John Quincy Adams Warned Us

An excellent piece by Jacob Hornberger- I can't add to it, but it reiterates what I've been writing about for some time:

In a Fourth of July message to Congress, John Quincy Adams suggested that if America were ever to embrace the principles of empire and militarism, she would become a dictatress of the world. What better evidence of Adams’ wisdom than President Obama’s assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, a state-sanctioned murder, one without any judicial process whatsoever?

Look at what an interventionist and imperialist foreign policy has wrought: a perpetual threat of terrorist attacks, which has been the government’s excuse for assuming extraordinary emergency powers — the same powers that many of the brutal U.S.-supported dictators in the Middle East wield: arbitrary arrests, kidnappings, indefinite detention, rendition, torture, kangaroo tribunals, and assassination.  

After the 9/11 attacks, statists cheered the assumption of these extraordinary emergency powers, naively believing that they would be exercised only against foreigners. But President Bush, whose CIA assassinated an American travelling in Yemen in 2002, always made it clear that these emergency powers extended to Americans. President Obama’s assassination of al-Awlaki is another reminder for the American people—that the U.S. government wields the post-9/11 power to kill its own people without any due process of law or judicial interference. It is a power, of course, that dictators throughout history have wielded.

read the whole thing.

If you do, you get clued into a little-known op-ed Pres. Truman did on the CIA,  He admitted that the spooks were getting spooky. The ghosts of history are crying out to us. When will we stop parroting talking points to each other and actually listen?