The Deeper Problem

America Has Fallen to a Jacobin Coup by Paul Craig Roberts:

The most important casualties of September 11 are respect for truth and American liberty. Propaganda has replaced deliberation based on objective assessment of fact. The resurrection of the Star Chamber has made moot the legal protections of liberty.

The US invasion of Iraq was based on the deliberate suppression of fact. The invasion was not the result of mistaken intelligence. It was based on deliberately concocted 'intelligence' designed to deceive the US Congress, the American public, and the United Nations.

In an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC News, General Colin Powell, who was Secretary of State at the time of the invasion, expressed dismay that he was the one who took the false information to the UN and presented it to the world. The weapons of mass destruction speech, he said, is a 'blot' on his record. The full extent of the deception was made clear by the leaked top secret 'Downing Street Memos.'

Two and one-half years after the March 2003 invasion, the US Congress and the American people still do not know the reason Iraq was invaded. The US is bogged down in an expensive and deadly combat, and no one outside the small circle of neoconservatives who orchestrated the war knows the reason why. Many guesses are rendered – oil, removal of Israel’s enemy – but the Bush administration has never disclosed its real agenda, which it cloaked with the WMD deception.

This itself is powerful indication that American democracy is de"