Paul Craig Roberts: It Has Happened Here in America:

The police state is real: The Bush regimes response to 9/11, and the Obama regimes validation of this response have destroyed accountable government in the United States. So much unaccountable power has been concentrated in the executive branch, that the US Constitution is no longer an operable document. Whether a person believes the official story of 9/11, which rests on unproven government assertions, or believes the documented evidence provided by a large number of scientists, first responders, and structural engineers and architects, the result is the same. 9/11 was used to create an open ended war on terror, and a police state. It is extraordinary that so many Americans believe that it cant happen here, when it already has. We have had a decade of highly visible evidence of the construction of a police state: the PATRIOT Act, illegal spying on Americans in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the initiation of wars of aggression, war crimes under the Nuremberg Standard based on intentional lies, the Justice Departments concocted legal memos justifying the executive branch's violation of domestic and international laws against torture, the indefinite detention of US citizens in violation of the constitutionally protected rights of habeas corpus, and due process, the use of secret evidence and secret expert witnesses, who cannot be cross examined against defendants in trials, the creation of military tribunals, in order to evade federal courts, secret legal memos, giving the president authority to launch preemptive cyber attacks on any country, without providing evidence that the country constitutes a threat, and the Obama regimes murder of US citizens without evidence or due process. As if this were not enough, the Obama regime now creates new presidential powers by crafting secret laws, refusing to disclose the legal reasoning on which the asserted power rests. In other words, laws now originate in secret executive branch memos, and not in acts of Congress. Congress? We don't need no stinking Congress. Despite laws protecting whistle-blowers and the media, and the US Military Code, which requires soldiers to report war crimes, whistle-blowers such as CIA agent John Kiriakou, media such as Julian Assange, and soldiers such as Bradley Manning are persecuted and prosecuted for revealing US government crimes. The criminals go free, and those who report the crimes are punished.