11905; 12333

I am sorry to bring this point up once again, but I feel that someone should. The other night I watched a documentary about the killing of Osama bin Laden. In the course of it, a government official stated what I had suspected to be the case: The raid was never intended to take bin Laden alive; it was intended to kill him. If this is so, it means two things. First, the Administration lied in the aftermath of the raid when it insisted that the idea was to capture or kill bin Laden. I recall clearly Administration spokesmen stating that an effort was made to capture bin Laden, and when he and his thugs resisted, he was killed in the gun battle. (Whatever the intent of the raid, no such battle took place, as the Administration now admits.) Second, if it is true, it may mean that President Obama and his national security team are guilty of violating U.S. law.

President Ford's executive order #11905, reiterated by President Reagan's order #12333 made it the law of the land that "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." Ford's order, reinforced by President Carter, was in response to revelations about what President Lyndon Johnson referred to as "a damn Murder, Inc." the CIA was running in the Caribbean.

This continuing program of political assassination began in North Africa during WWII (under the CIA's predecessor, the OSS) with the American-led assassination of the Vichy French collaborator Admiral Darlan, continued with the murders of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Raphael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, perhaps the murder of Salvatore Allende of Chile, and at least fourteen attempts to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba. In the course of these programs, the CIA entered into contracts with the worst sort of scum in the world: international contract killers such as QJ/WIN and WI/Rogue (Jose Mankel and David Dato), and the American mafia. (All of this, in my view, led eventually and inevitably, to the murder of President Kennedy.)

It was in order to prevent such lethal political activities that Ford, Carter and Reagan banned any effort by any U.S. Government official to conspire to assassinate any foreign leader. Yet this is precisely what Obama's team did. Now I understand that President G.W. Bush issued an "intelligence finding" marking bin Laden for death, but it is unclear whether this had any legal validity, and whether it overrides the three previous executive orders.

So far as I know, no one in the mainstream media is examining this possibility, in part because no one regrets bin Laden's death, and because it was ordered by a liberal Democrat president. Nonetheless, it is not the nature of the victim that matters, in this or any other case: it is the integrity of the law; law established by three former presidents and, it seems to me, violated by the present one.

Scared to death

I listened tonight to the Republican presidential candidates' debate. There is not a single one of them I could, in good conscience, support. Let me make this clear: I am scared to death.

I am scared for my children's future and for their children's future. Our nation is on the verge of bankruptcy, and the current administration seems utterly incapable either of understanding that fact or of doing anything to prevent it. Today I read three articles from separate sources declaring that we are facing another recession as part of a global economic collapse, and all three stated that the leaders of the Western World can do nothing to stop it.

We fought a sixty year war against international communism, and now I see our nation selling its economic future to one of only four communist dictatorships left on the face of the Earth. Today I watched our president being rebuffed, indeed, humiliated, before the United Nations (which we created in the aftermath of World War II), the unemployment rate remains above nine percent (the effective rate is eighteen percent), the national debt has tripled to an unimaginable number, and I learned that one in six Americans are now defined as being below the poverty level. And the current administration appears to have no new ideas, no new insights, no new solutions.

I am scared to death. And so should you be.

I think...

I think that all of us will die but few of us will survive.

I think that the glorious experiment that was the United States of American is on the verge of extinction.

I think that our children and their children will be poorer than us, have fewer opportunities than we had, and will execrate our memories. And it will be our fault.

I think that the current crop of political "leaders" is the most venal and scabrous in American history.

I think that the Founding Fathers would not recognize the nation they created, nor would we recognize them if they were suddenly to reappear. Indeed, I think that if that were to happen, we would mock and malign them into insignificance.

I think that no one in the current political structure has the courage or the will to fix the problems we have created.

I think that the President of the United States is an incompetent.

I think that Lincoln would be shocked and shamed at what the nation he suffered so much to preserve has become.

I think that our national future will be worse than our national past.

I think that those who predicted we would become a nation of sheep were right. And that this is largely due to the state of public education in America. And that is largely due to the influence of the teachers' unions and their alliance with the Democratic Party.

I think that America has relegated itself to the position of a second-rate power. And, ironically, after a successful sixty year war with international communism, we are selling ourselves to the Communist Chinese.

I think that the Tibetan people have every right to curse us, but that, given their stoical, spiritual nature, they will pray for us. I think we need their prayers now more than ever.

I think that organized religion has failed us monumentally; and that "salvation," if the possibility of it exists any longer, resides with the individual. And yet, few of us, as individuals, are capable any longer of embracing it.

I think that our hope is indicated in the purity of the animals. And yet, we eat them.

I think that the Mayans were right: The world will end in 2012 -- it deserves to.