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Source: The Rutherford Institute
20 Years of Government-Sponsored Tyranny: The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19
September 07, 2021 | By John Whitehead
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life." —Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNNWhat a strange and harrowing road we've walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.
Our losses are mounting with every passing day.
What began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.
The citizenry's unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.
Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.
The rights embodied in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life support.
Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.
Indeed, since the towers fell on 9/11, the U.S. government has posed a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.
While nearly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to foreign nations (which too often fall into the hands of terrorists), and foment civil unrest in order to keep the security industrial complex gainfully employed.
The American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.
In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, pandemic lockdowns and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the U.S. government—the government that was supposed to be a "government of the people, by the people, for the people"—has become the enemy of the people.
Consider that the government's answer to every problem has been more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.
Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation's early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.
Viewed in this light, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. Or, to put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.
This is how the emergency state operates, after all, and we should know: after all, we have spent the past 20 years in a state of emergency.
From 9/11 to COVID-19, "we the people" have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.
This is a government that has grown so corrupt, greedy, power-hungry and tyrannical over the course of the past 240-plus years that our constitutional republic has since given way to idiocracy, and representative government has given way to a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).
What this really amounts to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield.
Indeed, the government's (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before. According to the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, since 9/11, the United States has spent $21 trillion on "militarization, surveillance, and repression."
Clearly, this is not a government that is a friend to freedom.
Rather, this is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry as consumers and bits of data to be bought, sold and traded.
This is a government that spies on and treats its people as if they have no right to privacy, especially in their own homes while the freedom to be human is being erased.
This is a government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the public's biomedical data as a convenient means by which to penalize certain "unacceptable" social behaviors. Incredibly, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon's research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting "signs" of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.
This is a government that routinely engages in taxation without representation, whose elected officials lobby for our votes only to ignore us once elected.
This is a government comprised of petty bureaucrats, vigilantes masquerading as cops, and faceless technicians.
This is a government that railroads taxpayers into financing government programs whose only purpose is to increase the power and wealth of the corporate elite.
This is a government—a warring empire—that forces its taxpayers to pay for wars abroad that serve no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.
This is a government that subjects its people to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called "soft" targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.
This is a government that uses fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry's movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.
Please go to The Rutherford Institute to read more.
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Related:
News update on the TSA for 20 September 2021:
Has the TSA cleaned up their act since 2012? Do you have a p [peasant/pauper] assport? When you signed your passport did you write below your name "All rights reserved" making sure the writing partially covered your name so that it couldn't be corrupted?
The Corrupt TSA – How Bad Is It?
The TSA have never stopped one terrorist from coming into the US through any airport since the Patriot Act was passed immediately after the events of September 11, 2001. If you are carrying onto an aircraft a bottle of expensive facial cream you are immediately suspect. The bottle of expensive facial cream will be confiscated unless you place it in your checkin luggage. Then the TSA agent will brag to you that he has the keys and can get into any locked baggage that is checked through customs as checkin baggage. A female TSA agent sitting on a high stool with a bad attitude armed with a government issued 9mm semi-automatic, will give you an arrogant snarl if you ask her if you can get into the faster checkin line. It is mostly harassment for the peasant slave class - soft targets. Do readers comprehend the combined budgets of the TSA, the FBI, the DHS and the ATF? It is in the billions and billions of dollars and not one single terrorist has ever been apprehended or stopped at an airport in the US.
How can the TSA detect terrorists coming through airports when the FBI has been creating them? Need a terrorist? Call the FBI (commercial militia):
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