A Personal Declaration of Independence
William A. Cook

“If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic … It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” (President George W. Bush, Sept. 15, 2006  report by AP’s Terence Hunt)

Citizens of the United States of America bear an awesome responsibility to maintain control of their government’s behavior since that government derives its powers from the consent granted it by the citizens. When the government ceases to act in accord with the dictates of the respective consciences of its citizens as determined by its foundational documents – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights -- , when it violates the established principles that give this nation legitimacy before the nations of the world through mutually accepted agreements, charters, and conventions, when it abrogates the inalienable rights granted the citizens by the Creator, when it declares unequivocally that the citizens cannot dissent with an action or actions taken by the government, then it is the right and the duty of the citizen to “alter or abolish” that government.

For the past five years, the present government of the United States, including the Executive branch, the Congress and the Senate, has committed a “long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object (that) evinces a design to reduce them (the citizens) under absolute despotism.” As a citizen of these United States for 70 years, I refuse to be ruled by a tyrant who imposes despotic, autocratic control on the citizens of these United States through a series of clandestine actions that usurp the rights of the people.

I refuse to accept as my government actions by the current administration and its obsequious servants, the Republican Congress and the Republican Senate, that include

      * spying on its citizens without their knowledge or consent, an action contrary to existing law;

      * elimination of personal privacy through the Patriot Act, an action that presumes culpability, not innocence until proven guilty;

      * preemptive invasion of other nations determined by the unilateral judgment of an all powerful executive that eviscerates the power of the peoples’ representatives;

      * acts of extrajudicial execution and the abandonment of rule by law thereby making the President, in effect, judge, jury and executioner;

      * acts of torture and the unilateral infliction of “acceptable” torture techniques thus casting America before the world as an amoral nation beholden to no international agreement and placing at risk the soldiers who defend it;

      * imposition of illegal actions of war instituted through an orchestrated control of lies communicated to the citizenry thereby negating their democratic right to know that they might vote in accord with their conscience;

      * levying an incredible tax burden on the citizens to pay for the consequences of these lies that will cost them and their children dearly for decades to come while corporations reap a windfall of profit from closed bids and corruption;

      * infliction of a forced military occupation on a nation against the desires of its people and enabling that occupation to use illegal weapons of war contrary to the Geneva Conventions thus implicating its citizens in acts against humanity;

      * development of diverse nuclear weaponry in direct violation of the UN Charter even as it decries other nations for attempting to acquire their own nuclear weaponry;

      * acceptance, indeed, complete complicity and support of the barbaric and genocidal actions of the state of Israel against the people of Palestine, and most recently, and most deplorably, the abandonment of all pretense to the behavior of a civilized nation through its almost unanimous acceptance of a resolution written by the American Israeli Political Action Committee to endorse the Israeli state’s wanton destruction of the state of Lebanon.       

These are not the actions of a democratic state; these are the actions of an autocratic state, an amoral state, an arrogant state that rules by force and acts more ruthlessly than the “extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective,” negating by its actions the unthinkable comparison the President decried.

For six years I have tracked the deception of this government as it surreptitiously acted to acquire more and more power by instilling in the American people the fear necessary to propel the autocrat to absolute power. Fear suppresses individual inquiry even as it enables control of the people, ostensibly to provide protection for them. Fear creates victims, especially in the minds of those who have not been violated. It is the unknown, what might be that metastasizes into the mental slave, the compliant citizen who marches to the drum of those who would control a society. It is the instrument of tyrants and dictators.

This government hobbles its citizens by using fear to manipulate their belief in end time prophecy, by implanting fear of imminent threat from “Islamofacist” fanatics, and by immersing the people in a false sense of “victim hood” that links them with the state of Israel as the only “friend” in the mid-east suffering from the same terrorist scourge. It is time to dispel this fear that enslaves. It is time to declare that this government no longer serves the people, that, indeed, it surpasses in its behavior “the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” It is not the “compassion and decency of the American people” that is in question; it is the absence of “compassion and decency” in this administration that is at fault.