The Senate caved on Bush’s warrantless wiretapping requests and approved a bill extending intelligence agencies’ ability to eavesdrop on American citizens. The terrorists have stripped us of habeus corpus and are successfully eroding our civil liberties. How then are we being protected from terrorism? It appears they have already won.
Eliot Cohen, author of The Last Days of Democracy is interviewed over at TruthDig. Interviewer James Harris asks
For the most part, you’re saying that our government in the United States is coming to an end. And that we are headed toward a dictatorship, toward authoritarian rule. The idea that we will one day be like Nazi Germany was … is hard for a lot of Americans to swallow. Why do you believe it to be true?
Elliot Cohen: We are not saying things off the top of our heads; we do have the operations and secret prison camps in Europe, we torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. This regarding the Geneva Conventions and the NSA spying programs warrantlessly. Bush is issuing signing statements, which is tantamount to nullifying congressional lawmaking powers. Cancellation of habeas corpus, enabling individuals as enemy combatants just by virtue of whether the president deems that hostile to U.S. interests. I mean this goes on and on for individual facts as to why one might say that America is becoming a dictatorship.
Cohen goes on to blame corporate owned, mainstream media for much of what is happening to our country. He is right, I believe. The lack of information from the MSM when my son was in Iraq led me to independent journalists and bloggers and many foreign information services. The contrast is startling. America is being hijacked.
Regarding net neutrality, we are at risk of losing this medium as well –
The Net’s not going to be seen as a telecommunications system but rather it’s going to be conceived as an information system just like CNN or Fox cable. And what that does is open up the door effectively for various modes of control, and one of the ways in which these large corporations like Comcast are trying to control the Internet right now is through setting up these tollbooths where they are instituting, or want to institute—and there’s a lot of powerful lobbies in Congress to try to do this—they are trying to set up these tollbooths which will regulate how much, what kind of bandwidth different Internet sites can have, depending upon how much they are wiling to pay. So we have a pay-for-play system where the bandwidth will determine how quickly you connect then, and whether or not you end up spinning out in cyberspace versus reaching lots of people. And obviously those corporations with the deepest pockets are going to be able to have the best connectivity. What that means is money is going to control truth.
What will it take to get the majority of Americans that oppose the Bush administration to do more than stand with their hands on their hips? Wake up America.
