By James Donahue

The definition of tyranny is: oppressive government by one or more people who exercise absolute power. Other words for it are autocracy, totalitarianism, and dictatorship.

Shortly before George W. Bush came to power under questionable circumstances in December, 2000, he was quoted as saying: “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”

The media talking heads picked up on that statement and treated it as if it were a very bad joke. Since then, Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, the nutty attorney generals that have come and gone, and the band of cabinet members, advisors, legislators and other crooks that have been exposed for either ripping off the government till or getting involved in sex scandals, and always working under a cloak of secrecy in the oval office, have given us cause to wonder. If American voters fail to succeed in getting this gang booted out of Washington in elections this fall and we find ourselves looking at four more years of the same . . . then it means Bush wasn’t joking after all.

It will mean that Americans have been manipulated to accept a totalitarian form of government, and that we were goaded into surrendering our Constitutional freedoms without lifting a single fist or rifle in resistance.

These crooks used the Supreme Court to put Bush in power even though it was shown that even with suppression of votes in key states and Ralph Nader taking votes as a third party candidate, Al Gore may still have won the 2000 presidential election.

They used the 9-11 attacks to force the Patriot Act down our throats, thus stripping the Constitution of much of its power.

They created the office of Homeland Security that some say has been busy building concentration camps and creating a plan for closing off our borders, and they have launched a War on Terror that is operating under the cloak of superficial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, stretching our military to the limit, and draining the national coffers while certain “fat cats” are getting very wealthy.

Certain information to support these allegations, and help connect the dots, has only recently been brought to light.

For example, film director Oliver Stone, in one of his rare television interviews with Bill Mahr to promote his new film, “W,” portraying the Bush presidency, commented on how difficult it was to get information. He said the life of Bush was almost an open book until he started his term. From there, Stone said everything that went on in the presidential office occurred behind closed doors. Most of what we know about events that went on was due to the skilled work of a few investigative reporters.

Whether Bush really won the presidency was a hot-button issue right up to the 9-11 event. In fact, a coalition of newspapers financed a special recount of all of the Florida ballots and was heavily involved in getting information the Supreme Court suppressed when it appointed Bush as the winner of the election. After the attack, the mood of the country shifted. We felt as if we were a nation at war and in need of leadership, and questions about the fairness of the election were no longer on the front burner.

Conspiracy theorists will always question whether the 9-11 attack was the work of outside terrorists or an inside job carefully orchestrated for political reasons. That President Bush just happened to be in Florida, reading children’s books to youngsters in an elementary school when he got news of the attack, was odd, even though we don’t recall anyone questioning this. When have we ever had a president take time off from his busy schedule running the nation to read to youngsters in an elementary school? President’s wives have been known to do publicity stunts like that, but not presidents.

That Bush was in Florida on the morning of the attack, left Vice-President Dick Cheney in Washington and in charge of dealing with the events going on over New York. It is well known that America has had an excellent defense system in place. And we had a plan designed to stop large airliners that get hijacked and turned into projectiles of potential danger to public buildings and historical places. This kind of an event did not escape our military planners.

When it was known that three aircraft were out of communication and had turned toward New York, a squadron of jets was in the air and prepared to shoot them down. For a reason that has never been properly explained, and as we understand the story, Cheney called them back. Thus the planes were left free to fly into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

Within the first month of the attack, while Americans were still reeling over the shock of what had happened, Wisconsin Congressman Frank Sensenbrenner Jr. introduced the Patriot Act on the floor of the House.. The massive 342-page document was introduced on Oct. 23, rushed through Congress, gaining overwhelming approval (357-66) on Oct. 24, and approved by the Senate (98-1) on Oct. 25. Bush signed it into law on Oct. 26. It later was revealed that almost none of our legislators bothered to read the document and few rose to question it.

The Patriot Act, which violates at least six of the ten original Constitutional Amendments known as the Bill of Rights, and possibly the thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments as well, was such a massive and complex document, it is clear that its authors were at work on it long before the 9-11 attack. The act contained the inclusion of a five-year sunset provision, but in the end, the act was not only made permanent, but given a few troublesome revisions that actually expand its reach into our private lives.

The next troublesome event was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. This was sold as a plan to streamline government by placing a number of offices under one flag. Thus the National Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration Service, Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration and Civil Air Patrol are all packaged under the thumb of the Homeland Security office.

The Homeland Security office appeared to have been a disaster after Hurricane Katrina leveled the City of New Orleans and so many other communities along the Gulf Coast in 2005. Now it appears that the department was never designed to help make us secure in the homeland, but rather to secure the people in the homeland from rising up against their leadership. This information is only now coming to light in complaints filed by the American Civil Liberties Union:

Somewhere in all those drafts of Congressional acts, possibly the Patriot Act, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security the right to use some of its powers deep within the country. In fact, there is a so-called buffer or “Constitution-free Zone” established all around the parameter of the United States, reaching 100 miles in, where civil authorities have the power to search, seize, and arrest people without warrants or giving reasons for such actions. This zone includes several major cities, including New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and Seattle, and affects 197.4 million citizens.

The Department of Homeland Security currently has set up at least 33 internal checkpoints in these zoned areas where they can stop people, question them and ask them to prove their citizenship. The ACLU is challenging these powers.

A report by Peter Dale Scott in Global Research revealed that a company called KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, was awarded a $385 million contract to build detention facilities for the Department of Homeland Security. These prisons were designed to provide “temporary detention and processing capabilities” for “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs” in the event of other emergencies.

Scott suggests those “other emergencies” may involve the use of the new federal lock-ups as detention facilities in which to hold unruly citizens in the event of civil unrest.

The Scott report also noted that in April, 2002, the Defense Department implemented a plan for domestic U. S. military operations operating under a new U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM). The purpose of NORTHCOM is reportedly to support civil authorities in response to attacks, natural disasters or other events once handled by the National Guard.

This program has been creeping up on Americans insidiously. There has been little if any press coverage, the changes that the ACLU maintains are in violation of U.S. law have to date remained unchallenged by either Congress or the courts, and Americans may consequently now be ripe for insurrection within our own borders.

For example in September, NORTHCOM conducted a highly classified exercise called Granite Shadow in Washington. The Washington Post picked up that story. Writer William Arkin said “Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military’s extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.”

The ACLU is now demanding information through the Freedom of Information Act concerning CORTHCOM’s deplayment of the Third Infantry Division's First Combat Brigade team on U.S. soil for "civil unrest" and "crowd control" duties.

The ACLU argues that using trained military combat troops to control U.S. citizens is in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which specifically bars the use of the military in domestic policing.

As we see it, the Bush Administration in just eight years has systematically dismantled the Constitution, violated all the rules that gave balance to the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, spent us into a multi-trillion dollar deficit from which we may not recover, and alienated our nation from the rest of the world. Now we find ourselves about one step away from becoming a police state.