My friend Bernie says ever since the Bush gang stormed the White House in 2000, we’ve done nothing but run in circles like a bunch of terrified chickens with our heads chopped off. “We have no sense of direction,” Bernie said, “we’re staggering around in a jungle of lies, deceit, and scandal with no way out — and that’s the way they planned it.”

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed, astonished. “You mean they planned this mess? It’s nothing but bloody chaos out there.”

Bernie nodded. “You got that right. Bloody chaos is the best — the only — way to get what they’re after. Don’t be fooled by those little American flags stuck in the lapels of this bunch,” Bernie continued.

“The people in this nation, the hungry and homeless, the ill, the elderly, displaced Katrina victims, and especially those returning from war’s inferno either in body bags or maimed physically, psychologically, and spiritually aren’t even blips on their New World Order radar screen. They suffer at the pleasure of the president.” Bernie reminded me that shortly before the 2000 presidential campaign, when Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, he made a speech to the Institute of Petroleum in London where he complained that oil producers “had to deal with the pesky problem that once you find oil and pump it out of the ground you’ve got to turn around and find more or go out of business.”

Cheney went on to say, “That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously in control of about 90 percent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business...the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies...”

Bernie grinned. “If that didn’t set off alarms, especially in Iraq, you gotta know they started going off when, a year later, with his eyes on the prize, Cheney appointed himself vice president, put himself in charge of the nation’s energy policy, based that policy on the location of oil fields — not only in Iraq and Iran but throughout the Gulf — then mounted up and headed out to solve big oil’s ‘pesky’ problem.”

I have to agree with Bernie. Cheney and his bumbling bunch of neoconservative henchmen are obsessed with this really crazy “vision” that they can control the world. Flip through their chilling masterpiece and you’ll see that they believe the world is theirs — everything, including space and cyberspace — all theirs. And, it’ll hit you right between the eyes that every one of these suckers is a flaming psycho. If it takes lies, they’ll lie. If it takes imprisonment, torture, mass murder, either at home or abroad — they’ll do that too.

Bernie says folks in this country have no idea what they’re up against. In spite of the draconian USA Patriot Act, they still hang onto the illusion that their freedoms are protected by the US Constitution; yet they emerge from each succeeding crisis with fewer and fewer freedoms. “If Americans were willing — or capable — of reading and thinking,” Bernie said, “they’d know that the war being waged throughout the world began here at home, and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights were its first victims.” Can’t argue with that. The truth’s been out there for years. In December 2002, the Washington Post published a riveting piece in which writer Charles Lane exposed Bush’s executive power grab to strip courts of all oversight or authority.

Lane’s article can be found on Common Dreams.org, as can Jonathan Turley’s August 2002 article,”Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft’s Hellish Vision.” Turley, a straight-talking professor of constitutional law at George Washington University, exposed then Attorney General John Ashcroft’s “hellish vision” to incarcerate citizens he decided were “enemy combatants,” i.e., all who were disloyal to Bush or dared to resist his “smoke-em-out” war on terror. According to Turley, in Ashcroft’s America, “security precedes liberty.” Liberty is nothing more than a “rhetorical justification for increased security,” and citizens have a choice — accept autocratic rule and surrender their rights peacefully, or be labeled enemy combatants and be held indefinitely by the government, without charges, a hearing, or access to a lawyer.

The camps are there, fully staffed and ready. In the absence of the US Constitution, Bush’s Executive Orders are in place. One swipe of Bush’s pen will inflict martial law and we will discover, too late, that we live in a police state patrolled by jackbooted Blackwater USA mercenaries who will, indeed, serve at the pleasure of the president.

Blackwater is in place to become this nation’s shadow police force and is its current shadow army. The bodies hanging from the bridge in Fallujah were not US soldiers, but Blackwater mercenaries — death squad troops 100,000 strong who roam the Iraqi streets at will and stir up violence and hatred against the uniformed US military.

Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul says we must act before it is too late and we find ourselves being herded into camps. We must not allow ourselves and our children to be forced to live in a Kudzu World — to survive only at the pleasure of the president.

— Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites.