Bush's domestic spying: How America is rapidly becoming a police state

by Mike Adams
CounterThink.org
Jun. 25, 2006

For years I've been warning my readers about the coming police state and the abusive use of power by the Bush administration. This year, we have learned that President Bush -- or should I say King George Bush -- personally authorized domestic spying on American citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA). In articles that have appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post and other national news papers, George Bush admitted that he personally signed off on 30 illegal surveillance wiretaps, and furthermore, he defended the practice, explaining that wiretapping American citizens was saving American lives because of the war on terror. Furthermore, he explained he was doing everything in his power under the laws of the Constitution to protect U.S. citizens and their civil liberties.

The degree of doublespeak being used by George Bush in that statement is extraordinary. His lack of historical context is utterly jaw-dropping. The man is becoming the Stalin of the United States. He is destroying our civil liberties and the Constitution, while simultaneously claiming that he is protecting the Constitution and the civil liberties of the American people. What could be more sinister than using our own intelligence services to spy on the American people? This is more than a little reminiscent of the secret police of Nazi Germany.

The purpose of the Constitution is to put a check on tyranny
A professor of constitutional law at the Georgetown University Law Center, Susan Lo Bloch, said that Bush was "taking a hugely expansive interpretation of the Constitution and the president's power under the Constitution." That's a nice way of saying it. Actually, Bush is making up his own laws and his own power as he goes along. Actually, he is destroying the Constitution because he is making it increasingly irrelevant with each transgression of the limitations of power set forth by the Constitution.

For those who may not know, the purpose of the Constitution was explicitly to limit the power of government over the people. It was created by the founders of the United States out of the very real and genuine fear that any sufficiently centralized system of power, especially a governmental system of power, would eventually become abusive and exploitive, and begin to serve its own purposes rather than those of the people.

The founders created the Constitution to specifically limit the power of the federal government and the power of the president, and George Bush has trampled the Constitution to such a degree that to think he's actually defending it is utterly laughable.

For one thing, the Constitution says that only Congress can declare war, yet George Bush, like his father, has taken us to war without a Congressional declaration. It is an illegal war, using falsified intelligence to drag the American people into the desert version of Vietnam. Now he is saying that spying on the American people is justified and that the rights granted by the Constitution can be thwarted. George Bush is intent on spying on the American people and he is defending this act. In fact, in his statement to the American people, he lashed out at the press, which he claimed has endangered the American people by going public with this information.

Public knowledge is a "danger" to national security!
Such a sentence could have come, word-for-word, out of Hitler's mouth. The press must not go public with the secrets about the illegal domestic citizen surveillance program, because the government is protecting you, didn't you know? The government is protecting your civil rights. The government is protecting you from terrorists, and how is it doing that? It is running secret spy programs. It's spying on you and your fellow citizens illegally, unconstitutionally, unethically, immorally and without any legal justification whatsoever.

There is no doubt that these acts are federal crimes. Add this to the list of crimes committed by the Bush administration, including the condoning of torture, the illegal kidnapping of American citizens, the detainment of those prisoners without charging them, the violation of the Geneva Convention with prisoner torture, and the use of weapons of mass destruction against the Iraqi people. Depleted uranium, which is a nuclear weapon of mass destruction, is being used by U.S. troops on an almost daily basis in Iraq.

American democracy is rapidly giving way to a police state
The things I'm mentioning here are only part of the story. Clearly what we have in the United States today is a police state. We no longer have a democracy. We are no longer operating under the Constitution, because our own national leaders will not honor it. They believe that violating the Constitution in any way that can help them stay in power and achieve their political war-mongering goals is more important than the rights granted to the American people by the Constitution, and the limitations on government powers that have been demanded by the Constitution.

Bush's line of thinking on this is that the ends justify the means, no matter who has to be tortured; no matter who has to die. No matter who has to be invaded, bombed, killed or have their property taken from them, or their houses raided by federal agents. No matter what has to happen, in George Bush's mind, it's worth it to "get the terrorists." He can invoke the terror scare to insist on just about any transgression against the civil liberties of the American people. That is the most frightening thing of all.

The actions of President Bush and his administration are far more terrifying to me -- as someone who understands American history and world history -- than any actions taken by the terrorists, because a group of terrorists can destroy one building, but a group of power-hungry national leaders -- who are willing to do anything to justify their personal political agenda -- can destroy an entire nation, and that's what I see this administration doing right now.

It's tearing the foundation of this nation apart, one Constitutional amendment at a time, and if this does not end now, it is soon going to be too late to reverse it. We're going to end up as a fascist police state, a war-mongering global aggressor and a nation that is hated by all and feared by many. It will be a nation that will inevitably find itself in military conflicts with other nations of the world. We've got to reverse this trend. We have to learn how to make peace with ourselves and our global neighbors, and stop fanning the flames and trampling on our citizens' rights in order to achieve some geopolitical or military goal.

Where does the tyranny end?
I have a question for you: If president Bush would secretly sign off on top-secret surveillance programs that would violate laws -- to spy on Americans citizens in their own homes and in their own jobs -- and if this administration would actively engage in the torture of political prisoners, and would even refuse to outlaw torture, then what would this administration not do? Is there anything it would not do to achieve its political agendas?

Where does this end? It should have ended when it met up with the boundaries set forth by the Constitution. It should have ended with the very first invasion of Iraq by George Bush, Sr. Congress should have stood up and declared it illegal and impeached the president then for engaging in an illegal war, but Congress has no backbone. Our representatives and senators have been steamrolled by this Bush group for far too long, and they refuse to invoke and support the laws of the land set forth by the Constitution of this once-great nation.

I have another question for you: If you think terrorists are a threat, who is going to fight the terror from within? Who is going to stand up against these criminals running our country who are tearing it apart from the inside out? It should be our senators; it should be Congress, it should be our people, it should be the media, but right now, it is no one.

The only exception may be Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who is, despite his official party affiliation, really a Libertarian. How far will this go on? We already know about secret prison camps positioned all over the world, used by the United States. We know about Guantanamo Bay. Now the president has openly admitted to spying on American citizens with a domestic surveillance program. What's next? Do we have our own U.S. Gestapo? Are people going to disappear in the middle of the night and be taken to torture facilities? Is Bush going to go on the air and say that's justified too, because we're helping to stop terrorists, and damn the press for printing anything about secret prison camps, secret kidnappings, torture and interrogation of American citizens?

The free press is America's last defense against tyranny
This is the purpose of the press; to stop these criminals from turning the American people into cannon fodder for their private political war. The press must investigate and print the truth. The press must go public with this, because without the press, frankly, there would be nothing left to stop this aggressive power grab.

It's time to stand up and say, "Enough is enough. No more secret prisons. No more torture and kidnapping. No more interrogations of American citizens. No more domestic spying on our brothers and sisters. No more trampling on the Constitution in the name of 'stopping terrorists.' No more fabrication of intelligence. No more invading other countries just because it pleases the current corrupt leaders of our nation. No more fixing of elections."

It's time to stand up now and safeguard these United States of America, and any failure to do so, very quickly, will undeniably mean the end of this great nation. All we will be left with is the USSA: A police state where your rights are limited to whatever the president thinks you should have.