David Duke

Our policies in the Mideast and elsewhere are actually Israeli policies rather than truly American ones.

Probably no event in recent history has been more damaging to the image of America than the tortures that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. President Bush claimed that one of the justifications of attacking Iraq, was that people were being tortured by Saddam Hussein in that country.

Now that the graphic, disgusting pictures of Abu Ghraib reveal unspeakable tortures of Iraqi men and women in American custody (and the world only saw a very small portion of them), it is certain that America’s enemies will use Bush’s own logic to inspire and justify murderous attacks on Americans.

What happened at Abu Ghraib is as unAmerican and as damaging to America as any attack by al-Qaeda . The tortures that occurred there are symbolic of the fact that America has lost its way and that those in control of our nation have no sense of American justice or our honorable traditions.

No appeal to patriotism is any excuse for the tortures. I am a Patriot. I love America. I even instructed anti-Communist officers for the U.S. Government in Laos during the Viet Nam War. But, what happened at Abu Ghraib is symbolic that America has lost her heart and soul, and I grieve for our lost sense of morality and justice.

Any government that would spawn those kinds of injustices on other peoples will someday commit them on its own. Once the line is crossed, there is no going back.

More »

James Bamford

In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in. He was pulling a small black travel bag and had a number of laptop cases draped over his shoulders. Inside those cases were four computers packed with some of his country’s most closely held secrets.

Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the “Movers & Shakers” list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day. Written sixty-five years ago, it described a fictitious totalitarian society where a shadowy leader known as “Big Brother” controls his population through invasive surveillance. “The telescreens,” Orwell wrote, “have hidden microphones and cameras. These devices, alongside informers, permit the Thought Police to spy upon everyone….”

Today, as the Snowden documents make clear, it is the NSA that keeps track of phone calls, monitors communications, and analyzes people’s thoughts through data mining of Google searches and other online activity. “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,” Orwell wrote about his protagonist, Winston Smith.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

More »