Paul Craig Roberts

The only future for Americans is a nightmare.

Some of us have watched this day approach and have warned of its coming, only to be greeted with boos and hisses from “patriots” who have come to regard the US Constitution as a device that coddles criminals and terrorists and gets in the way of the President who needs to act to keep us safe.

In our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Lawrence Stratton and I showed that long before 9/11 US law had ceased to be a shield of the people and had been turned into a weapon in the hands of the government. The event known as 9/11 was used to raise the executive branch above the law. As long as the President sanctions an illegal act, executive branch employees are no longer accountable to the law that prohibits the illegal act. On the president’s authority, the executive branch can violate US laws against spying on Americans without warrants, indefinite detention, and torture and suffer no consequences.

Many expected President Obama to re-establish the accountability of government to law. Instead, he went further than Bush/Cheney and asserted the unconstitutional power not only to hold American citizens indefinitely in prison without bringing charges, but also to take their lives without convicting them in a court of law. Obama asserts that the US Constitution notwithstanding, he has the authority to assassinate US citizens, who he deems to be a “threat,” without due process of law.

In other words, any American citizen who is moved into the threat category has no rights and can be executed without trial or evidence.

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From Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

Palestinian leaders on both sides of the Green Line have warned against rising mass terror by Jewish religious fanatics against Muslim holy places.

The warnings came hours after suspected Jewish terrorists torched a mosque at the village of Tuba Zangariya in the Upper Galilee .

Eyewitnesses reported that around 1:00 o'clock a.m. (after midnight Sunday), suspected Jewish terrorists stormed the main mosque at the village, and set it on fire, apparently using an inflammable substance. The entire interior of the mosque went up in flames, causing heavy damage.

Quranic texts and other religious books were burned. Before leaving, the perpetrators scrawled racist anti-Islam graffiti on the walls.

Ahmed Teibi, an Arab lawmaker in the Israeli Knesset, described the burning of the mosque as "a clear-cut terrorist act."

"This is not an isolated incident, this is not an aberration, it is not thunder on a clear day. This is a natural outcome of the systematic incitement against the Arab community. The poisoned incitement against our community by many rabbis and the Nazi-like edicts issued by some rabbinic councils, which forbid Jews from renting homes and apartments to Arabs have finally produced this.

"This grave deterioration must be stopped immediately. We hold the government of Israel solely responsible. We are talking about a racist, fascist and extremist government whose policies and practices have made this crime inevitable.

"Why is it that the racist rabbi of Safad has not been arrested? Why is it that not a single Jewish terrorist responsible for mosque torching has been arrested."

Teibi added that the best response to the terrorist act was rehabilitating the mosque as soon as possible and exercising a measure of self-restraint.

"This is the most appropriate response to these racists and fascists."

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An Interview with William T. Hathaway

Rather than sheepishly obeying in hopes of avoiding more punishment, we need to actively resist and take back the power that's been usurped from us. This struggle won't be comfortable, but it will be meaningful.

"I used to be a war criminal, now I'm an anti-war criminal. The government awarded me medals for the first crime, now they're trying to imprison me for the second," says ex-Green Beret William T. Hathaway. "I'm a war criminal not because I committed atrocities. I didn't, and most soldiers don't. But the US government's invasions of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were war crimes. The United Nations Charter clearly forbids aggressive attacks on other countries. That's exactly what those invasions were. Every GI who participates in that has to share some of the blame.

"I'm an anti-war criminal because I'm part of a group of domestic insurgents who are helping soldiers to desert, destroying computer systems, trashing recruiting offices, burning military equipment, and sabotaging defense contractors. We've become criminals for peace out of despair. Obama's morphing into a war president has convinced the only way to bring peace now is to bring the system down. We're defying the Patriot Act and working underground in secret cells to undermine the US military empire. So it's not surprising that the government's trying to lock us up."

In addition to his activism, Hathaway has authored four books and a series of articles about waging peace. His first book, A World of Hurt, won a Rinehart Foundation Award for its portrayal of the psychological roots of war: the emotional blockage and need for patriarchal approval that draw men to the military. His second book, CD-Ring, is a young-adult novel about a boy learning the need for peaceful communication. The third, Summer Snow, tells of an American warrior in Central Asia who falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her an alternative to the military mentality.

His latest book, Radical Peace: People Refusing War, presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It's a journey along diverse paths of nonviolence, the true stories of people working for peace in unconventional ways. The book has aroused controversy. Conservative critic Joanne Eddington described it as, "Loathsome ... further evidence that the hatred of America is reaching hysterical dimensions." On the other side of the political spectrum, Noam Chomsky described it as, "A book that captures such complexities and depths of human existence, even apart from the immediate message."

Hathaway is currently an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. ld Is Possible interviewed him from there via e-mail.

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Stephen Lendman

In his book "Overcoming Zionism," Joel Kovel called Israel "a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses" led by terrorists posing as democrats. Throughout its history, Israeli policy toward Arabs has been corrosive, destructive, racist, extremist, undemocratic and hateful. It's leaders chose violence, not peaceful coexistence; confrontation, not diplomacy; and strength through militarism, intimidation, and naked aggression.

For over 63 years, Palestinians paid the price. They've suffered brutally at the hands of "God's chosen people," believing Jewish exceptionalism renders Muslim Arabs inferior legitimate enemies and terrorists for wanting to live free in peace on their own land in their own country.

Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir once explained that Israel's 1982 Lebanon war was launched because there was a "terrible danger....not so much a military one as a political one," so a pretext was invented to preemptively attack when no threat or justification existed. [The same goes for Palestine. This is the way the Israelis do business.]

On October 2, [The Palestine Telegraph reported that] Israeli planes bombed an area east of Beit Hanoun, Gaza. Medical emergency spokesman Adham Abu Silmiyia said Israeli warplanes fired a missile, injuring three Palestinians. Israel said militants were targeted, providing no proof. They were nonviolent civilians.

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