The President's Praetorian Guard - Auguring What?

I pause in discussion of illegal immigration, citizens arrest, and guerrilla law because what follows confirms what I have long expected and feared. Damn, but sometimes I hate to be right!

At a time of joy, especially for a guy like me whose life has ordered his priorities as only looking the imminent threat of pain and death in the eye can, it’s infuriating to have discovered what I did during our week visiting our first great grandchild and her parents. I’ve said it before, and at the risk of yelling wolf too often I have tell the reader that the nation I love enough to do everything honor will permit for faces its Götterdämmerung as the republic it has been. It’s that simple.

It’s not only that simple, but as many of the people who know me would tell you, I have seen it coming and feared it for almost three decades. The conclusive stroke is a book, a book vindicating everything I have said here concerning the silent coup d’etat of the military industrial complex President Dwight Eisenhower warned of in his valedictory address to the nation and shortly after it occurred. The book is “Blackwater, the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” by Jeremy Scahill, and it documents what may very well be the final maneuver preparatory to overt conversion of the United States’ federal republic into nothing less than a totalitarian, neo-conservative dictatorship.

The President of the United States – we must not forget that he is merely a figurehead actor for the cabal of military industrialists who control Washington, D.C. and the branches of government – now has a private army. Comprised of “Steve Canyon” proprietary companies like the Bird Air, Flying Tiger, Air America, and literally dozens more of the pre-Frank Church Hearings CIA, new companies like Blackwater (named for a swamp in North Carolina where it is based), Triple Canopy, DynaCorp, Aegis, and others have been organized and formed under the cover of virtual secrecy provided by the Operation Mockingbird media. Numbering near a quarter million, the new Praetorian Guard for the President operates outside the reach of both the courts and legal system and the scrutiny of the public.

Placed tactically by state-of-the-art political and economic maneuvering devised in think tanks that make the RAND corporations of old look Neanderthal, they are even further above the law and untouchable by the courts as Internal Revenue Service and the nation’s Brobdingnagian corporations. They have the power to operate as we might have suspected when informed of things like Abu Graib prison, secret CIA torture cells covertly located in sovereign nations, and presidential, congressional, and bureaucracy complicity in contemptuously blatantly violations of the U.S. Constitution by the White House and president.

Let me summarize where we are historically by asking a simple question. What do you believe the public – what would YOU do – should the president refuse to leave office, and enforce his refusal with the armed (replete with the most high-tech weapons known to man) might of as many as a quarter of a million of the most professionally skilled - and ruthless – special operations soldiers in the world? Or, imagine what the ultra-right wing of neo-conservatism might do, were Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi elected president and vice-president of the U.S. With hundreds of billions – trillions, even – of dollars at stake, knowing of their history after World War Two having to do with similar straits, tell yourself that they would meekly submit to the political process supposedly governing our country.

Let me digress long enough to point out first that I have been monitoring the rise of the military industrial complex corporations since literally boyhood when I was impressed into their service. More, I have for more than twenty-five years operated in the shadows of CIA Steve Canyon operations and armies, mostly involved in providing armed and unarmed close quarters combat skills training sought by individual mercenary special operations soldiers. Additionally, and as I have both publicized here and in the book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” I have covertly infiltrated the federal bureaucracy at all levels. There are, I contend, few people as qualified to hold forth as I do here.

I have also devoted what others including wives and family consider an inordinate amount of time to sociology and societal trends related to Operation Mockingbird and other “orchestrations” – the favorite characterization of the man who probably first conceived such a thing – designed to weaken the nation’s resistance to eventual coup and totalitarian takeover. In fact, you see, I recognized the enemy early on. Recruited originally at fifteen years for the purpose of doing its “wet work,” I recognized who it was General of the Armies and President of the United States Eisenhower spoke of in his lamentably not-so-famous or long-remembered speech. Since it’s pivotal, let me recollect it for you:

“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Note, in particular, the words “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.” The General wasn’t the only tactician in government aware of what would be required to take over the nation and thereby continue the acquisition of wealth and power facilitated by war. Operation Mockingbird, control of the public’s alertness and knowledge was among the first programs begun by the newly-instituted Central Intelligence Agency; using, that is, the unlimited funding provided the fledgling organization – or should I say “orchestration” – by an already co-opted U.S. Congress.

The United States, the same as any nation and people, has a government of the kind and character the people provide for and permit. The deteriorated state of our government, axiomatically, is due the deteriorated state of the public it rules and abuses. Assessment is easy, a matter of self-examination. If, for instance, you can read history, especially that of the last two presidential administrations and doubt that Dwight D. Eisenhower foresaw accurately what has happened to the government and to you, you’re simply too far gone to be of use to a republic and its governance.

If your fellow countrymen are in the same condition, ask yourself how there remains any hope for our nation, for continued liberty, and the dream of our Founding Fathers.

Ask yourself again what you will do if Eisenhower, and I, are right.

At what point will you react? When what amounts to martial law – total suspension of all constitutional freedoms (all of which have already been declared to be in jeopardy) – has been declared? When we have invaded Iran or another Arab nation? When the entire world of Islam has declared jihad against our country? When the corporate depredations and hubris of our colonializing, global-warming and planet polluting corporations has resulted in a massive retaliatory economic attack by the rest of the world’s nations has brought us to our financial knees?

Assume for a giddy moment that our political process were still generally intact, and that a new president and vice-president - Hillary and Nancy, for instance – were elected and proceeded to follow the agenda already associated with and expected of them – end of the war in Iraq, for instance, or a significant shift in policy costing the military industrial complex trillions of dollars. Do you really think the latter would quietly acquiesce, that their corporate greed would suddenly abate for the good of the country? Having already seen the public’s reaction concerning the present administration’s depredation of our civil rights? Why would neo-conservatism, its originators and adherents halt their drive toward their new – they’ve published their intentions, you know – fascism?

What do you think you would to, should the new fascists not so acquiesce to your naïve wishes? Rebellion may already be out of the question. Don’t forget the record of history (of course, you haven’t read it – a large part of the problem we face). Consider what the world’s colonialist capitalists have already done, and what they are doing. Do you really think that the same people who won’t let the health of the planet and its ecosystem stand in the way of gargantuan profit will be any more concerned for your health? Wow – you DO need to read my book! Why would people who follow the Ford Pinto Doctrine of business (remember? – rather than spend the money necessary to make safe the car that exploded easily, Ford was willing to pay costs of settling all the claims of those burned and burned to death), do business differently in this case?

More, the rebellion Founding Father Thomas Jefferson assured us would from “time to time” be necessary may be impossible. The military industrial complex corporations’ drive toward control of the U.S. and world dominion has been planned and in operation since the late forties and early fifties, let’s not forget. The plotters have been watching, probing and testing the U.S. public’s character, its resolve, and the effect of their methods for all that time. The new Praetorian Guard is only their most recent operation and success. While the public became more and more decadent, they waxed sanguine, driving relentlessly toward their profit goals. Patriotism, loyalty to nation and country, has been shown by history to mean nothing to a capitalist, after all. As Thomas Jefferson observed, “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”

Look around, as I am wont to say. If you don’t recognize the truth in Jefferson’s remark, you merely personify how fat-headed and vulnerable the nation has become.

The men being recruited by Blackwater and their like are the best special operations soldiers in the world. I know because I’ve trained them. They will not only cut through our volunteer conventional military like a hot razor through butter, they will slaughter any citizen militia, of any size, like blind sheep. Don’t forget what any such militia must be made of, and what “Americans” have come to be. Fat, slovenly, morally decayed creatures reared and maintained in an effeminate, climate controlled society like this one make damned poor revolutionaries.

Of course, it may not be necessary for anything as overt as a president refusing to leave office to happen. The military industrialists who already control the country’s government would have need of an open and public coup only if the president they have put in office should refuse to leave, and use his Praetorian Guard in an effort to seize despotic power by military force. The nation and its public would then watch as the loyalties of the Praetorians were made manifest. I’d bet on whomever could pay their price.

But let us assume that by some miracle the military industrial complex plotters don’t stage the final assault of their long prosecuted campaign against republican democracy. Assume, in other words, that the public continues in its present posture, the nation drifting and decaying as it is. Where is it going? How much more can you give? Where do you think everything that’s been going on will end? For an object lesson, pick any or all of the government’s handling of matters from illegal immigration to global warming and pollution, to the war on terror. The method is essentially that of reductio ad absurdum, there is no doubt whatever where any of it will end, and the future is thunderously obvious.

It is likewise obvious, and rationally irrefutable that the United States has become a cancer the rest of the planet can no longer endure. While the U.S. citizen addled by Mockingbird media propaganda may remain oblivious, the fact of our past and present behavior thunderously manifest to the planet’s nations and peoples. If you have somehow survived Mockingbird, put yourself in the shoes of the citizenry in any other nation on the globe. The U.S., less than five percent of the world’s people, uses thirty-five percent of the planet’s energy, and contributes forty-one percent of its pollution. If that weren’t enough, the people of the United States demand even more of the planet’s energy, will not curb their appetite for fossil fuel, slow their pollution of the atmosphere, or leave their neighbors anywhere on the globe alone politically or economically.

In its capitalist ravening, in fact, the U.S. makes no bones whatever about its intentions for the future, and its past – even where the original inhabitants of the continent are concerned – is far better known to persons in foreign nations than it is to its own people. It all adds up like arithmetic, you see – the column of figures determines inexorably the sum. Want to see the “column?” I refer you to the history of history’s last private army and Praetorian Guard.

They were called the Waffen SS, and their creator was a man named Hitler.