Surviving
At The Pleasure
Of The President
By Sheila Samples
28 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
"You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says:
It is a puling sample jungle of woods.
You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of beech if I have the
poultriest notions what the farest he all means."
~~James Joyce, Finnegans
Wake (1939)
My friend Bernie says ever since
the Bush gang stormed the White House in 2000, then stormed the World
Trade Center in 2001, we've done nothing but run in circles like a bunch
of terrified chickens with our heads chopped off. "We have no sense
of direction," Bernie said, "we're staggering around in a
jungle of lies, deceit, and scandal with no way out -- and that's the
way they planned it."
"You're kidding!"
I exclaimed, astonished. "You mean they planned this mess? It's
nothing but bloody chaos out there --"
Bernie nodded. "You
got that right. Bloody chaos is the best -- the only -- way to get what
they're after. Don't be fooled by those little American flags stuck
in the lapels of this bunch," Bernie continued. "The people
in this nation, the hungry and homeless, the ill, the elderly, displaced
Katrina victims, and especially those returning from war's inferno either
in body bags or maimed physically, psychologically, and spiritually
aren't even blips on their New World Order radar screen. They suffer
at the pleasure of the president."
Bernie reminded me that shortly
before the 2000 presidential campaign, when Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton,
he made a speech to the Institute of Petroleum in London where he complained
that oil producers "had to deal with the pesky problem that once
you find oil and pump it out of the ground you've got to turn around
and find more or go out of business."
Cheney went on to say, "That
means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million
barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and
the national oil companies are obviously in control of about ninety
per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business...the
Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost,
is still where the prize ultimately lies..."
Bernie grinned. "If
that didn't set off alarms, especially in Iraq, you gotta know they
started going off when, a year later, with his eyes on the prize, Cheney
appointed himself vice president, put himself in charge of the nation's
energy policy, based that policy on the location of oil fields -- not
only in Iraq and Iran but throughout the Persian Gulf -- then mounted
up and headed out to solve big oil's 'pesky' problem."
I have to agree with Bernie.
Cheney and his bumbling bunch of neo-conservative henchmen are obsessed
with this really crazy "vision" that they can control the
world. Flip through their chilling masterpiece and you'll see that they
believe the world is theirs -- everything, including space and cyberspace
-- all theirs. And, it'll hit you right between the eyes that every
one of these suckers is a flaming psycho. If it takes lies, they'll
lie. If it takes imprisonment, torture, mass murder, either at home
or abroad -- they'll do that too.
Bernie says folks in this
country have no idea what they're up against. In spite of the draconian
USA Patriot Act, they still hang onto the illusion that their freedoms
are protected by the US Constitution; yet they emerge from each succeeding
crisis with fewer and fewer freedoms. "If Americans were willing
-- or capable -- of reading and thinking," Bernie said, "they'd
know that the war being waged throughout the world began here at home,
and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights were its first victims."
Can't argue with that. The
truth's been out there for years. In December 2002, before the Washington
Post drank the Stepford Kool-Aid, it published a riveting piece, "In
Terror War, 2nd Track for Suspects," in which writer Charles Lane
exposed Bush's executive power grab to strip courts of all oversight
or authority. Lane sounded the alarm on the "parallel legal system
in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike --
may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without
legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system."
Lane went on to say the administration,
with approval of the "special" Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, could "order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home
and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen
an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base."
If the courts were aware of this activity at all, they would have "very
limited authority to second-guess the detention." .
Lane's article is no longer
available on the WaPo site (surprise!), but can be found on Common Dreams.org,
as can Jonathan Turley's August 2002 article,"Camps for Citizens:
Ashcroft's Hellish Vision," originally published in the LA Times,
but alas, is also no longer there.
Turley, a straight-talking
professor of constitutional law at George Washington University, exposed
then Attorney General John Ashcroft's "hellish vision" to
incarcerate citizens he decided were "enemy combatants," i.e.,
all who were disloyal to Bush or dared to resist his "smoke-em-out"
war on terror. According to Turley, in Ashcroft's America, "security
precedes liberty." Liberty is nothing more than a "rhetorical
justification for increased security," and citizens have a choice
-- accept autocratic rule and surrender their rights peacefully, or
be labeled enemy combatants and be held indefinitely by the government,
without charges, a hearing, or access to a lawyer.
The camps are there, fully
staffed and ready. In the absence of the US Constitution, Bush's Executive
Orders are in place. Everything needed to keep this country running
has been contracted out. Halliburton has left the building. Those in
our society still having bragging rights to civil liberties are illegal
aliens, whose growing numbers give new meaning to the word, "surge."
One swipe of Bush's pen will inflict martial law and we will discover,
too late, that we live in a police state patrolled by jackbooted Blackwater
USA mercenaries who will, indeed, serve at the pleasure of the president..
Blackwater is in place to
become this nation's shadow police force and is its current shadow army.
Go back to the "dry run" of Katrina and take a look at the
heavily armed force that laid seige to New Orleans, that sped through
the streets rounding up hurricane victims, packing them into a "detention"
arena where they were forced to stay for days without food or water
or assistance. Go back even further -- the bodies hanging from the bridge
in Fallujah were not US soldiers, but Blackwater mercenaries -- death
squad troops 100,000 strong who roam the Iraqi streets at will and stir
up violence and hatred against the uniformed US military.
We are, indeed, awakening
to find ourselves in a dark evil tangle, a "puling sample jungle
of woods." Reminds me of the helplessness I felt on that bright,
sunshiny day when I pulled over at a roadside park near Atlanta to take
a short nap. When I awoke two hours later, it was pitch dark -- and
it was only noon! Then, I realized with horror that I was covered with
Kudzu -- I could hear it relentlessly growing, munching, crunching around
me!
I was faced with a choice.
I could hunker down in fear and hope someone else would save me, or
I could at least make the effort to get out of the mess I had gotten
myself into. Armed with only a dull pocket knife, I managed to slice
my way out of the jungle by cutting frantically for a few minutes and
then "inching" the car forward. Finally, after a three-hour
battle with the stuff, I was free! I sped toward the state line with
the carniverous vines hot on my tail. I have never been back to Georgia.
Only the Devil goes down there...
It doesn't matter if that
actually happened. The important thing is that we are now faced with
a choice. We can hunker down and hope for the best, or we can rise up
and take our country back. Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul says
we must act before it is too late and we find ourselves being herded
into camps. Paul says we must contact every single member of congress
and demand "a repeal of freedom-crushing legislation such as the
Patriot act and the Military Commissions Act and the Defense Authorization
Act which essentially wipes out Habeas Corpus."
They must be forcibly stopped.
We must impeach this unholy gang of war criminals because they have
no intention of leaving office in 2008, or ever, if they are left unchecked.
We must not allow ourselves and our children to be forced to live in
a Kudzu World -- to survive only at the pleasure of the president.
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian
US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for
a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at [email protected]
Click
here to comment
on this article