Whats truly outrageous is that all this was legalized when Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). Thats right, Congress gave the NSA still more power to ferret out supposed terrorist patterns in our private communications. This gives AT&T, Verizon and the rest a hearty signal to go on pimping for the government. After writing that column, Nat Hentoff, whod been with the Village Voice since it started in the mid-1950s, got laid off.

A month after Bush left office, a memo entitled Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States came to light. Soon after 9/11, the Justice Department secretly gave the go-ahead for the military to attack apartment buildings or office complexes inside the country and, if necessary to combat the terror threat, suspend press freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Military action might encompass making arrests, seizing documents or other property, searching persons or places or keeping them under surveillance, intercepting electronic or wireless communications, setting up roadblocks, interviewing witnesses or searching for suspects. As Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies think tank, put it bluntly: In October 2001, they were trying to construct a legal regime that would basically have allowed for the imposition of martial law.  [Watch Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura on truTV]

Constitutional scholar Michael Ratner was even more blunt. He called the legal arguments Fuhrers Law and added: The memos revealed how massive the takeover of our democracy was to be. [they] lay the groundwork for a massive military takeover of the United States in cahoots with the president. And if thats not a coup détat then nothing is.

Such plans date back a ways. During an earlier period of racial unrest and antiVietnam War protests, in 1968 the Pentagon came up with Operation Garden Plot. It was updated most recently in 1991, and activated briefly during the L.A. riots in 1992. The idea was for flexible military operations in urban terrain, using various kinds of high-tech weaponry in concert with elite militarized police units that would be ready to stop disorder, disturbance and civil disobedience in America.