Creating a climate of fear to build an authoritarian state
Fear is the most important ingredient in an authoritarian state. First is the fear of the “Other”, which must continually be pumped up and amplified. For example, the Right has consistently portrayed terrorists (which they equate with all Muslims, hence the panicked opposition to the building of mosques) as supernaturally powerful—so powerful, in fact, that if they were ever brought onto US soil (for a trial, for example), then do you know what would happen? Well, the GOP does, and such a step would quickly lead to the downfall of the US through massive invasions of terrorists from abroad, the establishment of Sharia law throughout the US, and so on. The message is simple: Be scared, and give us enough power and we’ll make you safe.
Then, once the authoritarian state is established, people must be kept fearful lest they throw out the rascals in charge. So fear is continually pumped up, and generally an internal spying effort (like the current NSA surveillance of all communications in the US) is undertaken so that the citizens begin to fear each other. And, with people kidnapped and tortured and imprisoned for years even though they have done nothing wrong, the citizens also begin to fear their government—and rightly so.
We’re moving along in this process. People are already so afraid of terrorist that many have lost whatever reasoning ability they once possessed so that they cannot think through the implications of the direction the government is going.
And the Obama administration is determined to push the process along (with their actions, not their rhetoric). Read this column, which begins:
The Obama DOJ’s effort to force New York Times investigative journalist Jim Risen to testify in a whistleblower prosecution and reveal his source is really remarkable and revealing in several ways; it should be receiving much more attention than it is. On its own, the whistleblower prosecution and accompanying targeting of Risen are pernicious, but more importantly, it underscores the menacing attempt by the Obama administration — as Risen yesterday pointed out — to threaten and intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and activists who meaningfully challenge what the government does in secret.
The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers. It is part of the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent whom the DOJ accuses of leaking to Risen the story of a severely botched agency plot – from 11 years ago – to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear program, a story Risen wrote about six years after the fact in his 2006 best-selling book,State of War. The DOJ wants to force Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.
Like any good reporter would, Risen is categorically refusing to testify and, if it comes to that (meaning if the court orders him to testify), he appears prepared to go to prison in defense of press freedoms and to protect his source (just as some young WikiLeaks supporters are courageously prepared to do rather than cooperate with the Obama DOJ’s repellent persecution of the whistleblowing site). Yesterday, Risen filed a Motion asking the Court to quash the government’s subpoena on the ground that it violates the First Amendment’s free press guarantee, and as part of the Motion, filed a lengthy Affidavit that is amazing in several respects.
During the Bush years, Risen was one of the few investigative journalists exposing the excesses and lawbreaking that was the War on Terror — causing him to be literally hated by officials of the National Security State. Along with Eric Lichtblau, Risen most famously revealed, in 2005, that the NSA was secretly spying on Americans without warrants which — as he put it in his Affidavit — “in all likelihood, violated the law and the United States Constitution.” In 2006, he revealed that the Bush administration had been obtaining huge amounts of financial and banking information about American citizens from the SWIFT system, all without oversight or Congressional authorization. And here’s how he summarized the multiple revelations in State of War, the book for which the Obama DOJ is now seeking to force him to reveal his source upon pain of imprisonment: . . .
Continue reading. There’s a lot more and, if you reflect on it at all, it is shocking and ominous. Our kids are going to live in the nation now being created.
