"With FBI withdrawing from "Law Enforcement", who is in charge of interstate criminal activities, racketeering, and so on ??"

Wall Street?

How exactly do you explain the Republican passing Medicare D? That was there Obamacare, though it was more a scheme to throw money to their backers in big pharma than anything. Obamacare is a market solution to Health care.

The mammoth TARP bailout of big banks was a one one of the most massive interventions in the economy ever and it was Republican lead. Your thesis simply doesn't hold.

Democrats are throwing just as much money to defense and intelligence since 9/11 as the Republicans. Feinstein, a Democrat, and Leibermen a former Democrat were point men in giving away our civil liberties to the NSA and DHS. In case you haven't noticed most of the big wars in the 20th century were started/fought by Democrats, Vietnam being the worst of the lot.

There are a bunch of wedge issues the two parties differ on but they are mostly designed to herd people in to the two parties and make them think they have a choice wben really they don't. The wedge issues are unions, abortions, guns, gays. They are emotional hotbutton issues designed to divide people but yhey have very little to do with the stuff that really matters, who controls the power and the money (with the possible exception of unions). Reagan mostly broke the backs of unions and they matter less and less every day outside of government employee unions.

Republicans are traditionally friendlier to plutocrats but I seriously doubt there is much difference between the two in pandering to rich people. Dems tend to pander to Hollywood celebs and trial lawyers, Republicans to Texas oil men, but they are just pandering to which ever group of rich people will fill their campaign war chests.

Scahill is a well known and respected journalist. His book has pictures of McRaven visiting the surviving family members and slaughtering a sheep to beg forgivness of the family. NATO and JSOC have fully admitted that it was a mistake, and that there was an attempt to cover it up. The fundemental problem they had covering it up was the targets were so amazingly, obviously wrong, a police chief and a prosecutor, there were so many witnesses who survived, journalist were on scene fairly quickly and the attempted cover up was so obvious it fell apart immediately.

It would lead you to beleive that there are probably a significant number of "accidents" where the victims are not well known, there are no surviving witnesses, journalists can't reach the scene, or the victims are all pulverized by explosives and unidentifiable so they JSOC can get away with one coverup after another.

You do realize the people operating those drones are hiding among civilians too don't you? They go home to the spouse and kids when they get off work. Would you be upset if someone lobbed a cruise missile full of cluster bombs in to those towns?

The father of the Chinese space program was one of the founders of JPL, Jet Propulsion == rockets. The U.S. government hounded him so much for being Chinese, and possibly a spy, he eventually returned home to China and built a space program there.

The rest of your thesis is deeply flawed and NOT insightful. The U.S. space program is alive and well at JPL, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital Sciences and a number of other private companies.

The only thing that went wrong was letting a series of U.S. Presidents, Congress and NASA completely screw it up for a few decades. Space programs need to be run by visionaries with a plan, laser focus, sufficient resources and the capacity to stick with it even when its hard, so they acheive their goals. Von Braun was the visionary who made Apollo happen. Musk is the most likely visionary to get the U.S. to Mars first.

The space program as run by the U.S. government and NASA is doomed, if for no other reason than they completely change the strategy every 4 to 8 years, and their strategic decisions are based on how many jobs will be created in the districts of powerful Congressmen, not sound or rational engineering or whether a project is worth doing. As a result NASA seldom ever finishes anything (outside of JPL and observatories).

NASA is also never held accountable for failure to finish anything, partially because politcians always cancel the programs half way through right before they actually have to build and do something. NASA's staff need to propose projects that are well engineered and worth doing, tell Congress to fund them at a sufficient and sustained level to finish them, and if Congress and President wont they need to threaten to mass resign. If NASA can't do programs like that they should all mass resign, shutter the failed parts of the organization and put the money directly in to places like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences.

So you are saying that if a friend of yours is a terrorist, unbeknownst to you, you are OK with the U.S. government executing you without a trial.

You may not know this but Bin Laden's father is an affluent, respected owner of a multi billion dollar Saudi construction company. As far we anyone knows he disowned his son and had no ties to terrorism. By your reasoning the U.S. should still execute him and all of his relatives?

You either have rule of law or you don't. Rule of law says you are accountable for your actions not the actions of people you happen to know or share a blood line with. Rule of law says you produce evidence of someone's wrong doing to a judge and jury and they decided if the evidence warrants punishment.

The key point is I'm NOT the one who took this thread off topic, you were doing it before I did so don't pin it on me.

I think I made it pretty clear that in at least one case the U.S. has someone disappear from the U.S. I've also made the probably even more disturbing point that he U.S. has managed to bestow on itself the power to not only make people disappear in the U.S. but anywhere on the planet, which is far more disturbing and surpasses the powers of any previous police state.

JSOC is operating in at least 100 countries and they are accountable to no one other than maybe the White House and the SecDef occasionally. They are operating as judge, jury, torturer and executioner. There are no checks or balances and they are FREQUENTLY either making serious mistakes or serious errors in judgement.

There is a big difference between collateral damage on a declared battlefield and indiscriminate killing of civilians where the whole world is a battlefield and innocent civilians have no where to hide.

I'll say again you should read Scahill's book. Awliki's story is far more complex than it appears or U.S. propaganda painted it. Awkliki was actually very moderate before 9/11. He supported George W in 2000 because he was socially conservative and liked the hard line Republican stance on gays and other social issues. He was also the goto Muslim for U.S. media after 9/11 because of his moderation and appeals for calm.

His story then gets very murky after 9/11. There is at least some evidence the U.S. tried to coerce in to being an informant. In particular they may have snared him in two staged prostitution stings to pressure and discredit him. They hounded him relentless post 9/11 and he was dismayed at the brutal treatement Muslim's were getting in the U.S. He tried to return to the U.S. and was held at the border and then was suddenly released by the FBI to enter the U.S. He apparently went directly to someone the FBI wanted him to help implicate and he didn't even know. He was probably be coerced in to being an informant. He then fled the U.S. to never return because he didn't want to be an informant. When he returned to his ancestral home in Yemen the hounding continued under U.S. direction, he was imprisoned by Yemen for a time, and his radicationlization accellerated.

He was most definitely very radical when he was finally executed, but there is at least a 50/50 chance he was radicalized only because of 10 years of hounding and pressure applied by the U.S.

Still the fact that you think its OK to execute children based on the actions of their parents show just how morally challenged you and the U.S. government have become.

If U.S. citizens are guilty of something, try them in absentia in a court of law, put your evidence on the table and if you can convince a judge and jury then you have justification to act.

If you let the executive branch act as judge, jury and executioner you are opening a Pandora's box that all Americans will live to regret.

You seem to miss the point. U.S. indiscriminant killing of civilians is insuring this will be a perpetual war, which I suspect is what a lot of malevolent people in and around Washington D.C. want. This forever war spanning the entire globe gives them a blank check to do just about anything, anywhere, anytime and justify it by saying its necessary to keep American's safe. If the screw up and kill the wrong people they just lie, cover it up, and move on to the next set of executions. They can also spend unlimited quantities of money. After the Soviet Union fell DOD and Intelligence needed a new enemy to justify their enormous budgets. Now that they have one they will milk it forever.

You can't win a guerrilla war by working off an org chart of your enemy commanders and killing large numbers of civilians as collateral damage as you go after them. The French tried exactly this strategy in Algeria for years. They did take out a lot of boxes on their org charts but the brutality that went with it insured there was always a fresh supply of people who hated the French with a passion and constantly replenished the boxes on the org chart.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with targetting Al Qaeda and Taliban but you need to A) make sure the intelligence and targetting are rock solid and B) do everything possible to limit collateral damage. For example you kill them in vehicles on an open road instead of leveling an entire village full of innocent people.

Or you send in special operators to snatch and identify them. Unfortunately after 10 years they've realized that secret prisons are really messy from a human rights perspective so they've decided to use summary executions instead which is why they killed an unarmed Bin Laden at point blank range.

For long periods in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen JSOC opted for high mission rate based on bad intelligence over low mission rate and high quality results. They created whole new generations of Jihadi's as a result of that poor decision.

The "hiding behind women and children" is a silly propaganda line. You expect them to stand out in the middle of a field and put a bullseye on their chest so the drones can target them cleanly. They are facing an opponent with vast military superiority. They are going to blend in to villages and hide in mountains. Anything else would be shear stupidity and they aren't stupid.

LOL, YOU are the one who went off topic with

"If people were being "disappeared" in the US I expect we would hear something about it."

I was just pointing out how naive or misleading your point was.

There is another great story from Scahill's book that shows how flimsy and flawed the intelligence JSOC has been using to execute people is.

An informant apparently figured out he could finger just about anyone and JSOC would sweep in and kill them without even minimaly checking the intelligence. He told JSOC there were Al Qaeda or Taliban at a certain compound. In reality people there were a police commander and his family there. He wactually worked with the U.S. and was having a christening party with music(which should have been the first tip it wasn't Taliban or Al Qaeda since they shun music).

JSOC swept in, shooting first and not asking questions later. The police commander and another man were shot when they stepped out and tried to tell the people with night vision and lasers they were in the wrong place.

Three women then stepped out to try to help the two men and they were shot. About this time JSOC figured out they'd made a mistake. They dug their bullets out of the women with their knives while they were still alive. The official line from NATO for several days was the two dead men had stabbed the women as part of an honor killing and JSOC killed the men to protect the women. This lie quickly unraveled when journalists started investigating. Eventually the JSOC commander, McRaven, had to come to the family beg forgiveness, slaughter a sheep and buy them off with cash.

The basic point here is once you start extrajudicial killings based on often flawed intelligence, and you are accountable to no one, you can literally get away with murdering just about anyone, anywhere and there is next to nothing anyone can do about it. The main failure in this case is they failed to keep journalists away from the victims. They also probably should have used a drone strike since all they leave behind are small peices of meat so its often hard to tell what happened or even who was killed.

Your point is valid though the methodologies used in those wars were somewhat different. As best I remember they were mostly using locals being run by CIA and Green Berets which was the old school U.S. way to run dirty wars.

The organizational structure used after 9/11 was relatively new and conceived mostly by Rumsfeld and Cheney. It was based on new special force commands, namely JSOC and SOCOM, and were built around Delta and SEALS. They haven't used Green Berets as much because they usually work with indigenous forces.

JSOC has been largely indifferent to local forces, working on their own doing fairly indiscriminate find and fix ops without telling anyone what they are doing. They mostly bypassed the CIA to avoid congressional scrutiny and weren't reporting through the normal chain of command through the Joint Chiefs and regional commands so they've been largely operating without normal oversight from the Pentagon. They've been run almost entirely by the White House and Secretary of Defense without much scrutiny or oversight from anyone else.

There was a well known case of an innocent Canadian who was on a flight connecting through New York City who was seized at the airport and rendered to Syria where he was tortured. He was apparently targetted because he was mentioned as a refernce on an apartment application of someone under suspicion. No one really knows how many other people have been rendered out of the U.S., you only know if they are released at some point and speak out.

There have been well publicized cases in Italy and Germany. A number of CIA agents were tried and convicted in absentia by Italy for kidnapping because they rendered someone off the streets of Italy consulting the Italians.

There was a person rendered from Europe who had the same name as a suspected Islamist, but he was completely innocent and was completely disappeared for months, his family didn't know what happened to him, until the mistake was discovered months later and he was released.

One of the three U.S. citizens executed by drone was Anwar Awliki's son. There is no evidence he ever had anything to do with Al Qaede. He was 16 years old, though at the time he was killed the U.S. claimed he was 21. The U.S. claimed they were targeted someone else from Al Qaeda when they killed him but that person was no where near the drone stoke. The boy was at an outdoor barbecue with cousins when he and all the innocent people around him were killed by a drone strike. They were disappeared in a way, they were turned in to small peices of meat and bone and were buried in a communal grave because they couldn't be identified.

Early in the dirty war in Yeme the U.S. didn't have enough drones so they used cruise missiles from a submarine loaded with cluster bombs to level a village. There may have been one suspected Al Qaeda affiliate in the village, but thats not even certain, nearly everyone killed were innocent bystanders, many women and children.

The dirty wars are certainly killing a lot of Al Qaeda affiliates. They are almost certainly killing a larger number of innocent civilians which will fuel new generations to hate America.

How exactly have you gone ten years without hearing about rendition. The U.S. especially JSOC and SOCOM, have been snatching people all over the world since 9/11 and making them disappear. Many of them have been rendered based on the flimsiest of evidence or have even been totally the wrong people because of mistaken identity. These people have been disappeared in to secret U.S. prisons abroad and to states like Egypt for interrogation and torture where they have no access to the Red Cross, lawyers or family. They actually totally disappear. Try reading Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars.

There is also an issue with the U.S. using drones and cruise missiles over large swaths of the globe to conduct summary executions of individuals based on often flawed intelligence, and frequently killing large numbers of women and children in the process. At least three of the executions have been U.S. citizens, including a 16 year old boy.

Just because they are Muslim does that mean they don't count in your book?

You seem to be a little naive my friend.

Common characteristics of a police state, wide spread spying on citizens, warrantless arrest and detention, torture, rigged judicial system and trials, execution of citizens without due process, suppression of a free press, suppression of opposition parties, censorship, seizure of property, targeting of opposition groups and minorities, prevent freedom of movement.

You do realize the U.S. and U.K. have engaged in all of these. I can run through examples of each if that will help enlighten you. The U.S. and U.K are not particularly iron fist police states, they prefer more the velvet gloved fist. They aren't particularly wide spread or oppressive police states yet, just give them time and a few more excuses.

It is no secret the U.S. has tortured people on a wide scale and very recently. This precedent has been set and the people who did it got away with it. Obama has dialed it back some, preferring to let third parties do it so he can claim the U.S. isn't torturing but the U.S. is still actively participating in and bankrolling it.

Obama has executed at least three American's by drone, which is the new prefered means of execution. Thre is no judicial process or if there was it is secret. One the the people killed was a 16 year old boy who apparently was targetted because he was the son of someone the U.S. hated.

Obama has been he most aggressive adminstration in targetting journalists in recent history, especially ones who are telling stories the U.S. doesn't want told. Obama had a journalist in Yemen jailed for 3 years for exposing a cruise missile strike that killed civilians and interviewing Anwar Awliki.

Try bring any of the recent abuses of our Constituion to a court of law and most are shut down by State Secret privlideges. Many abuses of civil rights are currently untriable.

The U.S. pretends to have opposition parties but in fact the two parties we have are two sides of the same coin pursuing the same agenda on most issues that count, and only differing on wedge issues or where tax money is squandered. Third parties are ruthlessley suppressed, marginalized and muzzled in the U.S. especially ones which challenge the status quo.

The U.S. doesn't practice overt censorship, the U.K. is farther down this road. The U.S. favors more suble censorship and propaganda using a small number of corporate controlled media companies who do most of the shaping of public opinion. The U.S. prefers just listening to and recording what everyong is watching, reading, listening to and saying so they can spot the troublemakers.

The U.S. is actively planing for the near future when there will more terrorist attacks (i.e. 9/11), natural disasters(i.e. Katrina), protest movements (i.e. Occupy) and resource shortage shocks and when they occur they will ratchet up the police state a few more notches.

If you want an eye opener on the next generation global police state the U.S. has become grab a copy of Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars. U.S. special forces and intelligence are now roaming the globe engaging in largely unsupervised executions, renditions, torture and spying. This started under Bush/Cheney and Obama has actually dramatically accellerated and extended it. Some of their attacks have been very successful like killing Bin Laden, many of them are deeply flawed, killing large numbers of innocents, including women and children, and spawning new generations who hate America. The important part being they have almost no oversige from Congress or the judiciary, and often inadequate oversight from the White House and Pentagon who are running this global police apparatus.