The biggest hobgoblin was the false-flag attack of 9/11.

The great partners in Bush’s spreading of fear are the media outlets. Complicit in his every sin, they are now again obediently repeating his lies about Iran, and neglecting their responsibility to get to the bottom of the story and tell the truth. Of course this is not unexpected behavior, seeing as how the corporate elite are served by wartime profits and control media expression.

Well said Curtis. Like the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which were planned and on the books before the pretext of 9/11, the Iran war has been on the books and planned already. The media is doing its obedient part by parroting the White House’s propaganda. The skids have all been greased, and all we need is another false-flag op to begin the Iran War.

But the neo-con administration has been hampered in any instigation of the Iran War thus far, being far too hindered by public dissent against Iraq and a broken military. Hopefully the Iran War will not come to pass.

If any false-flag pretext happens before Cheney is out of office, I hope we’ve learned a lesson and can quickly look to Cheney for the source of said false flag op.

I look to a false-flag op in the vein of the staged Gulf of Tonkin incident. We already have ships and carriers stationed there, and if anything happens to those ships, it would be a simple thing for Cheney to claim Iran did it. With the complient media, we would not know the truth for many months.

But this thread was about the Patriot Acts of 1775 and 2006. My comments about the pretexts for a pre-planned war are related. Logically, you would not think that the 800+ page Patriot Act could be written and passed in the short few weeks after the attacks of 9/11. Who possibly could have written 800+ pages of legislation in such a short time? No one even was given time to read it before they voted on it and passed it.

If you research the questions of who wrote the Patriot Act, and when it was written, you will find that no one will, or can tell you. Orrin Hatch avoided these two questions in writing to me twice.

Common beliefs among many are that the Patriot Act was written many years ago, and was waiting in the wings for just the right time. In other words, the 9/11 attacks were staged for many reasons, one of those reasons was to get the public behind legislation that had already been pre-written and desired by a government which wished more control over its citizens.

Kelly,

If any false-flag pretext happens before Cheney is out of office, I hope we’ve learned a lesson and can quickly look to Cheney for the source of said false flag op.

Your hopes are good, but I’m afraid they will find no fruit. Both sides of government are anxious to show who is the bigger friend of Israel and even bigger enemy of Iran. If a false-flag event occurs under the current climate in D.C. we will have the support of the vast majority of elected politicians for military action against Iran.

Again, it’s the fear factor Connor has written of that leads to this. A fearful congress, or a fearful people, will be an obedient people or an obedient congress. The use of fear against US citizens by the government is well documented in Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” and, “Necessary Illusions” by the same author.

I think the fact that Bush et al don’t trust a Democratic administration to handle Iran will lead to Bush doing something military regardless of the political climate.

Regarding the Patriot Act, we have a long history of this sort of thing dating back to 1798 with the Sedition Act. The Sedition Act of 1918 that got Debbs imprisoned was equally heinous.