Is America Already a Police State

This is an article that i came across on a great web-site infowars.com. In the last eight years we have seen a slew of police state legislation, to the point that it has often been hard to keep up. By now, most take the Department of Homeland Security for granted, but the implications of its emergence should not be ignored. We’ve all, of course, heard of the PATRIOT Act*, though by now it is in the back of our minds, having been normalized in the discourse of the mainstream, corporate media. A few remember the ‘continuity of government’ measures implemented during 9/11 (though few are aware that they were never revoked and instead left in place indefinitely). Many haven’t forgotten the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Still, many Americans have lost track of the legislative developments, or assumed that the end of the Bush era meant the end of the era of police state preparations, which it obviously did not.

You Can Be Declared An Enemy Combatant
Where to start? There’s the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006, which grants the president the power to “identify American citizens as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ and detain them indefinitely without charge,” as Heather Wokusch reports. “The vague criteria for being labeled an enemy combatant (taking part in ‘hostilities against the United States’) don’t help either,” writes Wokusch. Senator Patrick Leahy called the legislation “flagrantly unconstitutional.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reports that “the Military Commissions Act of 2006 gives the president absolute power to decide who is an enemy of our country and to imprison people indefinitely without charging them with a crime.” According to the ACLU’s MCA fact sheet:
This law removes the Constitutional due process right of habeas corpus for persons the president designates as unlawful enemy combatants. It allows our government to continue to hold hundreds of prisoners more than four years without charges, with no end in sight.
Perhaps more disturbing still is “The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007” (H.R. 1955). As Jessica Lee reports for The Independent,
Many observers fear that the proposed law will be used against U.S.-based groups engaged in legal but unpopular political activism, ranging from political Islamists to animal-rights and environmental campaigners to radical right-wing organizations. There is concern, too, that the bill will undermine academic integrity and is the latest salvo in a decade-long government grab for power at the expense of civil liberties.

Domestic Troop Deployments, Civil Unrest, & Obama’s Police State

The Bush era is over, officially, but many mistakenly believe that Bush-era police state activity is as well, which is it not (nor did it begin with Bush in the first place). Many of the actions undertaken by George W. Bush to empower himself and the police state remain active tools in the Obama administration, and how Obama himself will approach them remains to be seen. Many remain hopeful, yet at least as many are disillusioned by the actions of Obama thus far, and no longer cling to a messianic view our new president. But as a wise man once said, you don’t stab someone with a nine-inch blade, pull it out three inches, and call it progress (or in this case, “hope” and “change”).
Even as the glorious age of Obama and the thousand years of peace it will bring unfolds before us like a lotus flower made of rainbow starlight, new blossoms of repression continue to emerge from the decomposing muck of the Bush administration. As Marjorie Cohn reports, newly revealed Bush-era memos “reveal a concerted strategy to cloak the president with power to override the Constitution.” She continues:
The memos provide “legal” rationales for the president to suspend freedom of speech and press; order warrant less searches and seizures, including wiretaps of US citizens; lock up US citizens indefinitely in the United States without criminal charges; send suspected terrorists to other countries where they will likely be tortured; and unilaterally abrogate treaties. According to the reasoning in the memos, Congress has no role to check and balance the executive. That is the definition of a police state.
Memos and legislation aside, one of the more disturbing developments in the emerging and already present American police state is the deployment of troops, as of October 1st of last year, on American soil, with the expressed purpose of quelling domestic revolt. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, which is now deployed within the United States, “has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle,” according to Gina Cavallaro of the Army Times.

This is the Endgame

Even the elite are on edge. Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has warned of riots within the United States. IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has also warned of “riots and unrest.”
Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America: Letters of Warning to a Young Patriot, and Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, has identified a series of key steps would-be dictators take to close down a more or less “open” society, a blueprint for turning representative republics into outright fascist dictatorships. These steps were present in the development every fascist state in modern history, and every society that displayed all of them eventually became a fascist dictatorship. All are now present in America.
No discussion of the emerging American police state would be complete without a mention of last year’s Republican and Democratic National Conventions. The RNC 8 are being charged with “Conspiracy to Riot in the Furtherance of Terrorism,” and are literally being held accountable for the actions of other individuals. For more on the conventions, check out the documentaries Ground Noise & Static and Terrorizing Dissent, both available online.
Recent years have also seen the emergence of the Green Scare, targeting earth and animal liberationists and labeling them as “terrorists” under such draconian legislation as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA). While environmental activists are receiving higher sentences than al Qaeda operatives, the FBI also arrested four animal rights activists on “terrorism” charges under AETA, for chalking, leafleting, and wearing masks while protesting. More recently, the feds arrested 2 animal rights activists in Utah and are charging them as “terrorists” under AETA for releasing mink. The industries of exploitation, in other words, are actively co-conspiring with the government to create legislation designed to maintain the status quo and protect their “right” to exploit and torture animals for profit.
Even MTV ran warnings of the impending police state, and it appears that YouTube has censored and removed them. I was able to find one version still on YouTube that has not (yet) been removed: That corporate pimps and whores like MTV are warning of such things, and that YouTube is censoring it, speaks to the gravity of the situation. The elite are fracturing and factionalizing.
Taken all together, these developments point towards the presence and continual emergence of an American police state. But this is only the United States. All over the world, similar developments are taking place. In virtually all “developed” countries, the surveillance state is steadily on the rise. In America, there is also the North American Union (NAU) and the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which aim to establish a common market and dissolve trade and security barriers (as opposed to the free movement of human beings) between the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
Stephen Lendman describes the SPP as “a tri-national agreement, below the radar, for greater economic, political, and security integration with secret business and government working groups devising binding policies with no public knowledge or legislative debate.” “In short,” he continues, “it’s a military-backed corporate coup d’etat against the sovereignty of three nations, their populations and legislative bodies. It’s a dagger through the heart of democratic freedom in all three, yet the public is largely unaware of what’s happening.”
We would be mistaken to believe that these tendencies towards fascism are the result of specific individuals and administrations, just as we would be mistaken to believe that the State will ever sanction any form of dissent and resistance that truly threatens their status quo. The exigencies of centralized authority and power are systemic, rather than personal. The beauty of Obama is that the higher people put their hopes in him, the greater will be their ultimate feeling of betrayal and disappointment. This, perhaps, will spur the populous towards true direct action and self-liberation.
It Is Time

To answer the question posited in the title of this article: my conclusion is that—considering the developments reviewed in this article—yes, America is already a police state. For now, it remains one that prefers to pacify the population through the use of coerced consent and propaganda, but it will remain so only so long as the populous allows themselves to continue to be enslaved and exploited, their land bases destroyed for the profit of the few. In the end, they will resort to killing us. Mark my words. They have done it in the past, and they continue to do it elsewhere today. Soon, they will do it in America.
As the global resistance continues to unfold, so will the repressive responses of the State apparatus. We can expect escalated attacks against our communities of resistance as we escalate our revolt against this culture of death and destruction.
We must develop relationships based upon affinity and communities capable of withstanding the onslaught of the repressive mechanisms of the State and transnational capital. We must develop the networks and connections necessary to survive the endgame of the elite’s psychotic obsession with total authority, power, and control. We must free ourselves from the mechanisms of dependency that keep us suckling at the teat of systemic global ecocide. We must establish autonomous communities of active resistance and stand in firm defiance against the destruction of our world and the precariousness of our lives. The best time was yesterday. The second best time is now.