Daniel Ellsberg: "I think a turning point, a tipping point, has been reached here."

[azul]

Dan Ellsberg on Past, Present, Future

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon Radio
August 1, 2008

~snip~

Ellsberg: The republic has been threatened by these actions and by the complicity of Congress over these seven years, but I think a turning point, a tipping point, has been reached here.

You know, “republic” isn’t a definitely defined thing. There was the Union of Soviet Socialist “Republics,” there was the German Democratic Republic, the East German satellite dominated by the Stasi, the secret police. Well, I’d say that the National Security Agency has just been set free of legal restraints to do a kind of surveillance that the Stasi couldn’t technically dream of at that time.

And that means that the ability of this government to blackmail anybody – the way, for example, that Nixon precisely hoped to blackmail me, by illegally gaining information about my private life, that’s exactly what he had in mind – they could do that against every Congressperson, every journalist and source, every political activist. I question whether you can long preserve a real democracy with that kind of capability, that unlimited knowledge of private affairs, in the hands of the government.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/073108c.html



Are we at an elected dictatorship now, with the executive above the law? With fixed elections of picked candidates? The media and psychologists offering the drugged pacifier until we can realize that this is what we really wanted and were developing toward all along?

[rfranklin]

1. The elections were phoney...dictatorship real

I will not submit.