FATAL VISION: THE DEEPER EVIL
    BEHIND THE DETAINEE BILL
    ("Big Brother" Government
    Is Now Here In The U.S.)
    By Chris Floyd, T.O. UK Reporter
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective
    Tuesday, 3 October 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. and Internationally
    by t r u t h o u t (.org),
    Empire Burlesque (Chris' blog)
    and/or Chris Floyd.
    All rights reserved.]

    (This is a slightly revised version of a piece that first appeared on the Oct. 2nd edition of Truthout.org .)

    There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country -- if the people lose their confidence in themselves -- and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
--- Walt Whitman

    I.

    It was a dark hour indeed (on Friday, September 29th, 2006) when the United States Senate voted to end the constitutional republic and transform the country into a "Leader-State," giving the president and his agents the power to capture, torture and imprison forever anyone -- American citizens included -- whom they arbitrarily decide is an "enemy combatant." This also includes those who merely give "terrorism" some kind of "support," defined so vaguely that many experts say it could encompass legal advice, innocent gifts to charities or even political opposition to US government policy within its draconian strictures.

    All of this is bad enough -- a sickening and cowardly surrender of liberty not seen in a major Western democracy since the Enabling Act passed by the German Reichstag in March 1933. But it is by no means the full extent of our degradation. In reality, the darkness is deeper, and more foul, than most people imagine. For in addition to the dictatorial powers of seizure and torment given by Congress on Thursday to George W. Bush -- powers he had already seized and exercised for five years anyway, even without this fig leaf of sham legality -- there is a far more sinister imperial right that Bush has claimed -- and used -- openly, without any demur or debate from Congress at all: ordering the "extrajudicial killing" of anyone on earth that he and his deputies decide -- arbitrarily, without charges, court hearing, formal evidence, or appeal -- is an "enemy combatant."

    That's right; from the earliest days of the Terror War -- September 17, 2001, to be exact -- Bush has claimed the peremptory power of life and death over the entire world. If he says you're an enemy of America, you are. If he wants to imprison you and torture you, he can. And if he decides you should die, he'll kill you. This is not hyperbole, liberal paranoia, or "conspiracy theory": it's simply a fact, reported by the mainstream media, attested by senior administration figures, recorded in official government documents -- and boasted about by the president himself, in front of Congress and a national television audience.

    And although the Republic-snuffing act just passed by Congress does not directly address Bush's royal prerogative of murder, it nonetheless strengthens it and enshrines it in law. For the measure sets forth clearly that the designation of an "enemy combatant" is left solely to the executive branch; neither Congress nor the courts have any say in the matter. When this new law is coupled with the existing "Executive Orders" authorizing "lethal force" against arbitrarily designated "enemy combatants," it becomes, quite literally, a license to kill -- with the seal of Congressional approval.

    How arbitrary is this process by which all our lives and liberties are now governed? Dave Niewert at Orcinus has unearthed a remarkable admission of its totally capricious nature. In an December 2002 story in the Washington Post, then-Solicitor General Ted Olson described the anarchy at the heart of the process with admirable frankness:

    "[There is no] requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant," Olson argues.

    "'There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this,' Olson said in the interview. 'There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.'"

    In other words, what is safe to do or say today might imperil your freedom or your life tomorrow. You can never know if you are on the right side of the law, because the "law" is merely the whim of the Leader and his minions: their "instincts" determine your guilt or innocence, and these flutterings in the gut can change from day to day. This radical uncertainty is the very essence of despotism -- and it is now, formally and officially, the guiding principle of the United States government.

    And underlying this edifice of tyranny is the prerogative of presidential murder. Perhaps the enormity of this monstrous perversion of law and morality has kept it from being fully comprehended. It sounds unbelievable to most people: a president ordering hits like a Mafia don? But that is our reality, and has been for five years. To overcome what seems to be a widespread cognitive dissonance over this concept, we need only examine the record -- a record, by the way, taken entirely from publicly available sources in the mass media. There's nothing secret or contentious about it, nothing that any ordinary citizen could not know -- if they choose to know it.

(Continued below.)

(Continued from above.)

    II.

    Six days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush signed a "presidential finding" authorizing the CIA to kill those individuals whom he had marked for death as terrorists. This in itself was not an entirely radical innovation; Bill Clinton's White House legal team had drawn up memos asserting the president's right to issue "an order to kill an individual enemy of the United States in self-defense," despite the legal prohibitions against assassination, the Washington Post reported in October 2001. The Clinton team based this ruling on the "inherent powers" of the "Commander in Chief" -- that mythical, ever-elastic construct that Bush has evoked over and over to defend his own unconstitutional usurpations.

    The practice of "targeted killing" was apparently never used by Clinton, however; despite the pro-assassination memos, Clinton followed the traditional presidential practice of bombing the hell out of a bunch of civilians whenever he wanted to lash out at some recalcitrant leader or international outlaw -- as in his bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998, or the two massive strikes he launched against Iraq in 1993 and 1998, or indeed the death and ruin that was deliberately inflicted on civilian infrastructure in Serbia during that nation's collective punishment for the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Here, was following the example set by George H.W. Bush, who killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Panamanian civilians in his illegal arrest of Manuel Noriega in 1988, and Ronald Reagan, who killed Moamar Gadafy's adopted 2-year-old daughter and 100 other civilians in a punitive strike on Libya in 1986.

    Junior Bush, of course, was about to outdo all those blunderbuss strokes with his massive air attacks on Afghanistan, which killed thousands of civilians, and the later orgy of death and destruction in Iraq. But he also wanted the power to kill individuals at will. At first, the assassination program was restricted to direct orders from the president aimed at specific targets, as suggested by the Clinton memos. But soon the arbitrary power of life and death was delegated to agents in the field, after Bush signed orders allowing CIA assassins to kill targets without seeking presidential approval for each attack, the Washington Post reported in December 2002. Nor was it necessary any longer for the president to approve each new name added to the target list; the "security organs" could designate "enemy combatants" and kill them as they saw fit. However, Bush was always keen to get the details about the agency's wetwork, administration officials assured the Post.

    The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen, along with several foreign nationals, by a CIA drone missile in Yemen on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred on December 4, 2005, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al-Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner's son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported.

    However, there is simply no way of knowing at this point how many people have been killed by American agents operating outside all judicial process. Most of the assassinations are carried out in secret: quietly, professionally. As a Pentagon document uncovered by the New Yorker in December 2002 revealed, the death squads must be "small and agile," and "able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to ... enter countries surreptitiously."

    What's more, there are strong indications that the Bush administration has outsourced some of the contracts to outside operators. In the original Post story about the assassinations -- in those first heady weeks after 9/11, when administration officials were much more open about "going to the dark side," as Cheney boasted on national television -- Bush insiders told the paper that "it is also possible that the instrument of targeted killings will be foreign agents, the CIA's term for nonemployees who act on its behalf.

    Here we find a deadly echo of the "rendition" program that has sent so many captives to torture pits in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere -- including many whose innocence has been officially established, such as the Canadian businessman Maher Arar, German national Khalid El-Masri, UK native Mozzam Begg and many others. They had been subjected to imprisonment and torture despite their innocence, because of intelligence "mistakes." How many have fallen victim to Bush's hit squads on similar shaky grounds?

    So here we are. Congress has just entrenched the principle of Bush's "unitary executive" dictatorship into law; and it is this principle that undergirds the assassination program. As I wrote in December, it's hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an "enemy." It's hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is exactly what the great and good in America have done.

    But this should come as no surprise. They have known about it all along, and have not only countenanced Bush's death squad, but even celebrated it. I'll end with one more passage from that December article, which sadly is even more apt for our degraded reality today. It was a depiction of the one of the most revolting scenes in recent American history: Bush's state of the Union address in January 2003, delivered live to the nation during the final warmongering frenzy before the rape of Iraq:

    Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists" had been arrested worldwide -- "and many others have met a different fate." His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: "Let's put it this way. They are no longer a problem."

    In other words, the suspects -- and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects -- had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything to end his torment, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds -- or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world.

    Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called "the meaning of American justice." And the assembled legislators ... applauded. Oh, how they applauded! They roared with glee at the leering little man's bloodthirsty, B-movie machismo. They shared his sneering contempt for law -- our only shield, however imperfect, against the blind, brute, ignorant, ape-like force of raw power. Not a single voice among them was raised in protest against this tyrannical machtpolitik: not that night, not the next day, not ever.

    And now, in September 2006, we know they will never raise that protest. Oh, a few Democrats stood up at the last minute on Thursday to posture nobly about the dangers of the detainee bill -- but only when they knew that it was certain to pass, when they had already given up their one weapon against it, the filibuster, in exchange for permission from their Republican masters to offer amendments that they also knew would fail. Had they been offering such speeches since October 2001, when the lineaments of Bush's presidential tyranny were already clear -- or at any other point during the systematic dismantling of America's liberties over the past five years -- these fine words might have had some effect.

    Now the killing will go on. The tyranny that has entered upon the country will grow stronger, more brazen; the darkness will deepen. Whitman, thou should'st be living at this hour; America has need of thee. (Subtitle and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)

    Chris Floyd is an American journalist residing in the UK. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times, and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium , and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog.

  ________

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.

Also see below:
Jim Lobe | "Decent Respect" Might Help Image Woes Abroad

    Go to Original.

    PATRIOTISM AND THE
    FOURTH OF JULY
    (True Patriotism Versus
    False Nationalism)
    By Howard Zinn
    AlterNet.org
    Tuesday, 4 July 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. and Internationally
    by AlterNet(.org)
    and/or Howard Zinn.
    All rights reserved.]

    The Declaration of Independence gives us the true meaning of a patriot, someone who supports a country's ideals, not necessarily its government.

    In celebration of the Fourth of July there will be many speeches about the young people who "died for their country." But those who gave their lives did not, as they were led to believe, die for their country; they died for their government. The distinction between country and government is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, which will be referred to again and again on July 4, but without attention to its meaning.

    The Declaration of Independence is the fundamental document of democracy. It says governments are artificial creations, established by the people, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," and charged by the people to ensure the equal right of all to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Furthermore, as the Declaration says, "whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." It is the country that is primary---the people, the ideals of the sanctity of human life and the promotion of liberty.

    When a government recklessly expends the lives of its young for crass motives of profit and power, while claiming that its motives are pure and moral, ("Operation Just Cause" was the invasion of Panama and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in the present instance), it is violating its promise to the country. War is almost always a breaking of that promise. It does not enable the pursuit of happiness but brings despair and grief.

    Mark Twain, having been called a "traitor" for criticizing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called "monarchical patriotism." He said: "The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: 'The King can do no wrong.' We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: 'Our country, right or wrong!' We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had -- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism."

    If patriotism in the best sense (not in the monarchical sense) is loyalty to the principles of democracy, then who was the true patriot? Theodore Roosevelt, who applauded a massacre by American soldiers of 600 Filipino men, women and children on a remote Philippine island, or Mark Twain, who denounced it? Today, U.S. soldiers who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are not dying for their country; they are dying for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They are dying for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the president. They are dying to cover up the theft of the nation's wealth to pay for the machines of death. As of July 4, 2006, more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq, more than 8,500 maimed or injured. With the war in Iraq long declared a "Mission Accomplished," shall we revel in American military power and insist that the American empire will be beneficent?

    Our own history is enough to make one wary. Empire begins with what was called, in our high school history classes, "westward expansion,"a euphemism for the annihilation or expulsion of the Indian tribes inhabiting the continent, in the name of "progress" and "civilization." It continues with the expansion of American power into the Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century, then into the Philippines, and then repeated Marine invasions of Central America and long military occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. After World War II, Henry Luce, owner of Time, LIFE, and Fortune, spoke of "the American Century," in which this country would organize the world "as we see fit." Indeed, the expansion of American power continued, too often supporting military dictatorships in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, because they were friendly to American corporations and the American government. The record does not justify confidence in Bush's boast that the United States will bring democracy to Iraq.

    Should Americans welcome the expansion of the nation's power, with the anger this has generated among so many people in the world? Should we welcome the huge growth of the military budget at the expense of health, education, the needs of children, one fifth of whom grow up in poverty? Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights. I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for her or his country might act on behalf of a different vision. Should we not begin to redefine patriotism? We need to expand it beyond that narrow nationalism that has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade---some call it "globalization"---should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity? Should we not begin to consider all children, everywhere, as our own? In that case, war, which in our time is always an assault on children, would be unacceptable as a solution to the problems of the world. Human ingenuity would have to search for other ways. [(Subtitle and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)]

    Howard Zinn is a veteran of World War II and author of the bestselling book, A People's History of the United States. The preceding essay is an excerpt from Zinn's forthcoming book, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.

  ________

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.

    Go to Original.

    "DECENT RESPECT" MIGHT
    HELP IMAGE WOES ABROAD
    (International Multilateralism
    Versus National Unilateralism)
    By Jim Lobe
    Inter Press Service
    (IPSNews.net)
    Tuesday, 4 July 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. & Internationally
    by Inter Press Service
    (IPSNews.net),
    and/or Jim Lobe.
    All rights reserved.]

    Washington -- It was in 1776 that a group of British colonists living along the Atlantic seaboard of North America felt compelled to offer a public justification for their "Declaration of Independence" from their mother country out of "a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind".

    That justification, a bill of particulars against King George II for a host of offences, including violations of what would come to be called human rights, was designed to rally British and European public opinion behind the colonists' cause.

    As the nation marks that occasion exactly 230 years ago Tuesday, a series of surveys from around the world over the past three years makes clear that contemporary "Mankind" believes that the United States no longer accords its opinions the "decent respect" that those who founded the country believe was its due.

    Those surveys suggest that the image of the U.S. as a benign hegemon that takes account of the interests and opinions of the peoples of other nations -- consciously cultivated by Washington for more than a century -- has been effectively shattered by the unilateralism of the administration of President George W. Bush and particularly its invasion of Iraq.

    "One of the reasons that people around the world are so upset with the U.S. is the perception that in the post-World War II era, the U.S. was the champion and leader of an international order based on international law and mutual constraints, when it could have created a form of great-power domination," said Steven Kull, director of the University of Marylands Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).

    "As the leader and promoter of such a system, the U.S. was expected to set the example for all the rest, but Washington is now perceived as violating the same rules it did so much to establish," according to Kull, who cited Bush's decisions to ignore the United Nations in going to war and the Geneva Conventions in treating detainees in its "global war on terror" as key moves that both defied and outraged public opinion abroad.

    Even after 16 months of vigorous efforts by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to reassure U.S. allies and potential rivals, such as Russia and China, that Washington cares about their views and is committed to multilateralism, public opinion abroad has remained stubbornly sceptical, according to former Foreign Affairs editor, Fareed Zakaria.

    Rice, he wrote in a Newsweek column coincidentally entitled "Why We Don't Get No Respect", has "engineered a broad shift in American diplomacy over the last year, moving policy toward greater multilateralism, cooperation, and common sense on Iran, North Korea and Iraq, and several other issues."

    "And yet it hasn't produced a change in attitudes towards the United States," he went on, citing surveys by the Pew Global Attitudes Project and the Financial Times (FT) released just last month.

    The FT poll found that the U.S. under Bush is considered by European public opinion to be more dangerous than either North Korea or Iran.

    The Pew survey of 14 foreign countries found that strong pluralities or majorities in all but two nations said that the Iraq war had made the world "more dangerous" and that the U.S. presence in Iraq was "more dangerous" to world peace than the alleged nuclear-arms ambitions of North Korea and Iran.

    These findings were broadly consistent with previous surveys, including a Globescan-PIPA poll of 35 countries released in February, and a Pew poll released in June 2005 that found a sharp drop in the belief by respondents in Europe and the Islamic world that Washington took into account the interests of their countries in making its foreign policy decisions compared to the period before the Iraq war.

    In yet another poll Globescan-PIPA poll released in January 2005, large pluralities and majorities of respondents in 18 of 21 countries said they believed Bush's re-election to office would have a negative impact on global peace and security.

    What was particularly surprising about the latest Pew poll was the degree to which Washington's image, particularly in Europe and the Middle East, had slipped since the year before, when Rice's campaign to put diplomacy and consultation first had just gotten underway.

    In May 2005, Pew had found a rebound in foreign attitudes toward the U.S. compared to its findings in surveys conducted in the year following the Iraq war when foreign views of Washington, and particularly Bush, plunged to the lowest level ever recorded. Most analysts had expected continued, if modest, improvement between 2005 and 2006.

    In fact, however, U.S. favourability ratings, as well as support for Washington's "global war on terror", resumed their post-Iraq war decline in both Western Europe and the Islamic world, with particularly steep declines found in Spain, Russia, Indonesia, Jordan, and Turkey.

    Zakaria blamed this on a number of factors, including a lag between the general public, particularly in Europe, and governments which, he insisted, have been very appreciative of Rice's -- and Bush's -- efforts.

    Other important factors, he noted, included the continuing presence in the administration of arch-hawks, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who may be able to constrain Rice's flexibility, especially on Iran and North Korea.

    Moreoever, according to Zakaria, U.N. Amb. John Bolton's confrontational style has been particularly destructive and has contributed to the perception that the administration remains deeply divided and that its new emphasis on diplomacy and multilateralism has been dictated more by necessity than conviction. "In five minutes of posturing in front of a microphone, Bolton undoes five months of careful work by his boss, the secretary of State," he wrote.

    In fact, however, the problem lies much deeper---in the belief that the U.S., especially under Bush, still does not accord a decent respect to the views and opinions of other nations, whether it involves the invasion of Iraq and the refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions in the "war on terror" -- for which Bush remains unapologetic -- or global warming, the International Criminal Court, or the administration's doctrine of pre-emption.

    "An America that does not understand -- and makes little effort to understand -- why it has become so unpopular abroad is almost certain to find itself both disliked and ineffective in many parts of the world," noted political commentator David Rieff in a reflection on the latest Pew poll and U.S. "exceptionalism" that appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this weekend. [(Subtitle and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)]

  ________

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.

    ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, READ "THE
    DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
    FOR IMPEACHMENT" OF BUSH & CO.
    By David Swanson
    AfterDowningStreet.org
    Sunday, 02 July 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. and Internationally
    by AfterDowningStreet(.org)
    and/or David Swanson.
    All rights reserved.]

    Veterans for Peace has drafted a Declaration of Impeachment using nothing but excerpts from the Declaration of Independence (plus a few words in parentheses). It reads as follows, and should be read at picnics and protests on the Fourth of July:

    "... (W)henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends ['... that all (people) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these (Rights) are Life, LIBERTY and the pursuit of Happiness..., (and that) Governments are instituted among (the People), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ...'], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their [Liberty,] Safety and Happiness ...

    "... (A)ll experience hath shewn, that (hu)mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations ... design(s) to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their DUTY, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security ...

    "The history of the present King (George)... is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States [and the world]. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

• ["He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for public good (and Liberty). He has forbidden his (more independent Lawmakers) to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to (obey) them (or to give his Assent that he must obey them) ...]

• "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance ...

• "He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

• ["He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of (false and fraudulent) Legislation: For quartering large bodies of armed troops (and domestic mercenaries) among us: For protecting them... from punishment for any Murders which they... commit on the Inhabitants of these States ...]

• "(He has) ... deprive(ed) us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury ... transport(ed) us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences ... [taking away (recognition and observance of) our Charters (Treaties and International Laws), abolishing (or refusing to obey countless numbers of) our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Form(s) of our Government(s) ...]

• "He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us ...

• "He is at this time transporting large Armies ... to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

• "He has constrained our fellow Citizens ... to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren [abroad], or to fall themselves by their Hands ... [and excited (and provoked) domestic insurrections amongst us ...]

   

    "[In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress (of Grievances under the First Amendment of the Constitution, and Article Three of the Bill of Rights, of these United States) in the most humble terms. Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury(ies).] A (President), whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. [Nor have We been wanting in attention to (the Bush administration). We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their ("Republican"/"Conservative") legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our (Freedom and Liberty) here (in this country). We have appealed to ... justice ... and we have (sought to influence) them by the ties of (Liberty and Freedom) to disavow these usurpations (of Freedom and Liberty), which would inevitably (destroy) our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguin(u)ity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of (hu)mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.]

    "WE, THEREFORE, [the (People) of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA] ... do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People [of these United States], solemnly publish and declare, That these ... FREE AND INDEPENDENT (PEOPLE) ... are Absolved from all Allegiance to the (Bush administration), and that all political connection between them and (this administration), is and ought to be totally dissolved ... AND for the support of this Declaration, [with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,] we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." [Emphasis, words in brackets ("[ ]"), mostly from the Declaration of Independence itself, which David Swanson left out (incorrectly in my opinion), and/or editing of the title, added by Wolf Britain.]

    David Swanson is creator of MeetWithCindy(Sheehan).org, co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, a writer and activist, and the Washington Director of Democrats.com. He is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and serves on the Executive Council of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, Media Coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as Communications Coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson obtained a Master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia in 1997. His website is DavidSwanson.org.

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