of his words. Or, if not in the prologue but most definitely in the epilogue, how much death, desolation, and mayhem the words "Tora, Tora, Tora" brought to bear upon Japan's own head, with interest.
After 9/11, America came together, and had the sympathy of the whole world, minus of course, our radical Islamic jihadist terrorist "haters of your freedom" foes. But the facts now show, it never was like WWII, or about fighting for our freedom, about WMDs or Saddam's non-existant yellow cake uranium stockpiles. No, in fact, Cheif UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix told an indredulous Bush a full two weeks before he invaded Iraq, that Saddam was "in full compliance" with UN directives contained in the same resolutions that Bush used to justify starting his first of two aggressive wars.
The "GWOT", which should've been fought like the police matter or as the law enforcement action it really was, and the way our Democratic Party standard-bearer John Kerry, said he would've fought it had he won the presidency in '04. Bush-Cheney's neocon, PNAC, AEI, CFR way was always about waging aggressive wars for empire and global hegemony, shedding as much blood as necessary, and sparing no less amount than a king's ransom in wealth for oil and territory, and fighting perpetual 50 year wars. And yes, the real spoils of those wars: $25 trillion in oil rest on sovereign Iraqi territory, and the only Eurasian overland oil passages to the Caucasas are in, you guessed it : Afghanistan.
Neither lands of which, ever lawfully belonged to us to begin with, and if possession is 9-10ths of the law, then we all own the cost of restoring Iraq whole, from the 3rd world under-developed nation teetering on the brink of "failed state" status we turned it into, back to the same condition we found it in, before we bombed and strafed their towns and cities, demonstrating our form of democracy in action, Bush's war machine very efficiently razing them all to the ground with virtual impunity. If they showed they had the guts to withstand our imperialism and refused to be pacified, then they paid the ultimate price for their insolence. Many hundreds of thousands decided to flee Iraq, rather than face the Bush onslaught of M1 Abrams tank cannons.
That is by definition "aggressive war" and prosecutorial war crimes that have their legal foundation sealed in the Nuremberg Principles, the Geneva Conventions, and the 1996 War Crimes Act; the very same ones that President Obama would love dearly if those principles, accords and US statutes condemning aggressive war, war crimes and crimes against humanity -- and if inquiring minds like mine -- would simply just stfu and go away quietly, living oblivious to the train of tyranny that has ran over my country, as if nothing ever happened. But I'm not going to turn the page or look forward, as long as Bush-Cheney still walk free.
"Crimes against humanity" are still called "the most egregious breaches of the peace" under the international accords we signed and ratified for good reason: for the simple fact they are! And all the page turning and all the looking forward in the world will never un-do what's been done in my name, my eyes will never un-see what carnage I've seen. My ears cannot un-hear the propaganda of unmitigated lies I've heard. And neither me nor my country can ever turn back the clock to September 10, 2001.
And if these damning facts weren't already enough probable cause for a Federal Grand Jury returning a True Bill, indicting them all on war crimes-or at the very least, a prima facie case for impeachment, add them to the fact that in failing to hold Bush-Cheney shackled in irons, duly-charged and bound over, and giving them the day in court the Constitution doesn't suggest, but DEMANDS, President Obama, in invoking a State Secrets privilege to withhold exculpatory evidence that could either establish their guilt or innocence, by usurping the Judicial branch's powers that belong only to them, he or any other sitting potus simply does not have those powers under Article II, to judge such grave matters as aggressive war and crimes against humanity committed by another potus-himself included. It's sort of like the conflict of interest of a murderer trying the case of another murderer-or one trying his own case. By acting as Bush-Cheney's Chief Counsel and de facto law group, he has become an accessory after the fact to enabling a conspiracy to obstruct justice, which is a prosecutorial war crime under the 1996 War Crimes Act, in and of itself.
But these lands and their legitimate owners may yet get the last laugh, because in winning a no holds barred, shock-and-awe campaign of preemptive, perpetual global war on terror, that includes a world stage including America, too, and based solely on one 9/11 event where the principals all died -- save OBL and his thousands of "seconds in command" who are still alive and well, and in full operational command, hiding beyond the detection but not beyond the reach of our predator drones, safely tucked away in the hills of Pakistan -- may indeed prove a most costly venture at best, and pyrrhic victory for us, at worst.
And an all-inclusive global one, in which the rest of the world should have the situational awareness, and know already if our government sees America proper as a "frontline on the global war on terror", their own citizens can't be seen by our war machine as lagging too far behind our own citizens in the "presumed guilty until proven innocent" department. And right along with us poor working middle class taxpaying Americans, the rest of the world's taxpayers are being held hostage against their will to pay for this global war, in our never-ending quest for a new and improved Pax Romana.
After reading the USA Patriot Act in its entirety five times, seeing the specter of police state, it's full weight hanging over us already, I can just imagine what the Constitution would look like today, if there were another 9/11-style terrorist attack on our soil. All I can say then is farewell and goodbye to the America I once thought I knew before 9/11.
This emergence of the coming storm of absolute despotism is a prime example why this republic was founded to prevent such a rebirth of tyranny, so any new king could not use any convenient excuse, any shock doctrine that his brain hatches to pass any ex post facto law he saw fit to tamp down lawful assembly or stomp-out peaceful dissent. Because, if they would use deadly force to steal Iraq's territory and oil, I have no doubt they wouldn't hesitate to use it to quell our voices of dissent railing against such crimes and atrocities they committed in our names and with our tax dollars-or if we ever became a serious threat to their long-term world hegemonic goals. For this reason, I always keep "my necessary papers" handy, in anticipation of that day I'm held against my will at gun point and told by their DHS Sturm Abteilung: "You are under arrest! We're very sorry, but YOUR PAPERS ARE NOT IN ORDER! You are under arrest!"
Then, being forceably and violently scooped off the street on a bogus, trumped-up charge. Or worse still, for the simple crime of not having my necessary papers on my person ready for their inspection. Once out of America's protecting hands, held indefinitely with no writ of habeas corpus protection before any bonafide judge other than the one the president certifies to handle "homegrown terrorist" cases, no Supreme Court's writ of certioriari intervention on my behalf, because I've already been tried by a Military Commission kangaroo court completely out of their SCOTUS jurisdiction, and being therefore found guilty in absentia, awaiting summary execution for treason.
Secretly renditioning me off in the darkness of night to one of their detention centers located extra-territorially and away from my Constitutional protections of natural-born American citizenship to one of their Solzenitzyn-style new and improved Russian gulag archepelago prisons, endlessly questioning me, with machine gun efficiency positing the same relentless questions already "asked and answered" by me a hundred times, and torturing me until they break my body which already has passed out and been revived, and once falling asleep from sheer exhaustion, they wake me long enough to do it all over again because short of pulling my finger nails out and shoving a hot poker up my rectum they will never break my will.
And torturing me, up to and including the point of them causing my death(murdering me), until they extract the precise confession that fits my supposed guilt for my alleged thought or speech crime I committed against the state. And all of these things done under the color of law, without either the presence of competent legal representation or the 5th Amendment's guarantee forbidding self-incrimination, that anything I say or evidence they obtain through torture can't be held against me in one of the Military Commission Act's show trials and kangaroo courts, the one place where the US Constitution in NOT the Supreme law of this land.
No "coalition of the willing" when other nation's economies fall like dominoes, seeing much to their angst that the Parthenan columns of America's own financial world are inextricably tied to their own columns. And when our empire rises and falls as surely it must eventually fall -- because no tree of tyranny such as this one can long be suffered to co-exist beside the trees of freedom and a free people, but it must be hewn down -- when the sun sets on our empire where the sun never set on it before, just like the others have gone before us, who fought, bled, and died for the empire, who thought they too were indespensible, above the law, even immune from the common laws of nature that rule men and nations and we therefore by our petulance became untouchable.
We will fall because, in our belief that "might makes right" and the means always justifies the end, we dared to presume that we, in finding ourselves flying so high and mightily far above such trite and burdensome rules that so obstructed our vision and destiny, and that we who dared to oppose them must therefore be expendable impediments to fulfilling our eternal destiny as the world's master, our nation decided we didn't have to obey them, even when they were written by our own hands!
When the law is on your side, argue the law. When the facts are are on your side, argue the facts. When you have neither the law nor the facts on your side, "attack, attack, attack"! To the victors go the spoils. And to the victors goes the luxury of victor's justice, the advantage of knowing what's right and getting it dead wrong, of seeing the wrongs done in our names and calling it protecting our freedom, the luxury of their propaganda ministry redacting history and calling that the whole truth and the only facts that matters; concealing material facts to aid and abet the perpetrators' escape from justice, and having their own separate judiciary ministry re-writing the laws and nullifying the Constitution by abrogation and rescission! And ever since that day for 8 solid years, the Bush "little boots"-Cheney "Fourth Branch" has maintained in effect, "I'm neither solely in the Legislative nor the Executive branch", so he became his own extra-constitutional branch and refused to answer to anyone.
He and Bush defiantly thumbed their noses at America, securely resting forever in the quiescent knowledge that no matter how many Articles of Impeachment charges Rep. Dennis Kucinich read, even if "the resounding clash of arms" caused by a 1,000 privileged motions was alone sufficient enough to cause any reasonable expectation of a forthcoming Judiciary Chairman's subpoena duces tecum demanding Bush-Cheney's answer to the charges -- either that, or face Contempt of Congress charges as well, impeachment was taken off the table months before Kucinich's first privileged motion was ever placed on that or any other table. The standard favorite canned soup of the day became: "impeachment will interfere with our Democratic agenda", coupled with side order of "the Constitution is worth it only if we can succeed".
Cheney didn't have any desire to freely volunteer any intel-or was he ever in any danger of being forced by the FOIA or congressional subpoena, to submit to either one, much less to obey the rule of law. No, he proudly, so matter-of-factly and openly bragged not only about their war criminal regime's own acts of terrorism they wrought upon America, Iraq, and Afghanistan in the name of "dubious, temporary security", but that both Bush and Cheney, if given the chance to compound their felonies, would perform the Big Lie better than Richard Wagner could play "Ride of the Valkyrie" on his best day, with every note on the propagandist's sheet music on time and coordinated in concert, with their subordinates having their backs, and with their congressional enablers' blessings on both sides of the aisle holding their hands in theirs closer than high school sweethearts. As if their whole lives and very freedom depended on it.
They sqaundered that era of good feeling, and in showing their true colors did everything in their power, acting as terrorists by proxies, and becoming more like the terrorists they claimed to despise in proving that we Americans weren't "exceptional", and the Constitution was indeed "quaint and irrelevant", after all. And that, left alone to their own devices our own President Bush and his tyranny-enabling Congress' would finish the job for the terrorists - if they just took a page out of the Vietnam war's playbook, and patiently waited us out and bided their time, they could indeed win their war against our nation and freedom without winning the first battlefield victory or "striking us a blow" loud enough to be heard around the world, our armies so shattered that they forced our armies into a white-flagged, unconditional surrender.
It's nothing short of "a force multiplier" of epic fail proportions that would make the invincible Roman Army's rout by Hannibal Barca's double envelopment manuever on the plains of Cannae, Italy in 216 BC, Napoleon's defeat at Trafalgar and Waterloo, the German 6th Army's destruction at Stalingrad and the ensuing crushing defeat at Kursk and with those vanquished divisions lay Hitler's dreams of lebensraum, a thousand year Reich, and a master race -- all pale by comparison.
Any defense lawyer worth his law degree will tell you that his main job is to posit a shred of reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury, but even the blindest of juries knows a Big Lie when they hear one. But it seems almost ludicrous to the point of absurdity that this 9/11 event was singularly all it took to bring down the Parthenan columns of a whole republic, barely over 230 years old, but it certainly led to a cascading of shocking events taking on lives of their own following on its heels, of which, added together have brought us to the brink of a total descent into chaos and ruin. It would lead one possessing a reasonable, rational mind capable of critical thinking being forced by the sheer weight of the evidence to conclude that the march towards absolute despotism started long before the 9/11 event, the day when "the inmates took over the assylum". Or as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman says, "madmen in authority". Or as Frank Rich once wrote: "the good Germans among us".
Even in usurping powers they didn't have, Bush's inglorious tongue-lashing at a meeting of stunned advisors, he ordered them to "stop throwing the Constitution in my face". This tin-horn wannabe dictator -- on whose very freedom depends on no small thanks to Obama's natural beneficence. It smacks of complicity all the way up and down the whole government power structure, and the air of corruption stinks like rotting corpses.
In open defiance to the Constitution and the rule of law, they continue to walk freely here in America, and continue to breathe the same free air of nations and peoples who don't commit mass murder of hundreds of thousands more innocent lives than the old Butcher of Baghdad himself did on his 30 plus years as Iraq's absolute dictator. With malice aforethought, shedding so much innocent blood as they did that our corporate-owned MSM propaganda machine is censored from producing the "before and after" photos of Iraq's "liberation" here in the USA.
But for the watch dog agency, the International Red Cross who is tasked with enforcing the Geneva Convention's Rules of War and numerous international news organizations, i.e., the Guardian UK, Der Speigel, I dare say that Americans wouldn't even know we have a 3/4 billion dollar brand new state-of-the-art Embassy in Baghdad that's costing us another cool billion a year to maintain, much less that we slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and erased hundreds of towns and cities from Google Earth Maps, in triumphing over Iraq's will.
It is inconceivable for me to accept they would've attempted to pull this thing off, unless they knew for dead certain the fix was already in, and their escape from justice was all but assured by an implicit, albeit unofficial, but nontheless de facto retroactive Obama pardon. Otherwise, why should any potus be willing to stick their necks on the chopping blocks, taking the penalty for their predecessor's guilt upon their own sholders for the gruesome atrocities in their stead? No, it's so much easier to simply pardon them all and get everybody off the hook, when it is too inconvenient to honor their oaths of office and to do the right thing. That is, they are "safe" just as long as Bush-Cheney and his cohorts in crime don't venture too far from the safe haven of American controlled territory.
President Obama, in protecting the most egregious war criminal regime in US history from the Constitution's sword of justice, doesn't seem to get it, that by protecting Bush-Cheney, he's doubling down and risking it all on a losing hand. He unwisely hitches his wagon to a fallen star. He risks his own impeachment, how history will remember his own legacy, the negating effect of his issuing them a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card, he risks destroying of any sense of remaining credibility to the remnant of his legions of true believers whose loyalty he once took for granted, that he ever really believed any of the words he spoke when he said, "nobody is above the law".
He risks what he is and ever was-or will ever be, in shielding Bush-Cheney, who would sooner see Obama resign in disgrace for protecting them, than to man up and finish the first fight they ever started, when they found it was much easier to ask for a deferment or to simply go awol, choosing instead let others do the fighting for them, the bleeding and the dying for them, like the cowards and bullies they are. So why should they stand up like and voluntarily take their medicine now? It's simple: they won't, unless they are led away in shackles wearing orange jumpsuits.
I remember his own words when President Bush -- that traitor who in stomping on our essential liberties and freedom, essentially turned this republic into a police state, handing the victory to the terrorists they couldn't win any other way-certainly not on any battlefield, passing enabling acts that continue to oppress us and glorify our avowed enemies, who live only for the day America falls. I'll never forgive Bush, who so arrogantly called the US Constitution "nothing but a goddam piece of paper" and acting more like Richard Nixon on steroids, the Decider saying often, "I'm the president, do it my way". Well, he did it his way. And millions of Americans, Iraqis, and Afghanis have never been the same since he announced "in the war against the terrorists, you're either for us-or against us". When he really meant was anyone who exposed, opposed, and call his tyranny the blight on this nation it really was.