John and Nisha Whitehead – The Rutherford Institute Oct 16, 2023
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”—Hermann Goering, German military commander and Hitler’s designated successor
For those who remember the days and months that followed 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Hamas attacks on Israel.
The same shocking images of carnage and grief dominating the news. The same disbelief that anyone could be so hateful, so monstrous, so evil as to do this to another human being. The same outpourings of support and unity from around the world. The same shared fear that this could easily have happened to us or our loved ones.
Now once again the drums of war are sounding on the world stage, not that they ever really stopped. Israel is preparing to invade Gaza, the Palestinians are nearing a humanitarian crisis, and the rest of the world is bracing for whatever blowback comes next.
Here in the United States, as we approach the 22nd anniversary of the USA Patriot Act on October 26, we’re still grappling with the blowback that arises from allowing one’s freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security.
Here are a few lessons that we never learned or learned too late.
Mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer. Rushed through Congress a mere 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, undermined civil liberties, expanded the government’s powers and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance by the government on American citizens.
Pre-emptive strikes will only lead to further blowback. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority and adopt a strike-first policy against terrorist threats ‘before they’re fully formed.’” We are still suffering the consequences of this failed policy, which resulted in lives lost, taxpayer dollars wasted, the fomenting of hatred against the U.S. and the further radicalization of terrorist cells.
War is costly. There are many reasons to go to war, but those who have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that have profited most from these endless military occupations and exercises. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad, including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt. That also does not include the more than hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, or the millions displaced from their homes as a result of endless drone strikes and violence.
The tactics and weapons of war, once deployed abroad, will eventually be used against the citizenry at home. The horrors that took place at Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq, involved “US military personnel humiliating, hurting and abusing Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen and women smiled and gave thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs, or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.” Adding to the descent into moral depravity, the United States government legalized the use of torture, including waterboarding, in violation of international law and in the so-called pursuit of national security. The ramifications have been far-reaching, with domestic police mirroring a battlefield mindset in their encounters with American citizens, including the use of torture tactics at secret locations such as Homan Square in Chicago.
Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not reduce acts of terrorism, but it will result in a watched, submissive, surveillance society. Not only did the USA Patriot Act normalize the government’s mass surveillance powers, but it also dramatically expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens without much of any oversight. Thus, a byproduct of this post 9/11-age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. We have all become data collected in government files.
News cycle distractions are calibrated to ensure that you lose sight of what the government is doing. The average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state. Whether these events are critical or unimportant, when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this. In this way, regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions that keep the citizenry tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles also keep them tuned out to the government’s steady encroachments on their freedoms.
If you stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it abides by will be the ones used to clamp down on the citizenry. Having failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the American people have found themselves saddled with a government that skirts, flouts and violates the Constitution with little consequence. Overcriminalization, asset forfeiture schemes, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, warrantless surveillance, SWAT team raids, indefinite detentions, covert agencies, and secret courts are just a few of the egregious practices carried out by a government that operates beyond the reach of the law.
Do not turn your country into a battlefield, your citizens into enemy combatants, and your law enforcement officers into extensions of the military. A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the citizenry of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead? It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, we in America now find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.
As long as you remain fearful and distrustful of each other, you will be incapable of standing united against any threats posed by a power-hungry government. Early on, U.S. officials solved the problem of how to implement their authoritarian policies without incurring a citizen uprising: fear. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. Most of all, they want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Once you trade your freedom for security, the terrorists win. We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road 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. And in so doing, we have proven Osama Bin Laden right. He warned that “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.”
It took a long time to clear away the rubble from the 9/11 attacks.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 22 years after the USA Patriot Act was unleashed on a vulnerable nation, we are still reeling from the destruction it has wrought on our freedoms.
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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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Source
Total crap:
“…22 years after the USA Patriot Act was unleashed on a vulnerable nation, we are still reeling from the destruction it has wrought on our freedoms.”
Wrong, the so-called “Drug War” dismantled all that piece at a time from Nixon’s DEA in 1971 on. You just didn’t notice it till 22 years ago.
while each day government people trafficks in yet more migrants
and nutenyahu says 35 million arabs need to be expelled for the greater israel project
and they must come to europe and the UK
our own folk are suffering real poverty
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/poverty-children-dwp-energy-bills-food-b2434506.html
israel employing crisis actors
https://uk.movies.yahoo.com › fact-check-video-shows-crisis-165600672.html
Judge Andrew Napolitano of Judging Freedom always goes on about the Patriot Act, just Nazi legislation, and the big clue which confirms its Nazified, no one was allowed to read it. They were forced to vote blind.
Conspiracy News which sadly has been shut down interviewed one of the 5 dancing israelis
after )9 11 and they said its part ofa long plan to turn the whole middle east over to israel
the 7 7 bombing in the UK was also a jewish inside plot
Lord Mountbatten was a homosexual pervert
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9745399/lord-mountbatten-fbi-dossier-prince-charles/
John Whitehead is your typical Judeo-Christian nutcase
Oh poor Israel…boo hoo.
roger waters plea for peace
brilliant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPjLhpZBteI
JOHN AMERY
John was born in 1912 his father was a well known British cabinet minister Leo Amery
and his mother a reformed Hungarian jewess.
John as a child would listen to what his father and mother said on the dangers of Communism
and jewish world conquest through finance, and this affected his later views, he was a good orator and in speaking out found the jews classed him as an enemy.
As a young man he set up several small companies but was harassed by jews who
continually bankrupted him.
The Great Depression was a difficult time across the world and as
John saw the way the country was sliding to w w 2 he felt like many at the time
that as Adolf Hitler had confiscated the Rothschild German wealth and shared it
among his people, that this was the way to go in the UK.
John had secret meetings with Winson Churchills chief bodyguard Walter Thompson
a man who knew a lot, and John began to espouse the views of National Socialism.
He travelled across Europe meeting politicians and giving speeches and in September 1942
went to Berlin john was a senior figure in the formation of a German brigade of Englishmen all
opposed to the march of Bolshevism.
The Englishmen were called the League of St George lAter changed to the English Free Corps
and in 1945 while travelling to Italy to give more talks was arrested by Captain Allan Wicker
who later became a TV broadcaster.
Amery was sent to london for trial on 8 counts of High Treason, it was said in court that John was a spanish citizen so could not commit treason against the UK, he said he was always an anti communist never a nazi but this was brushed aside, the authorities wanted
it over quickly and after a trial lasting just 8 minutes, John Amery pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death.
Amery was hanged in Wandworth prison on December 19 by Executioner Albert Pierrepoint
who in his biography described John amery as ” the bravest man i ever hanged” and he is buried in the prison cemetery, as he was being led to the scaffold he turned to the executioner and said
” i always wanted to meet you mr pierrepoint, though not of course under these circumstances”
In 1968 his brother Julian had Johns remains exhumed and cremated and his ashes scattered in France
An Epitaph by his father appears in ” The Empire at Bay” the Leo Amery diaries
At end of wayward days he found a cause –
‘Twas not his Country’s – Only time can tell
If that defiance of our ancient laws
Was treason or foreknowledge. He sleeps well.
Israel did 9/11.
Israel trains American cops.
Israel writes American law.
What could go wrong with that?
See Dr. Alan Sobrosky, former director of US Army War College…if you can find him on today’s Internet.
Attention, Carl Jones!
National Socialists in Germany didn’t vote blind. Hitler was democratically elected. His party’s 25 point program was well known.
Neither Stalin nor Churchill were elected. FDR? Lol! Huey Long was assassinated by the Jewish Communists because he threatened Roosevelt’s chances at the polls.
The patriot (so-called) act was totally Jewish Globalist (e.g. modern Communist). So is Biden’s government…all non-elected, by the way. Clinton?Bush? Obama? All quit similar, though the root (((rot))) has been progressing of late.
“Nazis?” Wake up, for the God’s sake, man!
Carl, ex-KGB head General Yevgeni Primakov and ex-STASI head Markus Wolfe aren’t nazis.
Or are they..
I spend very little time studying current affairs now, which is a massive cause of regret.
Tonight, I paid a bit more attention and was appalled to see Sydney Powell and Jenna Ellis admit to non existent crimes.
Sidney Powell said ‘God didn’t give me fear’ – well, apparently she got it from somewhere else then.
Arguing with retarded Carl Jones
Arguing with retards like Carl Jones is like playing chess with a pigeon; no matter how good you are at chess the pigeon is just going to knock over the pieces, crap on the board and strut around like it’s victorious. -Anon
This also applies to those who defend him, as they are obviously of the same ilk and dullness of perception.
Jews are still soaking the Germans. What a racket !!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=152&v=tsvsfSB53vE&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.centerforreparations.org%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo
I want to sign up for the A.A.
9/11 – Made in Israel
RageCast 387: WHO RULES YOU – Raging Dissident
Pro-Palestinian Dave Chappell Rouses the Crowd in Boston Garden
Open-source Intelligence Shows U.S. Deploys More Arms and Troops to Israel, Cyprus and Jordan
Putin Cardiac Arrest is Bullshit
Is Civil War in ISRAEL Coming Closer? + RageCast 387: WHO RULES YOU – Raging Dissident + The Slaughter Must Go On – Fishi Sumak On Board Operation Tantrum + Umbra Bellator on Amerikan Support of Evil
https://grizzom.blogspot.com/2023/10/live-ragecast-387-who-rules-you-raging.html
Ellis Taylor above….
.
AND unless these fiends are stopped the West will go into massive decline……it is already happening.
So talk has to translate into action…..starting with the top fiends….all unattributed.
Currently in NZ theyre rehashing the mosque attack five years after.NZers are never going to be free of that incident…..ten years after the media will STILL be going on about it.
Incidently Jacinda Ardern got a cushy job at Harvard University….this maybe in part to keep her safe. After resigning as PM she said she had no intention of leaving NZ to work abroad….but she is a proven liar….infact she likely had the job lined up BEFORE she resigned.
Harvard is now fully jewish owned and operated……
The NZ Media is fully controlled by the jews…..at the bottom of this is a racist employment policy leveled against European Kiwis.
One more point….the NZ National Party…. a large jewish component…..this would explain why the leader yesterday was
Dressed all in pink.