History of the police state in the US

Read it all at Washington's Blog

The Real Reason for Obama’s Threat to Veto the Indefinite Detention Bill (Hint: It’s Not to Protect Liberty)

The police state started in 2001.

 Specifically, on 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney initiated Continuity of Government Plans that ended America’s constitutional form of government (at least for some undetermined period of time.)

On that same day, a national state of emergency was declared … and that state of emergency has continuously been in effect up to today.

Endless war brought to you by the military-industrial-government complex that President Eisenhower warned the US about as he prepared to leave office. It is now an integral aspect of the US economy, and it is now in the process of privatizing the US military through contracting, centralizing and militarizing the domestic security forces, privatizing the US prison system, and repealing posse comitatus.

Did anyone really think it was going to end differently once it got going?

UPDATE:

Ambiguous but alarming new wording, which is tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and was just passed by the Senate, is reminiscent of the “extraordinary measures” introduced by the Nazis after they took power in 1933.

And the relative lack of reaction so far calls to mind the oddly calm indifference with which most Germans watched the erosion of the rights that had been guaranteed by their own Constitution. As one German writer observed, “With sheepish submissiveness we watched it unfold, as if from a box at the theater.”

The writer was Sebastian Haffner (real name Raimond Pretzel), a young German lawyer worried at what he saw in 1933 in Berlin, but helpless to stop it since, as he put it, the German people “collectively and limply collapsed, yielded and capitulated.”

“The result of this millionfold nervous breakdown,” wrote Haffner at the time, “is the unified nation, ready for anything, that is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.” Not a happy analogy.

Read the rest at AlterNet

Battlefield America: Is Gitmo in Your Future?
by Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity