{"id":55858,"date":"2013-08-05T08:16:50","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T07:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/were-in-a-post-constitutional-america-our-country-is-going-sideways-in-plain-sight-and-nobodys-saying-much-about-it\/55858\/"},"modified":"2013-08-05T15:35:42","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T14:35:42","slug":"were-in-a-post-constitutional-america-our-country-is-going-sideways-in-plain-sight-and-nobodys-saying-much-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/were-in-a-post-constitutional-america-our-country-is-going-sideways-in-plain-sight-and-nobodys-saying-much-about-it\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re in a Post-Constitutional America: Our Country Is Going Sideways in Plain Sight, and Nobody’s Saying Much About It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Close your eyes for a moment, think about recent events, and you could easily believe yourself in a Seinfeldian Bizarro World<\/a>. Now, open them and, for a second, everything looks almost familiar… and then you notice that a dissident is fleeing a harsh and draconian power, known for its global surveillance practices<\/a>, use of torture, assassination campaigns<\/a>, and secret prisons<\/a>, and has found a haven in a heartless world in… hmmm… Russia. That dissident, of course, is Edward Snowden, just granted a year\u2019s temporary asylum<\/a> in Russia, a.k.a. the defender of human rights and freedom 2013, and so has been released from a Washington-imposed imprisonment in Moscow\u2019s international air terminal and the threat of far worse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, close your eyes, open them again, and for just a moment, doesn\u2019t the world look a little more orderly? After all, a draconian imperial power has taken one of its own dissidents, who wanted to reveal the truth about its cruel war practices and global diplomatic maneuverings, thrown him in prison without charges, abused and mistreated him, brought him before a drumhead military court and, on essentially trumped up charges of \u201cespionage,\u201d convicted him<\/a> of just what its leaders wanted to convict him of. That power, of course, must be Russia and all\u2019s right with the world… oops, I mean, that\u2019s U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning<\/a> and the \u201cevil empire\u201d that mistreated him is… gulp… the United States.<\/p>\n

Think about it for a moment: if Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia is a place of asylum for American dissidents and the U.S. is doing a reasonable job of imitating aspects of the old USSR, we are on Bizarro Earth, aren’t we?<\/p>\n

Today, former State Department whistleblower<\/a> Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People<\/a>,<\/em> considers how America\u2019s distant wars have come home and how, under that pressure, this country is morphing into something unrecognizable. Worse yet, it\u2019s quite possible that we\u2019re only at the beginning of that transformation. To give but a small example of what the future might hold, psychiatrist and author<\/a> Jonathan Shay, famous for his work with traumatized Vietnam veterans, suggested in Daedalus<\/a> in 2011 that no one knows what it means for similarly traumatized employees of our Warrior corporations<\/a>, the rent-a-gun \u201cveterans\u201d of our recent war zones to come home to no health care and no support system. And he offered an eerie, if provocative, comparison to the footloose German veterans of World War I who, in the 1920s, joined the Freikorps<\/a> and played their part in the radicalization and then Nazification of that country.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am not saying,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthat I know that the Weimar Republic would still exist today, with all that implies about a different course to history, if Germany had had Vet Centers and VA Mental Health Clinics. But historians generally agree that the Freikorps contributed to the weakening of the new German political fabric in the immediate aftermath of World War I.\u201d His is a chilling reminder that, wherever we are now, it might just be a rest stop on some bizarro road to hell. \u00a0-Tom<\/em><\/p>\n

The following is an article by Peter Van Buren<\/a>:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

What If Your Country Begins to Change and No One Notices?\u00a0<\/strong>Welcome to Post-Constitutional America<\/strong><\/p>\n

On July 30, 1778, the Continental Congress created the first whistleblower<\/a> protection law, stating \u201cthat it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republished from: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Close your eyes for a moment, think about recent events, and you could easily believe yourself in a Seinfeldian Bizarro World. Now, open them and, for a second, everything looks almost familiar… and then you notice that a dissident is fleeing a harsh and draconian power, known for its global surveillance practices, use of torture, assassination campaigns, and secret prisons, and has found a haven in a heartless world in… hmmm… Russia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55859,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-55858","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55858\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}