Tag Archives: Continuity of Government

America, Meet Your New Dictator-in-Chief: The President’s Secret, Unchecked Powers

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”— David C. Unger, The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs

America, meet your new dictator-in-chief.

As the New York Times reports, “Newly disclosed documents have shed a crack of light on secret executive branch plans for apocalyptic scenarios—like the aftermath of a nuclear attack—when the president may activate wartime powers for national security emergencies.”

The problem, of course, is that we have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.

Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

The seeds of this present madness were sown almost two decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.”

Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20) provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president.

The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

Essentially, the president would become a dictator for life.

It has happened already.

As we have witnessed in recent years, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.

Yet according to documents recently obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.

It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security.

The war on COVID-19, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration: all of these programs started out as responses to pressing national concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been planning and preparing for such crises for years now, quietly assembling a wish list of presidential lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.

Indeed, the Trump Administration even asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deems it necessary during the COVID-19 crisis and “other” emergencies. The Department of Justice (DOJ) went so far as to quietly trot out and test a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution.

We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

These are powers the police state would desperately like to make permanent.

In such a climate, the American president becomes dictator with permanent powers: imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional.

Bear in mind that the powers the government officially asked Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has already unilaterally claimed for itself.

Unofficially, the police state with the president at its helm has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.

The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.

As law professor William P. Marshall explains, “every extraordinary use of power by one President expands the availability of executive branch power for use by future Presidents.”

Moreover, it doesn’t even matter whether other presidents have chosen not to take advantage of any particular power, because “it is a President’s action in using power, rather than forsaking its use, that has the precedential significance.”

In other words, each successive president continues to add to his office’s list of extraordinary orders and directives, expanding the reach and power of the presidency and granting him- or herself near dictatorial powers.

All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama and George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were inherited by Donald Trump and passed along to Joe Biden.

These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

These are the powers that continue to be passed along to each successive heir to the Oval Office, the Constitution be damned.

This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.

From Clinton to Bush, Obama to Trump, and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same abuses over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but “we the people” are paying the price for it now.

We are paying the price every day that we allow the government to continue to wage its war on the American People, a war that is being fought on many fronts: with bullets and tasers, with surveillance cameras and license readers, with intimidation and propaganda, with court rulings and legislation, with the collusion of every bureaucrat who dances to the tune of corporate handouts while on the government’s payroll, and most effectively of all, with the complicity of the American people, who continue to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by their politics, distracted by their pastimes, and acclimated to a world in which government corruption is the norm.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history about how easy it is for freedom to fall and tyranny to rise, and it often begins with one small, seemingly inconsequential willingness on the part of the people to compromise their principles and undermine the rule of law in exchange for a dubious assurance of safety, prosperity and a life without care.

Unfortunately, the process of unseating a dictator and limiting the powers of the presidency is far from simple but at a minimum, it must start with “we the people.”

For starters, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we must recalibrate the balance of power.

Start locally—in your own communities, in your schools, at your city council meetings, in newspaper editorials, at protests—by pushing back against laws that are unjust, police departments that overreach, politicians that don’t listen to their constituents, and a system of government that grows more tyrannical by the day.

What we desperately need is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—answer to and are accountable to “we the people.”

This will mean that Americans will have to stop letting their personal politics and party allegiances blind them to government misconduct and power grabs.

It will mean holding all three branches of government accountable to the Constitution (i.e., vote them out of office if they abuse their powers).

And it will mean calling on Congress to put an end to the use of presidential executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements as a means of getting around Congress and the courts.

In other words, we’ve got to start making both the president and the police state play by the rules of the Constitution.

Everything points to Thierry Meyssan being right today

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By challenging the official version of the 9/11 attacks, Thierry Meyssan opened a worldwide debate. But the essence of his book on the subject was a political science study predicting the evolution of the United States after these crimes. The problem is not how the attacks were committed, but why the US reacted that day by violating its own Constitution, why it implemented in the following days very deep reforms of its institutions that changed its nature. Thierry Meyssan had predicted the transformation of the American Empire that we are seeing with the planning of the fall of Kabul. Everything he predicted has been confirmed over the last twenty years.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

At the end of 2001, I published a series of articles on the attacks of September 11, 2001, followed by a book in March 2002 [1]. The book was translated into 18 languages and opened a worldwide debate questioning the veracity of the official US narrative. However, the international press refused to discuss my arguments and launched a campaign accusing me of “amateurism” [2], “conspiracy theory” [3], and “denial” [4].

Above all, the US authorities and their supporters reduced my work to the first few pages of my book: the challenge to the official version of the attacks. But it is a work of political science aimed at denouncing what these false-flag attacks would make possible: the surveillance of Western populations and the endless war in the wider Middle East. In this article, I will therefore review what has been learned about these attacks over the past 20 years, but more importantly, I will check whether my predictions from 2002 were correct or not.

THE BLACK HOLE OF 9/11

If we are asked what happened on 9/11, we will all visualise the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. We have forgotten many other things, such as the insider trading in the shares of the affected airlines, the fire in the Old Eisenhower Building, or the collapse of a third tower in the World Trade Center.

What is most astonishing is that almost no one remembers that at 10am, Richard Clarke triggered the ’Continuity of Government Plan’ [5]. At that very moment, President Bush and Congress were suspended from office and placed under military protection. President Bush was taken to an air base in Nebraska where the CEOs of the upper floors of the Twin Towers had been since the previous evening [6]; and Congress to the Greenbrier megabunker. Power fell into the hands of the “Continuity Government”. It was in the Raven Rock Mountain megabunker (’Site R’) [7]. Power was not returned to the civilians until the end of the day.

Who exactly were the members of this ’Continuity Government’ and what did they do during the time they were in power? We still don’t know. The members of Congress who asked the question were not allowed to hold a session of their assembly on the subject.

Please understand that until we have clarification, the 9/11 controversy will continue. The procedure implemented on September 11 was designed by President Eisenhower at a time when nuclear war was feared. If he, the Speakers and a majority of Congress were killed, there would be no constitutional powers. The military would logically have to assume the continuity of government. But this was obviously not the case on that day. Not one elected official was dead. The transfer of power was therefore unconstitutional. It was strictly speaking a coup d’état.

THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11

In my book and afterwards, I hypothesised about what really happened on that day. But this is irrelevant to my point. The people who perpetrated this crime wanted to create a shock comparable to Pearl Harbor, as the members of the Project for a New American Century wrote earlier, so that they could change the way the United States lives and functions. So they told us a tall tale that we swallowed without flinching. But :

• To this day, there is no evidence of the 19 designated hijackers on board the hijacked planes. They were not on the lists of passengers on board the planes released by the airlines on the same day. The videos of the hijackers at the airport were not taken in New York, but at other airports where they were transiting.

• To date, there is no evidence that the 35 telephone communications between passengers on the hijacked flights and the ground existed [8]. This applies both to the conversation attributed to the brave passenger who allegedly attacked the hijackers on UA 93, and to the conversation testified to by US Solicitor General Theodore Olson with his wife on AA 77. In contrast, at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (accused of being the 20th hijacker who would not have boarded the plane), the FBI testified that none of the planes had phones in the armrests, that passengers should have used mobile phones, that cell phones at the time could not work at altitudes above 5,000 feet, and that the records provided by the phone companies did not show any of the communications mentioned – including that of Attorney General Olson.

• To date, there is no physical explanation for the collapse of three of the World Trade Center towers onto their own footprints (i.e. vertically). The Twin Towers were hit by two planes, but were not shaken. However, their fuel would have run down the vertical beams and melted them. A third tower was destabilised by the fall of the first two to its side. It too would have collapsed, not laterally, but vertically. It should be noted that no explanation was given for the lateral explosions heard by the firemen and widely filmed, nor for the vertical beams that were severed and not melted; two pieces of evidence attesting not to an accidental but to a controlled demolition. It should also be noted that no collapse of skyscrapers has ever been observed, either before or after 9/11, following a large-scale fire… and that no one has learned the lessons of this attack and therefore changed the way such buildings are constructed to prevent such a catastrophe. Finally, the photographs taken by firefighters of “pools” of molten steel and those taken by FEMA (the disaster management agency) of the melting rocks in which the foundations were built are inexplicable according to the official version.

• To date, there is no evidence that an airliner hit the Pentagon. Already the next day, the fire brigade had given a press conference at the Pentagon during which they had attested that they had not found anything suggestive of a plane. The authorities, who had issued a vengeful statement against my book, announced that they had collected many parts of the plane and reconstructed it in a hangar. Then they stopped communicating on this subject. Moreover, the families of the passengers of the plane in question, after having been scandalised by my words, changed their minds when they were given back funeral urns, claiming to have identified the bodies of their relatives thanks to their fingerprints (which would have been totally destroyed during fires at those temperatures). Some refused to sign the confidentiality agreement offered to them in exchange for large compensation payments.

WIDESPREAD SURVEILLANCE OF WESTERN POPULATIONS

In the days following the attacks, the Bush Administration had Congress vote on an anti-terrorist code, known as the USA Patriot Act. This is a very large piece of legislation that had been drafted over the previous two years by the Federalist Society (of which Solicitor General Theodor Olson and Attorney General John Ashcroft were members). It suspends the Bill of Rights in cases of terrorism.

At the time of the formation of the United States, there were two opposing groups. The first, around Alexander Hamilton, drafted the Constitution to set up a system comparable to the British monarchy, but with governors instead of nobles. The second, around Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, only accepted the Constitution after it had been amended to prevent the use of Reason of State. These 10 amendments are called the Bill of Rights. Their suspension challenges the balance on which the United States was founded. It gives power to the first group, the descendants of the ’Pilgrim Fathers’, the Puritans exiled from England. President Bush is a direct descendant of one of the 41 signatories of the “Mayfower Pact” (1620).

In order to implement the USA Patriot Act, a new department was created, the Homeland Security Department, which brings together various existing agencies. It has a political police force capable of spying on any citizen. According to the Washington Post, which revealed this in 2011, it has hired 835,000 civil servants, 112,000 of whom are secretly employed [9], making the United States the most Orwellian country on the planet. The way this department works was revealed in 2013 by Edward Snowden. Snowden not only provided information about the NSA’s foreign eavesdropping system, but also about domestic mass surveillance in the US. He now lives as a political refugee in Russia.

This system, although less documented, is gradually spreading to all Western states, through the ’Five Eyes’ [10] and Nato.

THE “ENDLESS WAR”: FROM 9/11 TO THE FALL OF KABUL

A month and a half after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Office of Force Transformation, which he entrusted to Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. The idea was to change the very function of the Armed Forces. The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine [11] is a reform as important as the creation of the Pentagon after the 1929 crisis. This time, it is about adapting to financial capitalism. From now on, the United States will no longer try to win wars, but on the contrary to make them last as long as possible; this is what President Bush’s expression “endless war” means. Their aim will be to destroy local state structures so that natural wealth can be exploited without having to endure political control; as Colonel Ralph Peters summed it up: “Stability is America’s enemy” [12].

This is exactly what has just happened in Afghanistan. The war started there just after 9/11. It was only supposed to last a few weeks, but it never stopped. The Taliban victory that we have just witnessed was organised by the United States itself in order to make the conflict last even longer. That is why President Biden has just said that the US did not go into Afghanistan to build a state, as it did in Germany and Japan after the Second World War. Joe Biden had, during his meeting in Geneva with Vladimir Putin, rejected the endless war. However, he has just relaunched it, aligning himself with the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine like Barack Obama.

None of the conflicts that began after 9/11 have ended. On the contrary, instability has taken hold in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. One can of course call these conflicts “civil wars” and accuse their leaders of being “dictators”, or explain nothing at all, but the fact remains that they were stable before Western intervention and that Gaddafi’s Libya and Aoun’s Lebanon were US allies when their misfortunes began.

Vice President Cheney had set up a secret group in the White House to design the development of the National Energy Policy. He was convinced that oil would run out in the medium term. This is why the United States destroyed states in order to be able to exploit their oil in the long term, but not now. Moreover, the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine states that one should not fight globalised powers such as Russia and China. On the contrary, they should be given access to the natural resources they have conquered, but they should be forced to pay royalties to the US in order to exploit them.

By publishing a number of internal US military reports, Julian Assange has not revealed any sensitive information. But all these documents show that the Pentagon has never been interested in winning the post-9/11 wars. Assange was persecuted to the point of insanity.

To wage these wars, the Pentagon secretly created clandestine Special Forces: 60,000 soldiers without uniforms [13]. They are capable of assassinating anyone in any country without leaving any trace. Bob Woodward revealed the “Global Attack Matrix” operation, decided three days after the attacks [14]. Wayne Madsen published the names of the first victims in Papua, Nigeria, Indonesia and Lebanon [15].

CONCLUSION

All my predictions have been verified over the last 20 years. Unfortunately, few people have seen how the world has changed. Most refuse to make the connection between the revelations of one side and those of the other and to see the responsibility of the Western democracies for the crimes committed in the wider Middle East.

The problem remains the same: we cannot admit that the criminal is close to us.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] L’Effroyable imposture, Thierry Meyssan, Carnot (2002). Second edition, revised and corrected L’Effroyable imposture suivie du Pentagate prefaced by General Leonid Ivashov (who was acting chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces on September 11, 2001), Demi-Lune, 2006. English Version : The Big Lie. Version en español : La Gran Impostura.

[2] According to my detractors, I had not been at the scene, as a ” true journalist ” would have had to. But the United States had banned access to the three “crime scenes” for reasons of ” national security ” and for years no journalist, from absolutely no media, had access to them. So the reproach of ” amateurism ” would have to apply not only to me but also to all the journalists who repeated the official version.

[3] The adjective ” conspiratorial ” began to be used in the 1960s to designate those who questioned the official thesis of the lone sniper who supposedly assassinated President Kennedy and denounced that what he did was a conspiracy. possible that assassination.

[4] Indeed, I deny the official version of the attacks of September 11, 2001. But the term ” denialism ” actually alludes to an extreme right-wing current – whose ideas I have always fought – that denies the will of the Nazis to perpetrate the genocide of the Jews in Europe.

[5] Against All Enemies, Inside America’s War on Terror, Richard Clarke, Free Press, 2004.

[6] Like every year, Warren Buffet – who was then the richest man in the world – gave a charity dinner in Nebraska. But, something that had never happened before, that day the annual dinner was not organized in a large hotel but … in a military base. The invited company bosses had given their New York employees the day off, which explains the relatively low death toll in the collapse of the Twin Towers.

[7] A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the abuse of America’s intelligence agencies, James Bamford, Anchor Books (2004).

[8] «¿Quién inventó las falsas llamadas telefónicas desde los aviones secuestrados el 11 de Septiembre?», por Giulietto Chiesa, Megachip-Globalist (Italia) , Red Voltaire , 28 de julio de 2013.

[9] Top Secret America : The Rise of the New American Security State, Dana Priest & William M. Arkin, Little, Brown and Company (2011).

[10] The “Five Eyes” or Five Eyes is the name of the alliance of services for eavesdropping and interception of global communications in which Australia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom participate. in 1941 by the Atlantic Charter.

[11] “The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 25 May 2021.

[12] “Stabiliy American’s Ennemy”, col. Ralph Peters, Parameters #31-4 (winter 2001).

[13] “Exclusive : Inside the Military’s Secret Undercover Army”, William M. Arkin, Newsweek, May 17, 2021.

[14] Saturday, September 15, At Camp David, Advise and Dissent, Bob Woodward & Dan Balz, Washington Post, January 31, 2002.

[15] «J’accuse – Bush’s Death Squads», Wayne Madsen, Makingnews.com, January 31, 2002.

After a Year Under Lockdown, Will Our Freedoms Survive the Tyranny of COVID-19?

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The remedy is worse than the disease.”—Francis Bacon

One way or another, the majority of Americans will survive COVID-19.

It remains to be seen, however, whether our freedoms will survive the tyranny of the government’s heavy-handed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Indeed, now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., we may all be long-haulers, suffering under the weight of long-term COVID-19 afflictions.

Instead of dealing with the headaches, fatigue and neurological aftereffects of the virus, however, “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

Therein lies the danger of the government’s growing addiction to power.

What started out a year ago as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including our own) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents.

Until recently, the police state had been more circumspect in its power grabs, but this latest state of emergency has brought the beast out of the shadows.

It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security.

This coronavirus pandemic has been no exception.

Not only have the federal and state governments unraveled the constitutional fabric of the nation with lockdown mandates that sent the economy into a tailspin and wrought havoc with our liberties, but they have almost persuaded the citizenry to depend on the government for financial handouts, medical intervention, protection and sustenance.

This past year under lockdown was a lesson in many things, but most of all, it was a lesson in how to indoctrinate a populace to love and obey Big Brother.

What started off as an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of this virus, and not overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose the most vulnerable to unavoidable loss of life scenarios quickly became strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

Every day brought a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that were eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

There was talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dare to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.

To some, these may seem like small, necessary steps in the war against the COVID-19 virus, but they’re only necessary to the Deep State in its efforts to further undermine the Constitution, extend its control over the populace, and feed its insatiable appetite for ever-greater powers.

After all, whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America healthy again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

The war on drugs turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with SWAT teams and militarized police. The war on terror turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention. The war on immigration turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with roving government agents demanding “papers, please.”

This war on COVID-19 could usher in yet another war on the American people, waged with all of the surveillance weaponry at the government’s disposal: thermal imaging cameras, drones, contact tracing, biometric databases, etc.

Unless we find some way to rein in the government’s power grabs, the fall-out will be epic.

Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has coalesced into this present moment.

The government’s shameless exploitation of past national emergencies for its own nefarious purposes pales in comparison to what is presently unfolding.

It’s downright Machiavellian.

Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been anticipating this moment for years, quietly assembling a wish list of lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.

It should surprise no one, then, that the Trump Administration asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deems it necessary during this coronavirus pandemic and “other” emergencies. It’s that “other” emergencies part that should particularly give you pause, if not spur you to immediate action (by action, I mean a loud and vocal, apolitical, nonpartisan outcry and sustained, apolitical, nonpartisan resistance).

In fact, the Department of Justice (DOJ) started to quietly trot out and test a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution.

We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

These are powers the police state would desperately like to make permanent.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that anything will change for the better under the Biden administration. That’s not how totalitarian regimes operate.

Bear in mind, however, that the powers the government officially asked Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has already unilaterally claimed for itself.

Unofficially, the police state has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

As David C. Unger, observes in The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs:

“For seven decades we have been yielding our most basic liberties to a secretive, unaccountable emergency state – a vast but increasingly misdirected complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs that so define our present world that we forget that there was ever a different America. … Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

This rise of an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security is all happening according to schedule.

The civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters,” the government’s reliance on the armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems, the implicit declaration of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security: the powers-that-be have been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now, not just with active shooter drills and lockdowns and checkpoints and heightened danger alerts, but with a sensory overload of militarized, battlefield images—in video games, in movies, on the news—that acclimate us to life in a totalitarian regime.

Whether or not this particular crisis is of the government’s own making is not the point: to those for whom power and profit are everything, the end always justifies the means.

The seeds of this present madness were sown several decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.

Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives, which do not need congressional approval, provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

Mind you, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose, and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the executive branch and its unelected minions.

The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

The emergency state is now out in the open for all to see.

Unfortunately, “we the people” refuse to see what’s before us.

This is how freedom dies.

We erect our own prison walls, and as our rights dwindle away, we forge our own chains of servitude to the police state.

Be warned, however: once you surrender your freedoms to the government—no matter how compelling the reason might be for doing so—you can never get them back.

No government willingly relinquishes power. If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

That said, we still have rights. Technically, at least.

We should not voluntarily relinquish every shred of our humanity, our common sense, or our freedoms to a nanny state that thinks it can do a better job of keeping us safe.

The government may act as if its police state powers trump individual liberties during this COVID-19 pandemic, but for all intents and purposes, the Constitution—especially the battered, besieged Bill of Rights—still stands in theory, if not in practice.

The decisions we make right now—about freedom, commerce, free will, how we care for the least of these in our communities, what it means to provide individuals and businesses with a safety net, how far we allow the government to go in “protecting” us against this virus, etc.—will haunt us for a long time to come.

At times like these, when emotions are heightened, fear dominates, common sense is in short supply, liberty takes a backseat to public safety, and democratic societies approach the tipping point towards mob rule, there is a tendency to cast those who exercise their individual freedoms (to freely speak, associate, assemble, protest, pursue a living, engage in commerce, etc.) as foolishly reckless, criminally selfish, outright villains or so-called “extremists.”

Sometimes that is true, but not always.

There is always a balancing test between individual freedoms and the communal good.

What we must figure out is how to strike a balance that allows us to protect those who need protecting without leaving us chained and in bondage to the police state.

Blindly following the path of least resistance—acquiescing without question to whatever the government dictates—can only lead to more misery, suffering and the erection of a totalitarian regime in which there is no balance.

Whatever we give up willingly now—whether it’s basic human decency, the ability to manage our private affairs, the right to have a say in how the government navigates this crisis, or the few rights still left to us that haven’t been disemboweled in recent years by a power-hungry police state—we won’t get back so easily once this crisis is past.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government never cedes power willingly. Neither should we.

A year ago, I warned that this was a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—can survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

Nothing has changed on that front.

James Madison, the “father” of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the fourth president of the United States, once advised that we should “take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.”

These COVID-19 restrictions are far from the first experiment on our liberties. Yet if “we the people” continue to allow the government to trample our rights in the name of so-called national security, we can be assured that things will get worse, not better.

The Deep State: The Unelected Shadow Government Is Here to Stay

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

America’s next president will inherit more than a bitterly divided nation teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe when he or she assumes office. He will also inherit a shadow government, one that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country.

To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.

The first shadow government, referred to as COG or continuity of government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.”

The second shadow government, referred to as the Deep State, is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.

The first shadow government, COG, is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law.

Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it is the second shadow government, the Deep State, which poses the greater threat to our freedoms. This permanent, corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of the police state.

These two shadow governments, which make a mockery of representative government and the “reassurance ritual” of voting, have been a long time in the making. Yet they have been so shrouded in secrecy, well hidden from the eyes and ears of the American people, that they exist and function in contravention to the principles of democratic government.

As the following makes clear, these shadow governments, which operate beyond the reach of the Constitution and with no real accountability to the citizenry, are the reason why “we the people” have no control over our government.

The COG shadow government plan was devised during the Cold War as a means of ensuring that a nuclear strike didn’t paralyze the federal government.

COG initially called for three teams consisting of a cabinet member, an executive chief of staff and military and intelligence officials to practice evacuating and directing a counter nuclear strike against the Soviet Union from a variety of high-tech, mobile command vehicles. If the president and vice president were both killed, one of these teams would take control, with the ranking cabinet official serving as president.

This all changed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when it became clear that there would be no warning against a terrorist attack. Instead of waiting until an attack occurred to mobilize part-time bureaucrats and activate evacuation schemes, George W. Bush opted to change COG and establish a full-time, permanent shadow government, stationed outside the capital, run by permanently appointed (not elected) executive officials.

COG has since taken on a power—and a budget—of its own.

Incredibly, under the Obama administration, the plans for the shadow government have expanded and grown far more elaborate and costly than many realize. It is what investigative journalist William M. Arkin refers to as “the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival.”

In much the same way that the nation was taken hostage after 9/11 by color-coded terror alerts and “See Something, Say Something” campaigns that transformed us into a fearful, watchful nation of suspects, the government’s efforts to prepare us for a so-called national disaster have, in turn, left us a constant state of near-emergency and acclimated us to the sight of militarized police, military drills on American soil, privatized prisons, the specter of internment camps, and the erosion of constitutional rights, especially as they pertain to so-called “extremists,” domestic or otherwise.

Study the COG plans carefully, however, and you’ll find that the concern isn’t so much about protecting our government as it is about protecting the nation’s governmental elite.

As Arkin reports: “Countless billions have been spent on this endeavor over the years, a secret orgy of preparedness going on behind the scenes, one that ensures Washington can defend itself, take care of its own, and survive no matter what.”

To this end, the government has invested heavily in the “architecture of fear”: massive underground bunkers—the size of small cities—which are sprinkled throughout the country for the government elite to escape to “in case of an imminent nuclear strike so that they can set up a kind of Administration-in-exile, directing every order of business from retaliation to recovery.”

These bunkers, strategically located around the nation’s capital and in key states, represent a who’s who on the shadow government’s payroll, with every department and agency represented, from the Department of Education and the Trademark Office to the Small Business Administration and the National Archives.

No sector has been overlooked: military, surveillance, counterintelligence, scientific, political, judicial, corporate contractors, as well as computer programmers, engineers, fire fighters, craftsmen, security guards, branch chiefs, financial managers, supply officers, secretaries and stenographers, all of whom have been entrusted with special ID cards allowing them clearance into the doomsday survival sites. They’ve even included individuals tasked with patent and trademark processing. They even have contingency plans to save priceless works of art.

The Federal Relocation Arc near Washington DC will reportedly serve as the emergency bunker for “every Cabinet department (and every government organization deemed essential).” Site R, a 700,000-foot facility inside Raven Rock Mountain near Camp David, will serve as a backup Pentagon. Peters Mountain near Charlottesville, Va., is the likely site for the nation’s domestic spies to hide out. Congress will retire to a subterranean facility near the posh Greenbrier resortin West Virginia, which served as an internment facility for Japanese, Italian and German diplomats during World War II. And a 600,000-square-foot complex inside Virginia’s Mount Weather is expected to be the primary relocation site for the White House, the Supreme Court and much of the executive branch.

Built into the side of a mountain, Mount Weather, near Bluemont, Va., is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This self-contained facility contains, among other things, a hospital, crematorium, dining and recreation areas, sleeping quarters, reservoirs of drinking and cooling water, an emergency power plant, a radio/television studio and a full-time police and fire department.

There is also an Office of the Presidency at Mount Weather, which regularly receives top-secret national security information from all the federal departments and agencies. This facility was largely unknown to everyone, including Congress, until it came to light in the mid-1970s. Military personnel connected to the bunker have refused to reveal any information about it, even before congressional committees. In fact, Congress has no oversight, budgetary or otherwise, on Mount Weather, and the specifics of the facility remain top-secret.

These facilities reinforce a troubling government mindset that treats the American people as relatively insignificant and expendable. Because you know who’s not on the list of key-individuals-to-be-saved-in-the-eventuality-of-a-disaster? You and me and every other American citizen who is viewed as a mere economic unit to be tallied, bought and sold by those in power.

Not to worry, however. The government hasn’t completely forgotten about us.

In the event of a “national emergency”—loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions”—the executive branch and its unelected appointees will be given unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power.

In such an event, the Constitution will effectively be suspended, thereby ushering in martial law.

However, writing for Radar magazine, Christopher Ketcham suggests that the government won’t have completely forgotten about the rest of us. In fact, Ketcham believes that the government also has plans to imprison hundreds of thousands of “potentially suspect” Americans in detention camps.

Ketcham describes a program created by the Department of Homeland Security that relies on a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Referred to by the code name Main Core, this database reportedly contains the names of millions of Americans who, “often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”

Sounds unnervingly like the objectives of the government’s new Domestic Terrorism Czar and the Strong Cities network, which will be working to identify and target potential extremists, doesn’t it?

Under Ketcham’s scenario, if a terrorist attack occurs, the president will declare a national emergency, activating COG procedures and throwing the country into martial law with the shadow government at the helm. The administration will then round up the “dangerous” Americans listed in Main Core and place them in one of the many internment camps or private prisons built for just such an eventuality.

For all intents and purposes, the nation is one national “emergency” away from having a full-fledged, unelected, authoritarian state emerge from the shadows. All it will take is the right event—another terrorist attack, perhaps, or a natural disaster—for such a regime to emerge from the shadows.

As unnerving as that prospect may be, however, it is the second shadow government, what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” that poses the greater threat right now.

Consider this: how is it that partisan gridlock has seemingly jammed up the gears (and funding sources) in Washington, yet the government has been unhindered in its ability to wage endless wars abroad, in the process turning America into a battlefield and its citizens into enemy combatants?

The credit for such relentless, entrenched, profit-driven governance, according to Lofgren, goes to “another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

This “state within a state” hides “mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day,” says Lofgren, and yet the “Deep State does not consist of the entire government.”

Rather, Lofgren continues:

It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.

All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted.

The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

In an expose titled “Top Secret America,” The Washington Post revealed the private side of this shadow government, made up of 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.”

Reporting on the Post’s findings, Lofgren points out:

These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings…

The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley.

As Lofgren concludes:

[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change… If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda.

Remember this the next time you find yourselves mesmerized by the antics of the 2016 presidential candidates or drawn into a politicized debate over the machinations of Congress, the president or the judiciary: it’s all intended to distract you from the fact that you have no authority and no rights in the face of the shadow governments.