America Will Never Be The Same After Bush

By James Donahue

It wasn’t the 9-11 attack that changed America, it was the way the Bush Administration moved to strip our constitutional freedoms in the name of protecting us from another attack of that magnitude.

More then that, President George W. Bush and his top military and security advisors broke every moral and ethical rule, launching a preemptive war against Iraq, a nation that was no threat to us whatsoever, introducing horrifying torture techniques against people suspected of having information vital to national security, extending military combat duty beyond the limits of human endurance, flagrantly allowing industry to continue polluting and raping the environment, allowing our best industrial plants to move overseas in a quest for cheap labor, cutting taxes for the rich while bankrupting the nation by spending billions in an unnecessary and unpopular war, and isolating America by turning just about every country in the world against us.

The people in Washington have become so unpopular, even in the eyes of the ever-groveling national media, that they are showing clear signs of paranoia. Among the more troublesome actions . . . many of them done by executive order rather than acts of our legislators . . . have been the new surveillance technologies, and blatant tapping of private telephone, e-mail and other Internet conversations, under the guise of looking for terrorist activity.

Not only has this president stripped America of its Constitutional freedoms, but he has stacked the courts with judges who tend to support his actions, and appears to have some kind of magical hold over the legislative branch of our government, thus prohibiting the system of checks and balances built into our government to prevent just such a thing from occurring. Just how this was accomplished, and who was responsible for bringing this about, may be up to future historians to determine. It would be my sense that this was not the work of Mr. Bush, but was a long-ago conceived plan that has been slowly brought to fruition by a yet to be uncovered body of conspirators bent on altering if not destroying America forever.

The gross paranoia expressed by this government, which now is in obvious fear of its people, is most recently expressed in the announcement by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that his department is activating a new domestic satellite surveillance system, designed by the military to spy on the enemy. Except in this case, the enemy appears to be us, the United States citizenry.

Chertoff assured the media that the spy satellites overhead will be there to keep an eye on climate changes, tracking hurricanes, creating terrain maps and other such things of service to the overall good of the masses. But be assured that the sensitive cameras on these satellites also can watch every move we make. If Google can show clean enough overhead photographs of your house so that the license plate on your car can be read, imagine what military satellite cameras can read.

Indeed, Chertoff made no secret about plans by law enforcement agencies to use that sophisticated overhead sensing equipment to track criminals and stop suspected terrorist activity. But in doing this, are we not trampling the concept of individual privacy and civil rights?

Running this ominous new “eye-in-the-sky” network will be yet another department, the National Applications Office, part of the counterterrorism program operating under the flag of Homeland Security. All of this appears to have been accomplished by executive order from the president’s office, rather than by legislation. We learn that the administration approved satellite imagery, radar, electronic-signal information, chemical detection and other monitoring capabilities in these new satellites.

We won’t fart without someone in the government knowing about it.

And here is yet another looming threat to our freedoms to worry about. Back in 2005 our Republican dominated legislators blindly approved the Real ID Act, which will soon call for the creation of what some say will be a national identification card. It will accomplish this by imposing draconian restrictions on how states issue driver’s licenses.

To get licenses under this act, states must conduct expensive background checks and create and share state databases with detailed personal information for all drivers. The act also requires that airline passengers and anyone entering a federal building must present a Real ID or face extensive screening and delays at the door.

It may soon be impossible to travel, drive a car, or even buy our groceries without showing this form of identification. While billed as a total information awareness essential for national security, this obvious Orwellian program looks much like the “mark of the beast” as foretold in the Biblical Book of the Revelation.

If you think Real ID is a nightmarishly bad idea you are not alone. It is being opposed by voters and interest groups all over the nation. Unfortunately, the sleeping media has rarely mentioned it, and this threat has gone almost unnoticed by the masses.