Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org
A dictatorship does not represent the public but only the aristocracy that, behind the scenes, controls the government.
Jonathan H. Adler, Professor at Case Western University School of Law, noted, regarding George W. Bush’s secret policy for the NSA to access everyone’s phone-records, that “The metadata collection program is constitutional (at least according to Judge Kavanaugh),” and he presented Judge Kavanaugh’s entire published opinion on that. Kavanaugh’s opinion stated that the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution could be shoved aside because he thinks that the ‘national security’ of the United States is more important than the Constitution. Kavanaugh wrote:
The Government’s program for bulk collection of 2 telephony metadata serves a critically important special need – preventing terrorist attacks on the United States. …. In my view, that critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program. …
The Fourth Amendment allows governmental searches and seizures without individualized suspicion when the Government demonstrates a sufficient “special need” – that is, a need beyond the normal need for law enforcement – that outweighs the intrusion on individual liberty. …
In sum, the Fourth Amendment does not bar the Government’s bulk collection of telephony metadata under this program.
Kavanaugh said that since the 4th Amendment excludes only “unreasonable” searches and seizures (such as seizures of all of this private information from everyone), it doesn’t exclude the “bulk collection of 2 telephony metadata” (collection of both phone numbers in each phone conversation from and/or to anyone in the United States), because a “critical national security need [“preventing terrorist attacks on the United States”] outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program.”
As a consequence, for each American, the U.S. federal Government knows everyone whom you call, and who calls you — it knows all of your phone-contacts — and it does so because everything in the U.S. Constitution can be overridden by any “critical national security need” such as “preventing terrorist attacks” such as occurred on 9/11, which attacks hadn’t at all been enabled by the then-existing lack of such police-state measures here. Kavanaugh’s opinion simply ignored that fact — didn’t even discuss it. Instead of that’s having produced the ‘intelligence failure’, the U.S. Government — especially the U.S. President — prior to 9/11, had refused to allow its agents to inform the U.S. President of the actionable information that they had found and that they were struggling to get to him prior to the attacks. Bush didn’t want to know, until the attacks had already occurred. He demanded deniability.
As regards the reason why this police-state procedure which Kavanaugh backs is needed now, after 9/11 — though it had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks (except for the latter’s having served in far-right-wingers’ propaganda such as Kavanaugh’s opinion, as being the alleged excuse for the ‘intelligence failure’), and though martial law hasn’t yet even been declared in the U.S. — no one has publicly said anything. But is it really “reasonable” that the Government permanently stores all of this telephone-data from everyone, even if a given citizen does not, and in many instances doesn’t get to see it even on the phone-bill? Who actually benefits from this? It’s a severe situation that isn’t seriously being publicly discussed; such discussion is effectively banned in at least all of the major ’news’ media (which pretend to be concerned about protecting citizens’ most-basic rights — and not only about their own).
Judge Kavanaugh was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by a President who has threatened to go to war against Russia if Russia follows through with its announced plan to exterminate the Al-Qaeda-led forces in the only province of Syria that is at least 90% in favor of Al Qaeda and/or of ISIS — the province that is well over 90% jihadists and their pre-war supporters; it’s by far the most-jihadist province in all of Syria. Consequently, this alleged opposition to “Radical Islamic Terrorism” on the part of candidate and now U.S. President Donald Trump, the President who appointed Judge Kavanaugh to the highest court in the land, is entirely and blatantly fake. Trump and his allies support Al Qaeda in Syria, just as Obama did.
Three nations have been prominently alleged to have been the secret cause of the 9/11 attacks. One of them is Shiite Iran, which is the only Government that is accused by the U.S. Government, and which the U.S. Government has fined billions of dollars as having been the cause of the 9/11 attacks, even though there’s no credible evidence that Iran had planned those attacks, nor that Iran had financed either the planning or the execution of those attacks. Iran is instead a Government which the U.S. Government had controlled during 1953-1979 and whose U.S.-installed regime of torture became overthrown in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution against the U.S.-installed Iranian regime, at which time both the fundamentalist-Sunni Sauds — the royal family who own Saudi Arabia — and the fundamentalist-Jewish aristocracy who control Israel, declared Iran to be an “existential threat” against themselves; and the U.S. Government has both of those Governments as allies to overthrow this post-U.S.-stooge Government of Iran.
In 1996, Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud and his friend FBI Director Louis Freeh managed to blame the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia not on the fundamentalist-Sunni U.S.-and-Saudi-created Al Qaeda, which were widely thought to have done it, but instead on Iran, which both the U.S. and Saudi Governments hated; and the retiring Freeh then recommended Robert Mueller to replace himself, and the retiring Robert Mueller recommended James Comey to replace himself, and thus all three FBI Directors endorsed the Saudi accusation against Iran, that Iran was behind the Khobar Towers bombing, even though no reliable evidence has yet been supplied that Iran had had anything at all to do with it. Mueller himself had a long history as the aristocracy’s master of cover-ups designed to misdirect blame either sideways or else downward but always away from the actual culprits and especially away from the culprits at the very top of the given criminal or traitorous operation. He’s the master of ‘investigative’ deception, serving the aristocracy, not the public. Wherever there are aristocratic conflicts to be resolved by lawyers, it’s almost never good guys versus bad guys but almost always monsters versus monsters. The U.S. and its allies are simply bullies who lie, psychopathically.
All recent U.S. Presidents say that “Iran is the top state sponsor of terrorism”, even though (other than against Israel) all or nearly all Islamic terrorism has been perpetrated by fundamentalist Sunnis (such as Saudis), and virtually none by any Shiites at all.
Many Americans who oppose the U.S. Government, but who aren’t intelligent, say that instead Israel caused the 9/11 attacks, even though no reliable evidence has been cited for that allegation, either, and much of the ‘evidence’ that is cited for it is fraudulent or otherwise disprovable. Israel (like the Sauds) is an enemy of the American people, but (unlike the Sauds) it didn’t cause 9/11. Osama bin Laden’s financial bagman, when asked where the money came from to pay the “salaries” of all Al Qaeda members, said “Without the money of the — of the Saudi, you will have nothing” of Al Qaeda.
The evidence is overwhelming that the Sauds financed the 9/11 attacks and that George W. Bush and some of his friends were also involved in it but were careful to make sure they had deniability — ignorance of the advance details — so as not to be able to be nailed for their advance involvement in the arrangements that had been made for the attacks. Bush, of course, relied on a close staff that included not only FBI director Mueller but Brett Kavanaugh, the current Supreme Court nominee by Donald Trump — and Trump had been elected after a Presidential campaign in which he had pretended to loathe the Bushes and their — and Obama’s — policies. Trump overturns the least-bad of Obama’s policies, but is otherwise simply an even bolder fascist than those two Presidents had been.
This is entirely a bipartisan matter — the same U.S. aristocracy controls all American political Parties that have any chance of ruling the nation. For example, the opinion by Judge Kavanaugh was the only opinion that was published from any of the 11 judges though the ruling by the Court was unanimous. Among the ten other judges was the Chief Judge, Merrick Garland, whom President Obama subsequently appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and the Republicans blocked from being considered by the full Senate. President Obama was a defendant in this particular case, and all 11 judges on it ruled in his favor. If the Chief Judge had been the lone one to rule against him, then perhaps the Chief Judge (Garland) would not have been appointed (exactly four months later, on 16 March 2016) by the President to the Supreme Court. Garland was rejected by the Republicans because the President who appointed him labeled himself with the competing brand. The minor differences between U.S. Supreme Court judges nowadays are the differences that separate the two political brands, not actually differences in basic beliefs or values, though the propaganda by the competing brands pretends to basic differences between them. Anyone who opposes the existing secret rule by the aristocracy won’t even be appointed, much less confirmed. This is today’s American ‘democracy’.
So, clearly, just as the U.S. regime and its ‘news’ media had lied to say that Saddam Hussein needed to be eliminated because he possessed and was building up “WMD” and even nuclear weapons; and just as Muammar Qaddafi was similarly slaughtered on the basis of U.S.-and-allied lies; and just as those and other U.S. invasions — such as in Syria and in Yemen — have made America and the world vastly worse-off except for the U.S. weapons-makers such as Lockheed Martin and the other U.S. ‘Defense’ Department’s contractors and the U.S. extraction firms such as ExxonMobil and Halliburton which gained new sources of lands to strip of their natural resources by means of such military invasions, the biggest threat to U.S. national security is the U.S. Government itself — and especially its military, which spends around half of the entire world’s military budget each year.
As part of this growing U.S. police-state, every phone call that anyone in the U.S. participates in is information that this regime has (since 9/11) been collecting on that individual. We are all ‘national security’ suspects, now. The U.S. Government isn’t only the chief enemy of Iraqis, and of Libyans, and of Syrians, and of Iranians, and of Yemenis, and of Afghans, and of Russians, and of Chinese, etc.; it is also the chief enemy of the American people (though it doesn’t cause us hell like it causes the residents in those target-countries). And it is the chief enemy of Europeans, too. More recently, the U.S. Government has, in effect, even declared economic war against Europe.
What are the signs of a dictatorship? High percentage of its public being in prison? Low level of approval by the public of the nation’s leader? Low level of trust by the public in the nation’s ‘news’ media? Near-zero impact of public opinion on the laws that get passed and that don’t? High percentage of the public who think that the “Deep State” rules the country — that, essentially, the country is a dictatorship? High level of terror among whistleblowers and potential whistleblowers that they’ll be imprisioned for their herosim as being a ‘national-security threat’ instead of venerated as their being the essential sunlight that’s needed in order to be able to reduce corruption? All of that describes today’s United States of America. How can such a nation — one that’s a dictatorship on each one of those measures — NOT be a dictatorship? But is it even worse if such a nation pontificates to the entire rest of the world, that it is a democracy, and that it, and it alone, is the world’s indispensable nation?
President Barack Obama said, and repeated many times, that the United States is “the one indispensable nation” — meaning that all others are “dispensable.” Adolf Hitler had said essentially the same thing about Germany; and, like recent U.S. Presidents, he acted accordingly. Today’s U.S. Government is the enemy of FDR’s U.S. Government, and is not only the enemy of America’s Founders, in these and so many other basic matters. Today’s America is the fascist United States Government. All “dispensable” countries deal with that top fascist one, in whatever way the given nation’s aristocracy chooses to deal with it. Most aristocracies choose to share, however they can, in the Empire’s (the U.S. aristocracy’s) loot from this military, propaganda, and extraction, system. But some other “dispensable” nations resist the U.S. aristocracy. And some others are quiet, on the sidelines, for as long as they can be there, to avoid their becoming targets themselves. Dealing with such a bully is difficult for everyone.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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