February 09, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Americans
have been losing the protection of law for years. In the 21st century
the loss of legal protections accelerated with the Bush
administration’s “war on terror,” which continues under the Obama
administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and U.S.
civil liberties.

The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus in order to hold people
indefinitely without bringing charges. The regime had acquired hundreds
of prisoners by paying a bounty for “terrorists.” Afghan warlords and
thugs responded to the financial incentive by grabbing unprotected
people and selling them to the Americans.

The Bush regime needed to hold the prisoners without charges because it
had no evidence against the people and did not want to admit that the
U.S. government had stupidly paid warlords and thugs to kidnap innocent
people. In addition, the Bush regime needed “terrorists” prisoners in
order to prove that there was a terrorist threat.

As there was no evidence against the “detainees” (most have been
released without charges after years of detention and abuse), the U.S.
government needed a way around U.S. and international laws against
torture in order that the government could produce evidence via
self-incrimination. The Bush regime found inhumane and
totalitarian-minded lawyers and put them to work at the U.S. Department
of Justice (sic) to invent arguments that the Bush regime did not need
to obey the law.

The Bush regime created a new classification for its detainees that it
used to justify denying legal protection and due process to the
detainees. As the detainees were not U.S. citizens and were demonized
by the regime as “the 760 most dangerous men on earth,” there was
little public outcry over the regime’s unconstitutional and inhumane
actions.

As our Founding Fathers and a long list of scholars warned, once civil
liberties are breached, they are breached for all. Soon U.S. citizens
were being held indefinitely in violation of their habeas corpus
rights. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui an American citizen of Pakistani origin
might have been the first.

Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis University, was
seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan, and was
held secretly for five years in the U.S. military’s notorious Bagram
prison in Afghanistan. Her three young children were with her at the
time she was abducted, one an eight-month old baby. She has no idea
what has become of her two youngest children. Her oldest child, 7 years
old, was also incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to similar abuse and
horrors.

Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense. A
British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being
tortured, disclosed her presence. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24605.htm
An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending
Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a
captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldier’s rifle and fired two shots
attempting to shoot him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S.
soldier’s excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach
resulting in her near death.

On February 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted
murder. The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself
and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing
course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of her
fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman
had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was
presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no
bullet holes. Just an accusation.

Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: “The trial took an unusual
turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from the
rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S.
interrogators, did not match hers.”

An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a Muslim.
This is the kind of “justice” that always results when the state hypes
fear and demonizes a group.

The people who should have been on trial are the people who abducted
her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international
borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for the
fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two gunshots to
her stomach. Instead, the victim was put on trial and convicted.

This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim is an American citizen.

Anyone can be next. Indeed, on February 3 Dennis Blair, director of
National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was
now “defined policy” that the U.S. government can murder its own
citizens on the sole basis of someone in the government’s judgment that
an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just
execution on suspicion of being a threat.

This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential
appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of
Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder
American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat.

I can hear readers saying the government might as well kill Americans
abroad as it kills them at home--Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Black Panthers.

Yes, the U.S. government has murdered its citizens, but Dennis Blair’s
“defined policy” is a bold new development. The government, of course,
denies that it intended to kill the Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver’s
wife and child, or the Black Panthers. The government says that Waco
was a terrible tragedy, an unintended result brought on by the Branch
Davidians themselves. The government says that Ruby Ridge was Randy
Weaver’s fault for not appearing in court on a day that had been
miscommunicated to him, The Black Panthers, the government says, were
dangerous criminals who insisted on a shoot-out.

In no previous death of a U.S. citizen by the hands of the U.S.
government has the government claimed the right to kill Americans
without arrest, trial, and conviction of a capital crime.

In contrast, Dennis Blair has told the U.S. Congress that the executive
branch has assumed the right to murder Americans who it deems a
“threat.”

What defines “threat”? Who will make the decision? What it means is
that the government will murder whomever it chooses.

There is no more complete or compelling evidence of a police state than
the government announcing that it will murder its own citizens if it
views them as a “threat.”

Ironic, isn’t it, that “the war on terror” to make us safe ends in a
police state with the government declaring the right to murder American
citizens who it regards as a threat.

Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He is a
nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles.