By Chris Floyd
Are you a terrorist? If you don’t know, you’d better find out fast. Because Uncle Sam’s made a list and he’s checking it twice—”40 to 50 countries” targeted for possible “U.S. action,” according to America’s securely-located vice president, Dick “Chicken Hawk” Cheney. As the man says, a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
So here’s a simple test to check your moral worthiness and see if you can escape God’s—sorry, Bush’s—all-devouring wrath. Have you ever gone out for a beer and bought a Stella Artois instead of a Bud? Then you, my friend, have engaged in a conspiracy to cause “adverse effects” to the economy of the United States. And that makes you one of the evildoers.
So says the great Oval Object in his latest executive order, in which he grants himself the power to have anyone he designates as a terrorist to be tried by secret military tribunals and executed without appeal. Bush’s dread edict—which of course takes effect without any input from that useless appendage of a bygone era, the U.S. Congress—covers anyone who “causes, threatens to cause” or even “has as their aim” to cause “adverse effects” on, among other things, the American economy or U.S. foreign policy.