Ismail Salami

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was bitterly right when he said US President Barack Obama “seems to be a nice man, and that is precisely the problem” and aptly described him as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

Under the pretext of combating terrorism, Obama has followed in the footsteps of former President George Bush and even intensified the killer drone attacks in different parts of the world, a move which has terminated in the unfortunate deaths of multitudes of innocent people. President Obama argues that the drone strikes are focused efforts to exterminate people who are on a list of active terrorists and that they have not caused huge human losses.

Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents families of civilians killed in US killer drone strikes, says, "Either President Obama is lying to the nation, or he is too naive, to believe on the reports which CIA is presenting to [him]." In a similar strain, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK has said:

"So many people who spoke out against George [W.] Bush’s extraordinary rendition and Guantánamo and indefinite detention have been very quiet when it comes to the Obama administration, who is not putting people in those same kind of conditions, instead is just taking them out and killing them. So we need to make people speak up and say that when Obama says this [program] is on a tight leash, this is not true, this is a lie."

Only in Pakistan, Obama has authorized over 300 drone attacks and has killed innocent civilians. A new study by Stanford Law School and New York University's School of Law shows that the killer “drone strikes in Pakistan have killed far more people than the United States has acknowledged, have traumatized innocent residents and largely been ineffective.” Besides, the study calls for a re-evaluation of the practice, saying the number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low - about 2%. The report says Washington is misrepresenting drone strikes as "a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer," saying that in reality, "there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians."

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Mike Adams

In reviewing all the breaking news over the last few months and looking for the "big picture" of where America is headed, one pattern has emerged with striking regularity: America has quietly become less free in many ways than nations like Cuba, China and even Venezuela.

This is especially true in California, where "justice" has become a joke, and the power of the state is unleashed in personal vendettas against innocent citizens who have done absolutely nothing wrong other than refuse to bow down to state-run tyranny.

In California, the most freedom-crushing region of America, a man was recently thrown in jail for four days for photographing police. Photographing or video recording police is not a crime if done in a manner that does not directly impede their actions. But California police simply don't "like" being photographed, so they throw people in jail, without charge, and let them rot in California's third-world prisons for a few days as a form of retaliation.

In another case, California's raw milk man James Stewart has just been released from jail after being forced to sign a plea deal with L.A. County which accused him of the heinous crime of distributing unpasteurized milk. His punishment? Nearly four months in jail, being treated as a terrorist and denied nutrition to the point where he emerged looking like a Nazi war camp prisoner. The state then slapped on two felony charges, five years of probation, and a $300,000+ fine that the man has no way to pay because California raided his business at gunpoint, stole all his cash and then destroyed all the inventory of his business, including over $50,000 in fresh food.

This was all done, remember, for the "crime" of running a members-only club where people could pick up farm-fresh milk, eggs, cheese, melons and other better-than-organic foods. This is the new California, where the government literally destroys your business, your inventory, your livelihood, your freedom and even your health.

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Eric Peters

The particulars don’t matter. The principle is everything.

Here’s How it Will be Done…Incrementalism has proved depressingly effective as a tool for getting most people to quietly surrender their rights piecemeal. For gradually habituating them to an ever-diminishing circle of liberty. When the circle finally closes and their rights no longer exist at all, they hardly notice – because by that time, most of their rights have already been taken. The final surrender is met with a shrug rather than a scream of outrage.

Think how Americans have been habituated to arbitrary search and seizure. Something like the TSA would simply not have been tolerated if it came out of the blue sky circa 1980. And no, the terrr attacks of nineleven did not “change everything.” Getting people to accept “sobriety checkpoints” beginning around 1980 changed everything. Accept that – and something like Gate Rape is inevitable.

The same process works just as well when it comes to dismantling due process – and removing limits on what the government may not do to us. We didn’t get to legal strip searches for jaywalking or littering in one fell swoop. Nor rendition, torture as policy – and presidential kill lists. It is a matter of getting them – getting us – to tolerate “A” so that “B” will be accepted in turn. This is how the citizens of the United States will be disarmed.

No sudden, mass ban or attempt at confiscation – because that would probably lead to open violence on a large scale and they – people like Dear Leader Obama and his Vyshinsky, AG Eric Holder, know this.

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