How do we get out of this mess?

The Pursuance System, the culmination of eight years of thought and refinement, will be launched later this year, operating under a basic software framework explained at our website and overseen by a non-profit that we've set up for the purpose. The board of directors includes Icelandic Member of Parliament, poet, and Pirate Party stalwart Birgitta Jonsdottir; actor and filmmaker Alex Winter; CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou; former Columbia Journalism Review board member, author, and WhoWhatWhy founder Russ Baker; Professor Mano Singham of Case Western University (retired); Professor Robert Tynes of Bard University; author, intelligence critic, and former CIA Directorate of Operations covert asset Barry Eisler; activist-focused criminal defense attorney Jay Leiderman; and Pirate Party International board member Raymond Johansen.

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Over 40 years ago, a vastly criminalized presidential administration was brought down through a combination of leaks, reporting, and Congressional action.

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Do not be taken in, as many were after Watergate, by the idea that a successful dislodging of a criminal presidency will signal renewed commitment to the rule of law.

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Twenty-five years later, two former Nixon administration officials, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, managed to take firm control of yet another presidential administration. This one, too, was marked by revelations of unconstitutional and criminal acts, including torture, mass surveillance, the unprecedented negligence of emergency preparedness functions, the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys, and the most disastrous military engagements since Vietnam.

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Rumsfeld understood the real lesson of Watergate: the risks of violating our Constitution are vastly eclipsed by the rewards.

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Ten years later, many now regard the Bush Administration with actual nostalgia.

And 10 years from today, will we look back to 2017 with the same longing?

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It has become more and more difficult, as the years proceed, to maintain the fiction that the American republic is fundamentally sound. An associated myth—that the great majority of the American electorate are decent people who are entirely capable of overseeing the single most powerful apparatus in history—has also become less viable. The "establishment," as we may as well join in terming it, has likewise lost credibility, for reasons ranging from nonsensical to inarguable. The end result is a crisis of moral authority, and even of amoral authority; this is a society that cannot even produce a proper strongman.

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[T]he baseline of 21st century America involves a sort of constitutional police state with unprecedented incarceration rates, increasingly militarized law enforcement, an unaccountable intelligence community with a long history of unconstitutional behavior, and a judicial and legislative culture that, all told, has officially rendered tens of millions of Americans criminals via prohibitions on drugs, prostitution, and gambling.... [...] This is a country that can continue to exist above the level of a fully-mobilized gulag state only to the extent that its laws are not actually enforced.

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What is the proper role, then, for the citizen who takes citizenship seriously, and counts it a duty to defend the rights not just of Americans but of those populations abroad who ultimately bear the brunt of our civic failings?

  Barrett Brown

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