Facing FACTS - America Under Bush Corporate Coup

September 16, 2005

America Has Fallen to a Jacobin Coup
by Paul Craig Roberts

The most important casualties of Sept. 11 are respect for truth and American liberty. Propaganda has replaced deliberation based on objective assessment of fact. The resurrection of the Star Chamber has made moot the legal protections of liberty.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was based on the deliberate suppression of fact. The invasion was not the result of mistaken intelligence. It was based on deliberately concocted "intelligence" designed to deceive the U.S. Congress, the American public, and the United Nations.

In an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC News, General Colin Powell, who was secretary of state at the time of the invasion, expressed dismay that he was the one who took the false information to the UN and presented it to the world. The weapons of mass destruction speech, he said, is a "blot" on his record. The full extent of the deception was made clear by the leaked top secret "Downing Street memos."
Two and one-half years after the March 2003 invasion, the U.S. Congress and the American people still do not know the reason Iraq was invaded. The U.S. is bogged down in an expensive and deadly combat, and no one outside the small circle of neoconservatives who orchestrated the war knows the reason why. Many guesses are rendered – oil, removal of Israel's enemy – but the Bush administration has never disclosed its real agenda, which it cloaked with the WMD deception.
This itself is a powerful indication that American democracy is dead. With the exception of right-wing talk radio, everyone in America now knows that the invasion of Iraq was based on false information. Yet, 40 percent of the public and both political parties in Congress still support the ongoing war.
The CIA has issued a report that the war is working only for Osama bin Laden. The unprovoked American aggression against Iraq, the horrors perpetrated against Muslims in Abu Ghraib prison, and the slaughter and mistreatment of Iraqi noncombatants, have radicalized the Muslim world and elevated bin Laden from a fringe figure to a leader opposed to American hegemony in the Middle East. The chaos created in Iraq by the U.S. military has provided al-Qaeda with superb training grounds for insurgency and terrorism. Despite overwhelming evidence that the "war on terror" is in fact a war for terror, Republicans still cheer when Bush says we have to "fight them over there" so they don't come "over here."
...There is an even greater cost of the war – the legal system that protects liberty, a human achievement for which countless numbers of people gave their lives over the centuries. The Bush administration used Sept. 11 to whip up fear and hysteria and to employ these weapons against American liberty. The Orwellian-named PATRIOT Act has destroyed habeas corpus. The executive branch has gained the unaccountable power to detain American citizens on mere suspicion or accusation, without evidence, and to hold Americans indefinitely without a trial.
Foolishly, many Americans believe this power can only be used against terrorists. Americans don't realize that the government can declare anyone to be a terrorist suspect. As no evidence is required, it is entirely up to the government to decide who is a terrorist. Thus, the power is unaccountable. Unaccountable power is the source of tyranny. ...

The English-speaking world has not seen such power since the 16th and 17th centuries when the Court of Star Chamber became a political weapon used against the king's opponents and to circumvent Parliament. The Star Chamber dispensed with juries, permitted hearsay evidence, and became so reviled that "Star Chamber" became a byword for injustice. The Long Parliament abolished the Star Chamber in 1641. In obedience to the Bush regime, the U.S. Congress resurrected it with the PATRIOT Act. Can anything be more Orwellian than identifying patriotism with the abolition of habeas corpus? (The Patriot Act is also identical to Hitler's Enabling Act, instituted after the Reichstag Fire which many suspect the SS caused in the first place, then blamed on a Jewish man).
Historians are quick to note that the Star Chamber was mild compared to Gitmo, to the U.S. practice of sending detainees abroad to be tortured, and to the justice (sic) regime being run by Attorney General "Torture" Gonzales and his predecessor, "Draped Justice" Ashcroft, who went so far as to say that opposition to the PATRIOT Act was itself the mark of a terrorist.
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Federal officials have sensed the sea change in American law: arbitrary actions and assertions by federal officials are taking the place of statutory legislation. We saw an example recently when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced that news media covering the New Orleans hurricane story were prohibited from taking pictures of the bodies of inhabitants drowned when the levees failed. Nowhere is FEMA given authority to override the First Amendment. Yet, FEMA officials saw no reason not to issue its decree. Rome had one Caesar. America has them throughout the executive branch.
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The United States is starting to acquire the image of Nazi Germany. Knowledgeable people should have no trouble drawing up their own list of elements common to both the Bush and Hitler regimes: the use of extraordinary lies to justify military aggression; reliance on coercion and threats in place of diplomacy; total belief in the virtue and righteousness of one's cause; the equating of factual objections or "reality-based" analysis to treason; the redirection of patriotism from country to leader; the belief that defeat resides in debate and a weakening of will; refuge in delusion and denial when promised results don't materialize....

As Professor Claes Ryn made clear in his book, America the Virtuous, the neoconservatives are neo-Jacobins. There is nothing conservative about them. They are committed to the use of coercion to impose their agenda. Their attitude is merciless toward anyone in their way, whether fellow citizen or foreigner. "You are with us or against us." For those on the receiving end, the Nazi and Jacobin mentalities come to the same thing.
The Bush administration has abandoned American principles. It is a Jacobin regime. Woe to its citizens and the rest of the world.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell.

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If facts, truth, integrity and history mean anything - the American press core will come to the party and stand in concert to expose this wicked, evil coup using up American youth, lying to the public daily, and sneering like a ten year old narcissistic psychopath when questioned about their largesse. This is a totalitarian regime with contractors running the show and profiting directly from war - thus it will not end anytime, let alone soon. America is held captive to war and greed (and has been for three generations of Bush).