police abuses

From the first day in office, the Bush administration has set its hard-line course and has refused to budge. Now, they have declared war on the American people.

This was never more obvious than on Aug. 22, when, as part of his "working vacation," Bush showed up in Portland, Ore. to raise a million bucks for a Republican senatorial candidate. He used Air Force One to make this fund-raising trip. Nothing could be more essential to national security than to pump up the Republican Party's war chest...

Though Bush has tried hiding out on his Texas ranch,...this administration will sooner or later have to face the American people.

But so far, in every situation where they can't cordon off the unwashed citizenry who have the temerity to disagree with their policies, protesters have shown up. That's why the Portland event was a watershed for anti-Bush sentiment the way the Seattle protests in Nov. 1999 galvanized the anti-globalization movement.

Not only did the size of the crowds force the mainstream media to cover the protest, but the violent overreaction of the police conveyed an unmistakable message about the lengths this administration will go to to shield itself from democracy. In Portland, a peaceful assemblage only began chanting, "We are not the enemy!" when the riot police began to move against them. What kind of a democracy has riot police already in place for a fund-raising political event? These hair-trigger police shot pepper spray, water jets, and rubber bullets at protesters. What kind of democracy does this to its own citizens?

Washington, 1975... The unelected president, Gerald Ford...the congressional committees investigating the United States' intelligence agencies... [revealed] Assassination plots, terrorist acts, coups, secret armies, subversion of allied governments, mafia connections, torture, press manipulation, domestic surveillance -- the revelations were endless, a bottomless pit of corruption and criminality being dredged up by the House and Senate panels.

...special "CIA Assassination Manuals," like the one issued in 1953, stating: "The most efficient accident, in simple assassinations, is a fall of 22.5 meters or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. [In some cases], it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him."

Ford seethed. What the hell is wrong over there at the Central Intelligence Agency, he complained to his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld. Why couldn't Bill Colby, the director, keep a lid on things?...What next? Are they going to find out about Reinhard Gehlen, too: the Nazi spy who joined the CIA and recruited thousands of Hitler's best and brightest...to work for the Agency?...Gehlen was championed by Allen Dulles himself -- the founding father of the CIA, the hotshot lawyer who kept Prescott Bush's name out of the papers when Pres was caught trading with the Nazis in 1942...the "Gehlen Organization" stayed secret for another 26 years. But in July 1975, Ford had still more worries. A top White House aide, Dick Cheney, sent a memo to Rumsfeld...

[president Gerald] Ford, Rumsfeld and Cheney had kept the faith; they had honored omerta. Colby was not so lucky. For his sins -- his "weakness" in allowing a few spears of sunlight into the shadows -- he was summarily dismissed a few months later. He was replaced by a man who also lived by the code, who would keep the precious agency -- and all its Gehlens, its torturers, its dopers, its shooters -- safe from the mobocracy, the ignorant rabble with their pathetic fairytale notions about democracy, justice, law and honor. He would guard the shadow world so well that one day the headquarters of the CIA would proudly bear his name:

George Herbert Walker Bush