“8 unwanted terrorists” obliterated U.S. Bill of Rights, democracy ─ David Hoffman

Can (will) ordinary Americans fix what high officials, corporate media icons have broken?

Excerpting, editing, minor comment by
Carolyn Bennett

T

We the People
One Nation Indivisible
Are we?

oday at Pravda Ru David Hoffman lists and lays charges against “eight terrorists” for killing and or eroding freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights: First Amendment’s ‘freedom of speech’ (erased by University of Colorado and government spy programs); First Amendment’s ‘freedom of press’ (erased by government spying); Fourth Amendment’s freedom from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures (nullified by U.S. legal system’s failure to prosecute government officials’ high crimes against people domestic and foreign);  Fifth Amendment’s freedom from self-incrimination (erased by a new doctrine of ‘guilty until proven innocent ─ provided a person is first extra-judicially executed’); Eighth Amendment’s freedom from ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ (killed by the use of torture and extrajudicial executions); and Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ clauses prohibiting government’s taking of life, liberty, or property without ‘due process of law’ (murdered by the existence in the United States of all reasons stated above) ─ David R. Hoffman─

 

From his op-ed “America’s eight most unwanted terrorists”, these are edited highlights.

Unwanted TERRORISTs Number Eight: Corporate-Controlled Media

These media’s greatest acts of terrorism occurred shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001. 

…Airwaves became filled with ‘talking heads’ screeching how these attacks ‘changed the rules.’ Suddenly governmental intrusions into people’s private lives, unthinkable before 9/11, were myopically accepted by the corporate-controlled media as part of the ‘changed rules,’ and (former president George W.) Bush’s lies about the necessity to invade Iraq were unquestioningly regurgitated as truth.

Additionally, America's corporate-controlled media make prominent use of the ‘what came first, the chicken or the egg’ quandary.  When critics condemn them for feeding Americans a steady diet of garbage, these media respond that they are only ‘giving the people want they want.’

This garbage has been largely responsible for the ‘dumbing down of America and for the glorification of ignorance, irresponsibility, selfishness, and stupidity that may have even helped launch the ‘patron saint’ of ignorance, George W. Bush, into the White House.  

Unwanted TERRORISTs Number Seven: University of Colorado and Colorado ‘Legal’ System

“…As underscored by current government spying, freedoms have not been lost only through violence ─ but also through stealth.  … The University of Colorado (in the ‘war on terror’ era) continued (the 1960s FBI COINTELPRO) tradition of using stealth when it obliterated academic freedom throughout the United States by firing Ward Churchill, a tenured professor, for writing a controversial essay about the 9/11 attacks.

“…Because of actions by UC, the Colorado ‘legal’ system, and the fear of economic retaliation they have engendered, academics throughout the United States are reluctant to publish any writings, or conduct any studies, that could remotely be construed as ‘controversial.’”

Unwanted TERRORISTs Number Six: Jose Rodriguez and CIA

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is “One of the biggest ─ if not the biggest ─ terrorist organizations in the world. CIA’s hands drip with the blood from shattered democracies, torture, political assassinations, and extrajudicial executions.”

Dark sites

The CIA’s legacy, as that of the FBI, “is so sordid that it once contracted with members of organized crime to assassinate (Cuban President) Fidel Castro.”

 

Despite this record, “the CIA’s illegal and unconstitutional tactics, as of the FBI’s, have been met with the George W. Bush and Obama administrations approving ‘nod and wink’. For example ─

Former CIA Director Jose Rodriguez’s ‘National Clandestine Service’ illegally destroyed videotapes depicting CIA tortures. 

And while the offense, if committed by an ordinary person, would have prompted charges of ‘obstruction of justice’ and ‘evidence-tampering’, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute Rodriguez; and in ‘gratitude,’ Rodriguez sought to profit from the blood upon his hands in writing a book in which he denounces the Obama administration for condemning ‘waterboarding’ as torture.

Detention without charge
Without trial
Without end
With Torture

Unwanted TERRORISTs Number Five:  John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Margolis

‘Torture memos’ authored and signed Yoo and Bybee “are responsible for providing the ‘green light’ that made torture an American institution. 

“… America’s corrupt legal system, which rarely sees a government atrocity it cannot rationalize, proclaimed that persons tortured by the United States government ─ including American citizens ─ have absolutely no legal recourse against their torturers.”  This means ─

…thugs and sadists operating with the blessing of the American government can now kidnap, detain, and torture people at will, without fear of criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits, even when they mistakenly seize and/or torture an innocent person, a scenario that tragically happened to a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri. 

John Yoo is now teaching law ─ “the very subject for which he has demonstrated nothing but contempt” ─ at the prestigious University of California-Berkeley. The man who sanctioned human rights abuses, crimes against human beings that one lawyer in the U.S. Attorney General’s office dismissed as Yoo’s ‘poor judgment’, Jay Bybee, is now “a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.”

U.S. Executive Branch

Unwanted TERRORISTs Number Four: U.S. President Barack Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

Holder has gone to extraordinary lengths to both defend and prevent prosecution of those who advocated, engaged in, or covered up torture. 

Despite all his lofty talk about hope’ and ‘change,’ if history is an honest judge then  ─

Obama will undoubtedly be remembered as the ultimate example of how American democracy is impotent when it comes to electing just and moral leaders or producing meaningful political change.

In several ways President Obama “has abused his power more than former President George W. Bush. 

He has set the precedent that gives the American government the power to extra judicially execute its own citizens, and

…has even used a drone to intentionally target and kill a sixteen-year-old boy. 

He has also rabidly reauthorized the so-called ‘Patriot Act’ so he could cite it as an excuse for NSA and FBI spying and other abuses of power. 

…once news of this spying became public, according to Reuters, President Obama was planning an investigation into who leaked the documents exposing this spying and other abuses of power.

Unwanted TERRORISTs Number Three:  George W. Bush, et al  (a “ruthless cabal of terrorists” against whom no meaningful investigations or charges have been conducted or laid)

Former U.S. President George W. Bush “first planted the seeds of government-sponsored terrorism in the United States.”  After the 9/11 attacks, … Bush claimed that foreign terrorists hated America because they were jealous of its ‘freedoms’  yet it was Bush and his minions, not foreign terrorists, who so ruthlessly decimated these freedoms (all having entered force and taken root in the United States of America thanks to George W. Bush and his cabal of terrorists):

U.S. Legislative Branch

…Illegal spying upon American citizens;

…detentions without charge or trial; denial of legal due process;

…extraordinary rendition;

…secret prisons; torture;

…murder;

…war crimes;

…abuse of material witness statutes;

…Guantanamo Bay;

…the ‘Patriot Act’;

…intimidation of officials who exposed his lies;

…corrupt awarding of no-bid military and ‘rebuilding’ contracts to political cronies;

…use of America’s military resources for personal, financial, and political gain;

…destruction of the Bill of Rights;

…outrageous powers given to agencies like the FBI and CIA, despite their histories of abusing such powers; and

…corruption and politicalization of the judicial branch of government

Unwanted TERRORISTs Number Two:  America’s ‘Legal’ System

Without the servile compliance of America’s judicial branch of government, the terrorist activities of the Bush and Obama administrations might not have been possible.  The judiciary branch’s “terrorism resides in the fact that since the start of the new millennium ─

…it has abdicated its constitutional responsibility as a ‘check-and-balance’ against the legislative and executive branches of government and has become nothing more than a rubberstamp for governmental abuses, injustices, corruption, and atrocities.

“…What is particularly tragic about the legal system’s obsequiousness (subservience, kowtowing or yielding of its responsibilities) is that standing up to Bush’s and Obama’s crimes could have had a positive effect ─

… in that any refusal by these men to obey judicial decrees would have exposed the extent of their tyranny and hypocrisy. 

Instead, America’s corrupt legal system has not only regressed to the point of endorsing pre-Revolutionary war legal practices, it has even turned the presidency into a monarchy.

Unwanted TERRORISTs Number One:  The United States Supreme Court. 

U.S. Judicial Branch

The United States Supreme Court ─ though a powerful part of America’s corrupt legal system ─ deserves a dishonorable mention all its own. 

Comprised primarily of politicized, unethical, and overtly biased ‘justices,’ this court has been responsible for much of the legal system’s terrorism.

Not only in its refusal to hear the Ward Churchill appeal and its sanctioning warrantless collection of DNA samples, the Supreme Court ─ from the coup of 2000 to the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 2010 ruling ─ has gone far beyond mere destruction of the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights and destroyed democracy. 

“Despite

the existence of these terrorists, America still is (Hoffman says with a sting) ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’  The problem is ─ 

…the ‘free’ are government-sponsored terrorists; and

…the ‘brave’ are those vilified and victimized, denied legal redress, prosecuted, and or imprisoned for exposing the government-sponsored terrorists.

For a long time the United States of America (land that I love) has been in a state of BREAKDOWN and regression. I have compiled at least three books dealing with indicators of this breakdown. Hoffman has fixed the blame, as he always does, with an accuracy that is almost too painful to bear.

A

re we Americans prepared for no more than fixing of the blame? Are we ready to fix the problem? Or are we prepared only to continue in the current character of blissful ignorance, arrogance, virtual action, viz., inaction in human relations terms, and inane defensiveness?

Sources and notes

“America’s eight most unwanted terrorists” (David R. Hoffman, Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru)

June 11, 2013, http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/11-06-2013/124806-america_eight_unwanted_terrorists-0/

_________________________________________________

Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

_________________________________________________