The scariest things about a war against people who hate our freedom is that it never ends, it justifies the most terrible things imaginable and is self-sustaining.   With the technology now in place, a wartime president, and they all are now, forever, is able to spy on, locate and kill by remote control anyone he or she deems worthy of death.

If Louis Farrakahn had this technology in 1965 he wouldn’t have had to foment murderous hatred by preaching “a hypocrite such as Malcolm X is worthy of death!”   Malcolm’s on the phone, he’s getting into his car, boom!  Done.

In 1917, when the U.S. was engaged in a war nobody to this day can give a moral reason for (American banks had loaned millions to France and England, jingoism had run amok, colonialists were vying for control of Africa and Asia), it was literally packaged and sold by the US President as The War to End War and a crusade to Make the World Safe for Democracy.   It did neither, as the next century was to grotesquely illustrate in the blood and nightmares of countless hundreds of millions.

Woodrow Wilson was the president who hired a PR genius , George Creel, and created a government office called The Committee for Public Information, to make Americans enthusiastically join up for this senseless slaughter.  Wilson’s remembered well by many as the peace-loving idealist who formed the League of Nations which became the UN.  Others remember him as the KKK sympathizer who screened the infamous “Birth of a Nation”, the first moving picture ever shown in the White House.  

This movie portrayed a noble South besieged by lawless Blacks, enraged, apparently, over their former condition of servitude.   The Federal government laughed, as the piano player accompanied the silent black and white film, as southern ladies were defiled.  Finally hooded heroes emerged to defend the honor of their women and restore decency to the South.  These heroes were members of the KKK.  There are people who insist that Wilson was a klansman himself.  It wouldn’t surprise me, in light of the facts and the profile of the psychopathic type who is usually elected president of the USA.

Don’t get me wrong, I use psychopathic in the most respectful way.  These men are not  serial killers, they are charming, confident, mostly brilliant winners of vast popularity contests.  I just recall the things many have done to prove they are ready for office, like publicly executing brain damaged prisoners to prove their toughness (Clinton, Dubya).   The things they sign off on as president sometimes involve killings and these men must not flinch, even when they may personally think the killing in question is probably wrong.   There are trillions of dollars at stake if they don’t play ball with the people who have the most to lose.  In most cases it is thought best to keep these high-stakes matters private.

The only hope for working representative democracy is transparency, information, a robust exchange of actual ideas based on the actual facts of each given case.  When Cheney  restored the power of the Unitary Executive and famously moved our democracy to the Dark Side to fight people as evil and devious as he himself is, his first move was to stamp every government action secret and confidential.  Make the bastards go to court to prove it isn’t, you know?

Secrecy is essential for a government working in the shadows.  For example, if you have a top secret memo, written by lawyers– one soon to be a Federal Judge with a lifetime appointment– that redefines torture to allow unspeakable things to be done during interrogations, your operatives are free to do whatever is necessary to extract information.  If some asshole publishes photos of some of these horrors, and some bleeding heart like the NY Times publishes them, a whole unnecessary shit storm, a gigantic kerfuffle, (as when Cheney innocently shot  his acquaintance in the face while drunk), flares up.   It makes everyone look bad in the name of  protecting a few hundred or thousand people who might very well hate our freedom.  Can you prove these were innocent people we humiliated, tormented and broke, NY Times?

If you publish photos of Auschwitz for chickens, or pigs, or cows, there are statutes that will punish you.   If you show the parade of American coffins coming back from various foreign wars– watch out.   The toxic mix of chemicals forced deep into the earth at great force to extract clean, safe natural gas?   Top secret, there’s a federal statute that says so.   There are certain practices that do not lend themselves to the disinfectant of  sunlight.

Strict deterrents, a determined ruler finds, are very useful in gaining compliance– particularly where delicate government secrets are involved.   At a critical juncture where a disastrously costly war in Iraq might have been prevented, a man with direct knowledge of the false evidence petitioned the government to reveal that the aluminum tubes from Niger had nothing to do with Saddam’s supposed nuclear program.  The government told him to shut up.  Instead he published an Op-Ed in the NY Times, the Grey Skank, America’s journal of record.  Some might call him a patriot for this action.

Others were not impressed with his patriotism.  In short order his wife’s status as a CIA officer was publicly revealed.   That she was working to prevent WMD from falling into the hands of terrorists was secondary to the need to chill the sort of bravado her husband had shown at this crucial juncture.  He could easily have ruined everything!  

Revealing the wife’s secret agent status led, no doubt, to the mass round-up and execution of all of her informants, the shutting down of her network.   As I recall America was already at war in Afghanistan.  If so, this treasonous act during a time of war should have been a capital offense.  Instead it was one more thing for Americans to just “get over” as the administration plunged ahead with its plan to, inadvertently, make Iran the most powerful player in the region.  Lawyers made the rest of this treasonous conspiracy quietly disappear as one fall guy was convicted of obstructing justice and then had his prison sentence commuted.

Anyway, my point is this:  In 1917, Woodrow Wilson decided that there were too many unpatriotic Americans, unionists, communists, socialists, pacifists, who were intent on preventing America’s entry to the War to End War.   Congress passed the 1917 Espionage Act which allowed these groups to be spied on, prosecuted in federal court and locked up for a long time for aiding the enemy during war (Wikipedia would be handy to check now, but I’ve got to end this tirade soon).

Fast forward almost a century.   President Barack Obama’s government has used the 1917 Espionage Act, a law passed to make prosecution of a senseless war (except for the war profiteers who made billions) easier, to prosecute more cases (6) than all American presidents before him combined (3).   Details from the Grey Skank herself here.

Another moment of true horror, hearing that President Transparency has been more zealous than his even his famously secretive predecessors in keeping unseemly government actions opaque.   Punish the whistle blower harshly and consistently enough and you eventually can stop worrying about the public getting a whiff of the unspeakable things governments do in our name.

Democracy is best left to the experts, it would appear by the evidence.

FN (From NY Times article linked above):

In one of the more remarkable examples of the administration’s aggressive approach, Thomas A. Drake, a former employee of the National Security Agency, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act last year and faced a possible 35 years in prison.

His crime? When his agency was about to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a software program bought from the private sector intended to monitor digital data, he spoke with a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. He suggested an internally developed program that cost significantly less would be more effective and not violate privacy in the way the product from the vendor would. (He turned out to be right, by the way.)

He was charged with 10 felony counts that accused him of lying to investigators and obstructing justice. Last summer, the case against him collapsed, and he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor, of misuse of a government computer.

All the rules that our former Vice President Dick Cheney and President G. W. Bush put into place about how to get around international and U.S. law seem to have been vigorously embraced by President “Change You Can Believe In”.    There was talk when Cheney’s lawyers were force feeding this new regime to our democracy– that you can hold people indefinitely without charges and even torture them, (as long as your lawyers redefined the practices to be lawful and interrogators were properly immunized against prosecution), and also kill people without trial and spy on them without a judicial rubber stamp.  Oh, and also invade countries because you honestly believe they might attack you some day, whether they have the means to do so at the moment or not.

I recall the mouse-like debates at the time– “but, if we give these powers to this Unitary Executive, supremely wise and prudent though he is, what about the next one?  Would we want Hillary Clinton (the presumptive next president at the time) to be able to decide who is an enemy combatant, who to kill by drone, which civil liberties to suspend and which countries we can invade without an actual causus belli?”   The answer, five years after an Executive Order closed down the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, is still “NO!”

There were once more than 800 detainees, held in this legal limbo on a corner of Cuba.  These prisoners, many turned in for generous American reward money, were famously called “the worst of the worst”.  Quietly more than 600 of these merciless terrorists have been released, not charged with anything, or after a careful investigation of the facts reveals one as, say, an Afghan pediatrician, turned in for the reward money.  “Go back to your clinic, doctor, and continue treating children.  And sorry about the two or three years of what some critical people might cavil and call ‘torture’.  Have a nice day, doctor.  And by the way, have your lawyer read our new laws carefully before you spend any money trying to sue us.  He’ll tell you we’re bulletproof, and he’ll be 100% correct.  Have a very nice day, and again, sorry we never changed your towels or bedding, during those times when you had a bed.”

At last count there are 166 men left in Guantanamo, 86 of whom have already been cleared by our intelligence service for release.  You may recall that President Obama, in one of his first official acts, closed that shameful “detention center” in January 2008.   Not that it had any real world effect on the actual detention center.  Many of those prisoners, long denied habeus corpus (the ancient right to know what you’re accused of and what jeopardy you face before they lock you up) are now on a mass hunger strike– 100 of them, in fact.  You won’t see much of this on the news.  Face it, it’s embarrassing, and horrible.  Why publicize something so tawdry?   It will certainly not help anyone sell anything.   We don’t talk about 250,000 Indian farmer suicides in the last decade because Monsanto took their farms, why mention 166 people, some of whom may actually have connections to terrorism?

Because America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, and has long been famous for its spirit of fair play, the more than twenty  hunger strikers in danger of death will not be allowed to starve themselves to death.  They are taken out of their cells by force, if necessary (and one suspects it often is necessary, unfortunately, as people desperate enough to go on a hunger strike will often not be the most cooperative or sensible people) strapped into a chair and have a feeding tube forced down their nostril into their alimentary canal (or further down, I’m not a doctor, what do I know about forced feeding?) so that nutrients can be forced into their bodies.  

You see, we value human life, we do.  Some life we value a lot more, and a monetary value can be, and is, assigned to each life, but we find all life precious.  Even the lives of those who may, quite possibly, hate our freedoms, even after more than a decade of forced detention, humiliation, rough-stuff, and, in maybe three cases we know of, enhanced interrogation that may have arguably crossed the line and been near the border of torture as traditionally defined, even those lives are precious.  And we will not let them die no matter how passionately they might beg for that right.