Is the United States turning into a police state, as former Reagan-era official and columnist Paul Craig Roberts suggests in a recent interview on Russia Today?
Roberts was referring to the Feb. 3, 2010 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in which National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told representatives that American citizens could be assassinated by the US government when they are overseas.
Writing in the LA Times, journalist Greg Miller provides chilling insights into how CIA hit lists are put together:
From beginning to end, the CIA’s process for carrying out Predator strikes is remarkably self-contained. Almost every key step takes place within the Langley, Va., campus, from proposing targets to piloting the remotely controlled planes.
The memos proposing new targets are drafted by analysts in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center. Former officials said analysts typically submit several new names each month to high-level officials, including the CIA general counsel and sometimes Director Leon E. Panetta.
As Roberts asks, how is this different from Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany?
It is no secret there has been a steady decline in democratic rights and freedoms in the United States over the past decade. This rather brazen announcement that American spooks can act as judge, jury and executioner is one more indication of how repressive and murderous the U.S. government has become.
If there is a difference between the United States of 2010 and the most notorious 20th century tyrannies it is that most Americans appear to believe they inhabit the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Will this naive mom ‘n apple pie state of mind persist now that the “government of, by and for the people” has publicly declared its intentions to murder some of “the people” without due process of law?
Americans may yet come to understand why so many non-Americans regard the U.S. government with suspicion, fear and loathing.
Paul S. Graham 
This practice goes on and when you try to tell people they somehow justify it with all that post 911 rhetoric! Any logical or humane argument you use they just go to the extreme and talk about the terrorist threat and try to shut you up.
“Any logical or humane argument you use they just go to the extreme and talk about the terrorist threat and try to shut you up.”
Doesn’t this sound an awful lot like how critics of the former Soviet and Nazi regimes were treated?
Remember there are two things that are never discussed in ‘polite’ company; and those are religion and POLITICS, so let’s just end this political discussion now, shall we? We certainly wouldn’t want to offend anyone.