We let them get away with it.

And that's why they keep doing what they do.

When the powers that be were allowed to proclaim, forty years ago,
that the murder of John F. Kennedy was the work of a lone gunman -
a conclusion virtually no one ever believed - the American people
sent a signal to their leaders that they could basically get away
with anything they wanted, and the people would not significantly
- and certainly not effectively - object.

What followed, as we all know, has been a litany of murderous
deception: the downed airliners ruled accidents, the massacre of
children and mothers holding babies, and the cynical demolition of
American landmarks that were blamed on mysterious but unidentified
(or misidentified) terrorists, for whom new repressive laws were
instantly (and suspiciously) enacted.

Now the World Trade Center has come and gone, the fragments of
what was once the world's tallest buildings are now buried in
secrecy, and still no legitimate investigation into how this
incomprehensible tragedy happened has been undertaken, never
mind concluded. The message could not be clearer: the people
who have obstructed a probe into 9/11 are the ones who benefit
from obstructing it, and quite likely the ones who dreamed up
the whole thing in the first place.

This tragic fact has been more or less verified with the recent
revelation that the Project for a New American Century, a gang of
Republican (and Zionist) warmongers, wrote a paper in 2000 advising
that America needed a "Pearl Harbor type event" in order to justify
the creation of new laws to limit freedom, and thereby improve
conditions for increased business banditry by the very rich.
Yet this is a notion that the mass media, which are wholly owned
by many of the same interests who benefited from the 9/11 attacks,
will never admit, never mind write about.

When an event happens that has been recommended by someone as
desirable to happen, the people who made the recommendation in
the first place should become the prime suspects. But that has not
happened in America, which brags it is a free country, but never
seems to get the truth about the truly momentous events in its
own history.

Why? Because we let them get away with it.

We have let President Bush II win the debate day with such senseless
pronouncements as "the terrorists hate our freedom" and allowed him
to murder 5,000 innocent people in Afghanistan without a shred of
evidence that any of them were involved in the tragedies in New York
and Washington. We have allowed America to be surreally twisted into
a hateful place where suspects are now guilty until proven innocent,
without applying the same criteria to the actual perpetrators of the
violence who manipulate and distort the social and political agenda
to their own profitable aims.

And it's too late to fix the situation. Let's face it. They got away
with it. It's water over the damn, old news. There's no going back
now. The die is cast. The dead are buried. The facts are firmly
covered up. New crises now distract us.

There is one positive that has come out of all this death and
deception: people are taking a harder look at American history.
Some are realizing that what is happening today has been happening
all along.

We've harped on and lamented plenty about the criminal destruction
of the American Indians. So for those young adults new to serious
criticism of America's bloody and imperalist history, let's start
with the Philippines and the so-called Spanish American War in
1898-99. The Philippines drove the Spanish out on their own, but
then the Americans decided those stragetically placed islands were
too lucrative to pass up and proceeded to kill 1.5 million Filipinos,
while all the time the American people were reading in their own
newspapers that the U.S. was helping these poor islanders fight
the Spanish and "rebels." The phrase "war on terror" had not yet
been invented, but the meaning was the same, more than a century
ago. The war on terror is a war on freedom.

World Wars One and Two were essentially started by the West as
Germany got too strong economically. Regardless of what you may
have read in the schools that try to shape your mind on orders
from the power elite, it was Britain that fired the first shot
in both those wars, and the purpose of those shots was to regain
commercial markets that had been lost to the Germans.

Let's cut to the contemporary chase and jump to 1963. Kennedy had
fired CIA chief Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Dulles,
of course, along with Nixon and Bush, were the prime players in a
continuous effort to destabilize the American economy by creating
wars to stimulate arms-production profits. They were the prime players
in a group of seriously rich industrialists who had financed Adolf
Hitler in order to make money off the creation of the war known as
The Big One. Allen Dulles, you may remember, was later named to head
the Warren Commission that determined the assassination was the work
of a lone nut.

Lone nuts were also falsely blamed for the murders of Martin Luther
King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. These too were stories that were never
widely believed, but allowed to stand by the disoriented and deluded
American populace.

The justification for the Vietnam war, triggered by a totally
fictional incident, was similarly preposterous, trying to stop the
Communist domino effect, according to the American papers, while in
reality Ho Chi Minh had been asking for American help against the
Chinese since World War I. In 1947, Ho again wrote a letter to
Truman, expressing admiration for the U.S. and asking for assistance
against the Chinese and the French. Truman never answered him, a
decision that was to cost millions of lives two decades later. But
that didn't matter. The profits of Dow and Dupont were all that did
matter.

In recent years, buoyed by all these triumphs of deception, the
atrocities became more frequent and more profound. I love these
clowns who say the American government would never kill its own
citizens. American history is chock full of examples in which the
U.S. government has eagerly obliterated its own, especially its
own military personnel (think Gulf War vaccines and Agent Orange)
but also its average citizens (think, most recently, AIDS and
anthrax).

In the 1990s, with foreign wars in relatively short supply, the
focus of the beast turned inward, with the first WTC attack, Ruby
Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City events all fomented from within the
bowels of the American intelligence apparatus.

The first WTC bombing included a plant among the duped Egyptian
terrorists who urged his controllers not to let the attack go
forward when there was a clear opportunity to stop it, but the FBI
let it happen anyway. More convincing that way.

At that small cabin in Idaho, the man who approved of a sniper
putting a bullet in the forehead of a young mother holding her baby
was later given a medal and appointed to be assistant director of
the FBI.

And why did Janet Reno give the order to burn babies at Waco merely
over some theological disputation? Why did the feds say they didn't
know why Flight 800 blow up when, so far, 757 people have come forward
to say they saw missiles hit the plane? Why did they insist JFK Jr.
was a bad pilot? These were all lies, and we knew it. But we let
them get away with it.

Prior to 9/11, my favorite preposterous atrocity explanation
involved the government's demolition of the Murrah building in
Oklahoma. Esteemed General Benton K. Partin delivered an
incontrovertible report that explosives attached to five major
stanchions inside the building were responsible for bringing the
building down, and killing 168, but his expert testimony was
ignored and the blame was placed directly on where the power
elite intended it to be placed, on American patriots. Of course,
the anti-terror legislation had already been written then, too,
and was quickly passed with little debate.

And now we come to the watershed event in American history, 9/11,
which precipitated the virtual suspension of the U.S. Constitution,
because a Republican think tank had written several years before
the event happened that this would be a profitable idea.

More than a year after this latest tragedy, no rational explanation
has been presented to the American people, only charges without
evidence and stilted and implausible cover stories tossed around
that were quickly shot full of holes. And more murders. Lots more
murders.

The deceitful deed has been covered up in the same way that all
those other dirty deeds have always been covered up, with more
manipulated events to distract everyone's attention and new crises
to drive the "old" stories from the newspapers.

The anthrax attacks, almost surely carried out by government
provocateurs, were meant to convince us that the "terrorist" crisis
was continuing, and hypervigilance was required. Then, when the
business histories of Bush and his demonic vice president threatened
to blow up in their faces, a war against the innocent people of Iraq
was fomented, despite rationales that elicited nothing but laughter
and scorn from around the world.

In all of these situations, we let them get away with it. As a
people, we did not and do not have the power, the clout, the impact,
to overturn what our "elected" representatives perpetrate upon us.
We have been taught to be sheep, not to rock the boat, not to
challenge authority, not to question the official version of events
lest our paydays be interrupted. We relinquish freedom for bribes.

As we have abandoned justice for the people of this planet, these
are our 30 pieces of silver.

And now there's nothing we can do except go to the prison camps they
send us to and take the poisons they prescribe for us, because we
were always afraid to jeopardize our paltry paychecks and say the
things we really felt, and make those things stick. This is how
the American people forfeited freedom for the entire world.

John Kaminski is a writer who lives in Florida and used to
be proud to be an American before he learned what was really going
on. Now he's ashamed. End of article