tyranny

This week Brian McLain continues his series by examining The John Warner Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007, The Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the National Security Presidential Directive 51.

Just in case you haven't noticed before, the United States of America has become a presidential tyranny. We've been clanging this bell here (and elsewhere) since late September 2001, and have seen it confirmed over and over through the years – with torture edicts, domestic spying, rendition, secret prisons, indefinite detention of uncharged, untried captives, etc. – and most recently and most baldly with the "Military Commissions Act," which enshrined the principle of arbitrary presidential power in law and gutted the ancient privilege of habeas corpus. This was rubberstamped by the Republican-led Congress last year – and is still standing strong under the Democratic-led Congress.

1. Why is the United States government spending millions of dollars to track down critics of George W. Bush in the press? And why have major American universities agreed to put this technology of tyranny into the state's hands?

At the most basic level, of course, both questions are easily answered: 1) Power. 2) Money. The Bush administration wants to be able to root out—and counteract—any dissenting noises that might put a crimp in its ongoing crusade for "full spectrum dominance" of global affairs, while the august institutions of higher learning involved—the universities of Cornell, Pittsburgh and Utah—crave the federal green that keeps them in clover.

President Harry S. Truman declined two requests by the British to go to war against Iran in 1951 and 1952. But still conceded to a allow a covert CIA operation in conjunction with British Intel. In 1953, General Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the go-ahead of the CIA operation known as Project Ajax (led by Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy and cousin of FDR) to undermine and overthrow a democratic Muslim government and install a brutal dictator. Why? In order to reinstall BP in control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.