AMERICA IN PERIL
By
Bob Aldridge
Review by Wilson (Woody) Powell
Bob Aldridge is a World War II veteran and former engineer. He has spent thirty-five years researching government secret and not-so-secret policies and actions undermining Constitutional and Bill of Rights guarantees. He was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Award for warning of the Pentagon’s efforts to seek a nuclear first strike capability in the 1970’s. He is an advisor/consultant/sponsor to CCCO, the Nuclear Peace Foundation, British-Institute for Law and Peace. He lives in Santa Clara with Janet, his wife and partner for sixty years.
Mr. Aldridge has produced a meticulous, detailed account of how our Constitution has come to be relegated to the category of “a nice idea, but not really practical” anymore.
He may not say that, but that is what I inferred after reading “America In Peril”, which traces the assaults on civil liberties, international treaties governing the treatment of prisoners of war, the masking of dictatorial power by patriotic appeal, and the imposition of a thick veil of secrecy over the workings of government, by the Bush administration since 9/11.
This is an incredibly scholarly work, citing case after case from the public record, counting in relentless detail the depredations upon civil rights by Bush and his neocon appointees. Warning. It is dense with factual examples, citations of historical precedent and an exacting chronology of the arcane machinations of the Bush administration as it wriggles to escape the twin hooks of constitutional authority and humanitarian ethics.
PNAC and rigged elections
He begins with the stated intentions of the neocons leading up to the rigged election of 2000, starting with then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s Defense Planning Guidance document, co-authored by his Under Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Deputy Under Secretary, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Richard Perle and Zalmay Khalizad, a Muslim, Afghanistan-born member of Project For A New American Century, special advisor to the State Department on Afghanistan promoting the mujahadeen insurrection against the Soviet Union, and recently, ambassador to Iraq.
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