SOLA 8 22 Unanswered Questions About 9/11

'9/11 was an inside job': Full speech by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at UN

NEVER BEFORE SEEN FOOTAGE of WTC7 Before Collapse #911truth

CIA, MI6 Had Prior Knowledge about ISIS assault in advance, failed to react

The Top10 Reasons to Stop the #Cromnibus and #Shutdown the American Govt

Here is a list of at least ten reasons you should support a peaceful revolution in America at this time, which STARTS NOW by stopping the $1.1 trillion budget.  #Cromnibus #ShutItDown.

Centralized Control of Economic Markets - The markets are rigged.  Everything on the stock market, gold, silver, LIBOR, currency markets, HFT, you name it, the evidence is there. #RestoreGlassSteagall #ProhibitHFT

Corporate Control of Our Legal System - The justice system is f*cked.  Eric Holder is in Contempt of Congress for Fast and Furious.  The Supreme Court says corporations are people and any amount of money can secretly flow towards political campaigns (Citizens United) #RepealCitizensUnited

Israeli control of the US Congress, White House, and Pentagon through lobbying, coersion, blackmail, dual citizens, and outright murder and genocide.  For examples see "The Day Israel Attacked America" and "9/11 Missing Links".

Authoritarian Domestic Surveillance - The police state and surveillance state is out of control.  From the NDAA, Patriot Act, to predator drones, and NSA working with high tech to monitor every form of communication, every physical, financial, and digital transaction is recorded and monitored.  They may not have anything on you yet, but they will.  #DefundNSA #NoMoreDrones

Centralized Control of the Economy, Prices, and Wages - The Federal Reserve is a private banking cartel, owned by TBTF banks that bankrupt cities (Detroit, Stockton), counties (Jefferson), and States (Who's first? IL or CA). #AuditTheFed #RestoreGlassSteagall

Quasi Secret Societies and Foreign Agents Control Foreign Policy for Profit -   Skull and Bonesman John Kerry picked up where Hillary left off and is using the CIA and State Dept to coerce and blackmail foreign nations, bringing in the IMF, and NGOs to impose austerity while the Billionaires like Soros, Kissinger, and Brzezinski, Blackstone Group, and Goldman Sachs rape, pillage and plunder. I am talking about Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Sudan, Cuba, Venezuela, and the rest of the countries we currently attempt to destabilize using covert operations.   Sometimes they even use assassins (mercenaries like Blackwater) or KINETIC action in false flag operations to DESTABILIZE foreign countries or worse, to manipulate public opinion to serve a hidden agenda here at home, such as United Nations Agenda 21.  #InvestigateSkullAndBones

In Sickness and in Health - BigPharma and Monsanto are poisoning our food and water.  While much has been done about this to make people aware of genetically modified foods, they are still being slipped in undetected and unlabeled.  Meanwhile Obamacare is being deployed to guarantee long term profits for the pharmaceutical industry and corporate hospitals.  Rates will rise and sickness will rise and they will profit. #KillMonsanto #EndRockefellerMedicine

Loss of Sovereignty, Loss of Property -  Presidents from Bush Sr to Obama are implementing a United Nations plan (#UNAgenda21) to remove private property, disarm Americans, and force the middle class into overpriced high density, stack and pack condos and apartments in mega metropolices in a regionalization power play to create city-states like Rome. #StopUNAgenda21

Corporate Welfare and Legal Bribery - An oligopoly continues to operate with impunity while lobbying Congress and the White House to pass legislation that feeds their mega corporate control and destroys the middle class and small businesses and farms.  #CampaignFinanceReform

A Shadow Government Propaganda Machine -  That same oligarchy controls the media so much that NOTHING gets discussed or debated or presented on TV, news, or radio that doesnt fit the false left right narrative that is simply Divide and Conquer.

Weapons Trade, Subversion and False Flags - The attacks on Benghazi on 9/11/12 were part of a CIA and State Department operation to trade arms from the Libyan invasion through Turkey to the Free Syrian Army and Al Queda in Syria.  An American Ambassador and several others were killed, possibly to stop them from blowing the whistle.  The coverup has been amazing and even includes Hillary Clinton falling and getting amnesia.  Look it up!  The Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission are UNELECTED UNACCOUNTABLE technocrats that manipulate foreign policy for the benefit of their military industrial complex. #Solving911 #Investigate911 #ArrestMcCainForTreason

The Prison Industrial Complex - We have the world's largest prison population, much of which is FOR PROFIT and prisoners are often producing products and engaging in services.  That's slave labor right here in America.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Government Statistics - The govt sanctioned economic data from the Federal Reserve such as "unemployment" is rigged.  When CPI and PPI dont include FOOD and ENERGY or EDUCATION then WTF does it measure?  The measure of money supply changes every time the numbers look bad and the purchasing power of the US dollar has declined as much as 98% since the Federal Reserve coup of 1913.

Obama's Reducation Program - Obama's Common Core is degrading the quality of education in this country - on purpose to create better corporate employees, meanwhile the manufacturing capabilities and critical thinking skills of our country are being wiped out. #CommonCore is a Disease!

Gun Free Zones - Every time a lone nut allegedly pulls off the most unlikely round of assassinations, like the Dark Knight shooter in Aurora, CO, or the Sandy Hook elementary shooting, the Federal government looks for ways to take our guns and defy the second Amendment.

Freedom of the Press, First Amendment - Corporate media lies through its teeth on a daily basis on behalf of the shadow government, perpetuating the left right paradigm in order to divide and conquer us all.  Meanwhile, our ability to speak out, blow the whistle, or even protest has been censored, trampled, and muffled. 

A Nation of Debt - The United States has the largest national debt in the history of the world.  What sort of debt slaves will be required to pay that off? #MonetaryReformAct

Selective Enforcement of Tax Law - The IRS has been accused of orchestrating partisan politics in favor of Barack Obama and the Democratic party in the 2012 selection process.  The fact that Lois Lerner is taking the heat and pleading the 5th should be alarming to everyone.  Let us not forget, the US Attorney General is in contempt of Congress for Fast and Furious.  We need an AG that will prosecute perjury by Clapper, banksters, and more.


No Taxation Without Representation - 1913 was a bad year for the USA.  We got income taxes (started at 1%), the IRS, and the Federal Reserve, all through coersion and deceptive practices.  None of them are Constitutional. #EndtheFed

Military Suicide - Our armed forces are suffering under decades of war and no amount of drone strikes will relieve them.  Suicides are occurring at an alarming rate despite mainstream attempts to dispel that news.

Do you need more? I am sure there are another 100 reasons to stop this administration and Congress from destroying what's left of the country.  

Did I mention that we've been engaged in ENDLESS WAR at TAXPAYER's EXPENSE as part of a corporate welfare program?  50% of the $1.1 trillion spending bill is for the military industrial complex.  Can anyone else see that we are near World War 3 ostensibly over Ukraine, a crisis the US government absolutely provoked.  

 

Distinguished U.S Marine Stands Up for American People and 9/11 Truth

WOW! MUST SEE! Russia Today Cover U.S. Links To Al Qaeda, 9/11 "Inside J...

Debunking The Official Story: 9/11: The Devil's in the details

The Political Dominance of The Cabal: by Mark Gorton

I've referred to it as the High Cabal.  Mark Gordon, a successful Wall Street and Tech entrepreneur has described it in other ways!

@mediamonarchy Respected Wall St. Financial Expert declares Illuminati exists via Gawker. Source: http://t.co/f7RxpHs1UG #NewWorldNextWeek
— Darren Williams (@DazAltTheory) April 16, 2014

"Another of Gorton's writings, "The Political Dominance of the Cabal" is a point-by-point primer on the Cabal's alleged members and murderous conspiracies.(Example: President Bill Clinton was a "Senior Member of the Dixie Mafia... Associated with dozens of suspicious deaths"; George HW Bush masterminded the savings and loan crisis, Reagan's shooting, and "domestic death squads.") The third document, "The Coup of '63, Part 1" is a JFK assassination-centric shorter version of "Fifty Years of the Deep State."

Yesterday, we called Mark Gorton to ask him about the authenticity of these documents. After a long pause, he said that he was mulling over the "consequences for me" if these documents came to light. Like what? "People killing me and my children," he said. "This has the potential to change my life."

Gorton did confirm that he wrote the essays, though, which he described as works in progress. He even agreed to send us the most recent versions of the documents, which are the versions we've embedded below. In his email to us yesterday, Gorton described his fears:

I am concerned because the criminal syndicate that I describe in these documents has a long history of harassing and killing people who describe what they do. They not only kill the people that speak up, on occasion, they also kill their family members. I have a good life and four great kids, and I would prefer not to bring the wrath of a criminal government down upon my head.

I would ask that you completely read all three documents and think about what they have to say. Having these documents suddenly appear on a blog like Gawker changes my risk profile in life.

That being said, I do think that the truth needs to be told about what has happened to our democracy. I have written these documents and I have sent them out to a limited audience. If you are interested in publishing this material, I ask that you talk to me and that this be done in a thoughtful manner. I would prefer that my life not be put in jeopardy by a casual, quick, one off, blog post.

We have decided to publish the material. We trust that any shadowy forces will be kept at bay by the public attention we are drawing to this topic."

The Cabal

Scene from: SKYGATE 911 Pilots for 9/11 Truth

FBI Storm Guantanamo, Enquiring about 9/11

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/us/politics/covert-inquiry-by-fbi-rattles-9-11-tribunals.html?from=homepage




13 years ZERO conviction on 9/11. The greatest attack in modern history and there isn't enough evidence to convict a single person, yet we've spent BILLIONS bombing, building, protecting opium crops, surrounding Iran, and creating a police state at home.

Next time you fly little boiling frog, ask your self why Grandma gets felt up by TSA.

Next time you call your mom to wish her happy birthday, ask yourself, is this call being recorded?




Why? For your safety. Welcome to 1984, where the only way out is 1776.

posted from Bloggeroid

ABC 9/11 Insider Trading & Foreknowledge 9/20/01

New Poll: More Americans "Rethinking" 9/11, Focus on World Trade Center 7 Collapse

When THOUSANDS of scientists, architects, and engineers from all over the world gather to discuss 9/11, they focus on World Trade Center 7 (WTC7), the THIRD tower that fell on 9/11/2001.  It was not hit by a plane.  The new owner, Israeli real estate mogul Larry Silverstein, is on TV, on record, saying he ordered the fire department to "pull it", which in demolition terms means to bring it down.  Hmmm.

If you still don't question the official story on 9/11/2001, then you SERIOUSLY have been a victim of massive propaganda and you need to WAKE UP! Call your Congressman and inform them to re-investigate 9/11.  More importantly, those Congressmen need to go on national television and express their doubts about the official story.  The world needs to see we are serious about changing America's course of destruction and decline.

New picture of the ReThink911 Ottawa bus ads. Watch the videos and sign the petition at http://t.co/VpVB7xPNG9 pic.twitter.com/F1jVD9j26e

— ReThink911 (@ReThink911org) December 20, 2013

The Official ReThink911 Video

BEST 9/11 DOCUMENTARY EVER!(FULL MOVIE)

How to Steal an Airplane: From 9/11 to MH370 (+playlist)

Former Marine and Northwest Airlines Pilot Field McConnell Exposes Boeing Secrets of MH370

Former Marine and Northwest Airlines Pilot Field McConnell Exposes Boeing Secrets of MH370



More on cyber hijacking in this video below:



Boeing wins patent on uninterruptible autopilot system | Homeland Security News Wire" ( http://bit.ly/1hihSLs

"New autopilot will make another 9/11 impossible - News - London Evening Standard" ( http://bit.ly/1hihXyJ )

Uninterruptible Autopilot

Numerous aviation industry personnel who joined a fight to expose TSA and high-level aviation corruption have experienced retaliatory actions. Airline insiders fired for testifying before the 911 Commission or for reporting other security issues continue to be suppressed, persecuted in worst ways as targeted individuals, leaving flying passengers at risk.

More than one airline employee lost his job for tryting to keep airline passengers safer. One of these, however, has fought avaiation officials’ since 911 and even more so, since Boeing installed on all of its jets auto uninterruptible autopilots without provisions to train pilots how to use them, making this technology a terrorist weapon. This man is former Delta/Northwest pilot Field McConnell. 

All Boeings have been modified with an uninterruptible autopilot, according to McConnell. Pilots, however, are not trained to use them, making aircraft a weapon for terrorists to access and deploy, he says.

“The significance is that pilots are not aware of this, feature, and therefore they cannot comply with aviation regulations, namely FAR 121533,” he says.

McConell has warned government officials and the public that a crisis such as the Malaysian hijacking would occur, due to lack of pilot training regarding uninterruptible autopilots. In his attempt to save lives, he has been repeatedly gagged by United States officials.

In a remarkable Voice of Russia interview, McConnell detailed how the plane was equipped to be flown remotely. When pilots are unaware this new feature has been installed, the pilots are incapable of properly managing it in case of an emergency that would meet federal aviation regulations, he says. 

Boeing’s uninterruptible autopilot modification makes it impossible for hijackers to hijack, supposedly – if pilots understand what to do. Pilots in general were not even aware of this new installation until McConnell blew the whistle on it. Within 4 days of his doing this, Boeing admitted having this modification. On March 3, 2007, Boeing said within two years, all Boeings would have this type of autopilot.

Had the auto-uninterruptible autopilot been available on 911, it couldn’t have happened, he said, adding pilots must be trained to use them.

As it is, however, “someone on the ground could fly the plane and override the pilot’s decisions.” 

.

“If a physical pilot hijacker tried to get into the cockpit, the pilot could trigger the autopilot. Then, officials on the ground could remotely gain control and direct it to a safe landing. This has been known since 2007,” McConnell said. “Once operating, it cannot be turned off by anyone in the plane.”

It should be a safety feature, he says, but in the case of Malaysia Airlines, it might be proven that one entity tried to take control of it, or both pilots may have flown it west. The plane could have been taken to any one of 108 places in the world, according to McConnell. 

“The problem is none of the American pilots in the U.S. have been educated regarding the existence of this Boeing uninterruptible autopilot, which by Boeing’s own words, have been deployed since 2007 and deployed on every Boeing airliner since 2009,” he said. “So is it possible a terrorist group could hack into this system like on the Malaysian plane and fly the plane remotely.”

McConnell followed that, saying what this reporter has highlighted repeatedly, such as in the article You Won’t Believe What Spies On Malaysia Plane Were Doing, published March 12 on Before It’s News.

“Keep in mind there were 20 software engineers, Chinese nationals working for Freescale in Austin Texas, and some of the patented material they were working on were stealth cloaking of airliners and chips that can be installed in these exotic weapon systems. (Emphasis added)

Who Took Control Of Malaysia Airlines Boeing?

“And at the end of the day, every airliner that has an auto-interruptible autopilot, making planes a very complex remotely controlled flying vehicles, but it should only be remotely controlled if there’s a threat against the aircraft or the people on board.

“I presume that it’s possible that someone on board the aircraft, if they are a software engineer for instance could trigger the remote control of it, but I think its more likely that someone at a ground station, or even an Air Force AWACS aircraft or the Navy aircraft could gain authority from the operating company, in this case Malaysia.”

McConnell explained the protocol for that to happen: “If Malaysia realized they lost control of the aircraft, if their SOC,  System Operations Center, cannot electronically recapture the control of their own aircraft, they could contact a variety of nations that might be able to remotely control it — if Malaysia contacted them and said there was a problem.” 

He followed that saying, “One nation that I’m confident could do that is the United States of  American and if there was an AWACS in that area, they could have  taken control of it.”

There are 108 airports around the world that could remotely guide an airplane to a safe stop – a category 3 landing. 

Why not just fly it right back to Kuala Lumpur or Beijing? 

“I think the most likely scenario is a rogue player whether a front end crew doing it manually or malicious external mode doing it remotely – took the plane off its flight plan and headed to another destination. McConnell said. “Once the rogue controllers got control of it, some benign positive safety conscious remote control was established and the aircraft was landed at one of these many airports that can land a plane.”

Whether the plane could be controlled after a rogue terrorist organization takes control and flies it to another destination, and whether the system allows the airline to override the rogue controller cannot be answered “with any degree of certainty” but these questions need to be asked of Malaysia Airlines and .the Federal Aviation Association, according to McConnell.

Different kind of terrorism: Billions and billions of dollars of intellectual property onboard

“Keep in mind there were billions and billions of dollars worth of intellectual technology property of an open patent on that plane in the form of Freescale and others on the plane, so it could be corporations or nations willing to hijack for that plane for that intelligence,” he said. 

McConnell says that until that patent is granted, and the ownership of that patent is 20% for five parties, four to individuals and one to Freescale.  Four days after the missing flight MH370, a highly valusble  patent was approved by the Patent Office.  Four of the five patent holders are Chinese nationals working for Austin-based Freescale Semiconductor, owned by Blackstone, for which Rothschild is a board member. 

On April 27, 2013, Bloomberg published an article confirming Freescale is a Blackstone venture: “Blackstone-Owned Freescale Rises as Forecast Tops Estimates: Freescale Semiconductor Ltd. (FSL), the chipmaker mostly owned by a private-equity group including Blackstone Group LP (BX) and TPG Capital, rose after predicting second-quarter sales that may exceed some analysts’ estimates.”

The patent holders are: 1) Peidong Wang, Suzhou, China, (20%), 2) Zhijun Chen, Suzhou, China, (20%) 3) Zhihong Cheng, Suzhou, China, (20%) 4) Li Ying, Suzhou, China, (20%) 5) Freescale Semiconductor (20%). According to the March 8, 2014, passenger manifest(original) of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 these were not on that plane. If they were, their names were not listed.

What officials initially said, however, was as many as seven people on board were using passports other than their own. Officials also reported at one point that there were four other passengers aside from the two Iranians whose identities were unclear. Then, officials made no more public statements about this.

“Until that patent is granted, their patent income would go to their survivors – but the ownership would go back to Freescale in Austin TX,” McConnell said, adding, “I’m not suggesting that Freescale is behind this.”

This is a different kind of terrorism, by organizations or nations who want cutting-edge military technology.

Sources: Voice Of Russia, illuminatireview.com, Before It’s News, Examiner.com, YouTube

Follow Deborah Dupré on Twitter @DeborahDupre

MH370 and 9/11 Synchronicity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT5A7IakNuE&feature=youtube_gdata_player

posted from Bloggeroid

Atlantic Council Speech: An “extraordinary crisis” is needed to preserve the “new world order,” #CrisisInitiation

February 9, 2014 by Jack Blood
Filed under Commentary

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Writing for the Atlantic Council, a prominent think tank based in Washington DC, Harlan K. Ullman warns that an “extraordinary crisis” is needed to preserve the “new world order,” which is under threat of being derailed by non-state actors like Edward Snowden.

In an article entitled War on Terror Is not the Only Threat, Ullman asserts that, “tectonic changes are reshaping the international geostrategic system,” arguing that it’s not military superpowers like China but “non-state actors” like Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and anonymous hackers who pose the biggest threat to the “365 year-old Westphalian system” because they are encouraging individuals to become self-empowered, eviscerating state control.

“Very few have taken note and fewer have acted on this realization,” notes Ullman, lamenting that “information revolution and instantaneous global communications” are thwarting the “new world order” announced by U.S. President George H.W. Bush more than two decades ago.

“Without an extraordinary crisis, little is likely to be done to reverse or limit the damage imposed by failed or failing governance,” writes Ullman, implying that only another 9/11-style cataclysm will enable the state to re-assert its dominance while “containing, reducing and eliminating the dangers posed by newly empowered non-state actors.”

Ullman concludes that the elimination of non-state actors and empowered individuals “must be done” in order to preserve the new world order. A summary of their material suggests that the Atlantic Council’s definition of a “new world order” is a global technocracy run by a fusion of big government and big business under which individuality is replaced by transhumanist singularity.

Ullman’s rhetoric sounds somewhat similar to that espoused by Trilateral Commission co-founder and regular Bilderberg attendee Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 2010 told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting that a “global political awakening,” in combination with infighting amongst the elite, was threatening to derail the move towards a one world government.

Ullman’s implied call for an “extraordinary crisis” to reinvigorate support for state power and big government has eerie shades of the Project For a New American Century’s 1997 lament that “absent some catastrophic catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor,” an expansion of U.S. militarism would have been impossible.

In 2012, Patrick Clawson, member of the influential pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) think tank, also suggested that the United States should launch a staged provocation to start a war with Iran.

Ullman’s concern over failing state institutions having their influence eroded by empowered individuals, primarily via the Internet, is yet another sign that the elite is panicking over the “global political awakening”

- See more at: News Watch

Who is Dr. Harlan K. Ullman? 

Mr. Shock & Awe

Ullman, Mr. “Shock and Awe” himself, is one of the Neoconservatives who planned the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He’s a retired U.S. Naval Commander who is known as the mastermind behind the U.S. “Rapid Dominance” strategy used in the bombing of Iraq in April, 2003. Indeed, he coined the phrase, “Shock and Awe”. He is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Atlantic Council. One of his books, a product of the National Defense University, promotes the doctrine of shock and awe. It technically is known as “rapid dominance” and is a military doctrine based on the use of “overwhelming decisive force”, “dominant battlefield awareness”, “dominant maneuvers”, and “spectacular displays of power” to “paralyze an adversary’s preception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight”. 

All this reminds me of the Crisis Initiation speech from the Israeli lobbyist suggesting war with Iran.


Washington Institute for Near East policy forum luncheon Patrick Clawson, who heads the Washington Institute's Iran Security Initiative, went as far as to suggest the US may be best served by carrying out a false flag style attack so the President could take the US to war with Iran.

Clawson actually went as far as to suggest that false flag operations were "the traditional way America gets to war is what would be best for US interests"

He went on to give us a concise history of past "false flag operations" - the attack on Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Lusitania, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and ever the blowing up of the USS Maine - as giving past Presidents the excuse needed to go to war.

In the most chilling part of this speech he said, "So, if in fact the Iranians aren't going to compromise," the Israel lobbyist concluded with a smirk on his face, "it would be best if somebody else started the war." 

Washington Institute for Near East Policy -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washingt...

ZOOM IN and use #NetworkLink Analysis to Compute the Crimes of the #Bilderberg http://t.co/8gaJDzWO10 pic.twitter.com/CNHDP2Nw64
— Flashback (@Flashback1984) June 1, 2014

The End of America? Ten Steps to Oligarchy and Tyranny

From "The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," Chelsea Green Publishing, Sept 2007

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.
They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.
Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda has noted, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2 Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3 Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4 Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5 Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7 Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8 Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9 Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10 Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.
We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

From "The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot," Chelsea Green Publishing, Sept 2007