Dick Cheney Defends Obama's NSA Stasi

When a man as notoriously opposed to historical American constitutional principles such as former V.P. Richard B. Cheney who is a stone cold fascist comes out in defense of Obama’s NSA Stasiyou get an idea of just how truly screwed that we all are. Cheney after all is the man most responsible for the decline in image of the United States when he and his neocon cabal essentially hijacked the George W. Bush presidency, running roughshod over the Constitution and leaving hell in his wake.  Speaking at a Steam Boat Springs Colorado gathering over the weekend Cheney was in rare form. While playing down any actual complimentary language towards  Obama himself, the evildoer whipped a shovel or two of chunks of bloody red meat to an adoring audience but it was sheer theater. Cheney engaged in some Clintonian hair-splitting in trying to separate the Obama administration’s use of the IRS to go after political groups yet not condemning the use of the NSA to spy on millions of Americans and their most intimate personal details. The insinuation being that while Barry and the boys must be held accountable for IRS abuses that he is somehow absolved for the NSA Stasi’s ongoing criminality. Behold this vile hypocrite for ye shalt never see another quite like him again. He didn’t overtly back Obama’s upcoming attack on Syria, a country that represents zero threat to the United States but considering his track record on such things I would imagine that his approval is assured even if not voiced out of necessity in the preposterous effort  to foist off his daughter Liz as Senatorial material.

But of course Cheney is defending the out of control NSA  because the surveillance apparatus it is the very operating system of the  fascist Deep State. One that Mr. Cheney himself played no small role in advancing and molding so that it now existentially threatens the American democracy itself . I am not sure that anyone reading this knows much about Continuity of Government (COG) which is a menace to all that we as Americans have ever held dear, so allow me to elaborate. During the Cold War it was determined that a parallel government needed to be set up. This was ostensibly for protection of the real government in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack/decapitation strike on Washington . The COG program was highly secretive and is very real despite the sort of paranoid, X Files connotations that will be made by those who dare not research them on their own lest they find their naive beliefs of the role of big government and American society shaken to their roots. During the 1980′s Cheney and his longtime buddy Donald Rumsfeld were both involved in ongoing secretive drills as the Reagan administration stared down the USSR. According to a 2004 piece for The Atlantic entitled The Armageddon Plan by James Mann from which I excerpt:

At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Defense, was a hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area—where, as the head of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy to the success of such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number to use in case of emergency.

After leaving their day jobs Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man—joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and one member of Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet—slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a disused military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear would head to each of the locations.

Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. Under it U.S. officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new “President” and his staff. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve “continuity of government,” and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role.

It was also during the Reagan administration that Lt. Colonel Oliver North who presented himself as an uber patriot (all while shanking Reagan himself in the back) while he was involved in drugs for weapons deals in order to circumvent the Constitution and to arm Latin American Contra militants he was also busily working on preparing for the suspension of the Constitution if necessary. Using a highly sophisticated computer program Colonel North, under REX 84 plotted the internment of domestic political dissidents. It was during the Iran-Contra hearings that North was asked by Texas Congressman Jack Brooks about the existence of such a program (REX 84) which brought forth the following conversation:

Congressman Jack] Brooks: Colonel North, in your work at the N.S.C. were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

Brendan Sullivan [North's counsel, agitatedly]: Mr. Chairman?

[Senator Daniel] Inouye: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch upon that?

Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was an area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

Inouye: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I’m certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.

According to a must read 2008 piece by investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham entitled The Last Roundup the author wrote of a massive national database named Main Core which now five years later seems to mesh very nicely with Edward Snowden’s revelations of Obama’s (and Cheney’s) now totally run amok security apparatus. I excerpt the following from The Last Roundup:

Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency’s incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem farfetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese-Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities.

Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of “militants” and “American negroes” who were to be held at “assembly centers or relocation camps.” In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish “temporary detention and processing capabilities” for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs.” Just what those “new programs” might be is not specified.

It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

On September 11, 2001 Continuity of Government plans were implemented to some degree by then Vice President Cheney who ran the show while Bush was rushed from the Florida grade school classroom where he was reading My Pet Goat to the kiddies and flown around the country out of the way while Cheney took care of business. In fact according to Richard Clarke, a member of Obama’s NSA whitewash committee was quoted by an ABC News story as saying “On the morning of 9/11, the entire continuity-of-government program was activated”. No matter what your political leanings are this is just plain anti-American. Hell I despise both Obama and Cheney for largely the same reasons in that they are above the law elitists who play games with the lives of real people, and they could give a tinker’s damn about any of us.

It is very chilling to know that these powers which anyone with an inkling of common sense and a smattering of healthy skepticism have grown so exponentially under the Obama regime. During the Bush-Cheney years there were fears that another ‘terrorist’ attack would result in martial law being declared, with NSPD-51 being signed by Dubya in 2007 and the establishment of NORTHCOM a domestic military command that flew in the face of the Posse Comitatus Act such fears were seemingly justified. It was  Cheney himself, the de-facto head of that previous administration who vested such enormous power in the Executive Branch and now that power can be yielded by Barry and the boys to crush dissent to their radical plans. When it all hits the fan (and it will) whether it be from more blowback from a Middle East escalation or the imminent economic collapse once the rigged six ways from Sunday financial markets go into full withdrawal after the Federal Reserve stops providing the fix of cheap money and Quantitative Easing just remember one thing. It is thanks to Cheney and his power-mad ilk that Obama can now put the country under martial law with nothing more than a phone call. Just think of what was done in Boston a few months back where thousands of paramilitary police were sent forth and half the city shut down as a test run to chase down one pathetic loser of an amateur terrorist.

I would think that conservatives should be aghast at what Cheney wrought, it is the very essence of a “turnkey totalitarian’ system and he has put it into the hands of Obama’s rogue regime. Mr. Cheney may have been able to dupe an audience of loyalist that “The biggest threat facing us are terrorists armed with something more than plane tickets and box cutters” but that is just more of the same crap that we have been fed for twelve years now.

No Dick, the “biggest threat” is a run amok government steeped in secrecy and contempt for the U.S. Constitution in the hands of a power crazed man like Barack H. Obama and what you fail to acknowledge is that YOU were instrumental in setting up the system of oppression that he now has at his disposal.