In Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the follow-up
to his award-winning book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, constitutional attorney John W.
Whitehead paints a terrifying portrait of a nation at war with itself and on
the verge of undermining the basic freedoms guaranteed to the citizenry in the
Constitution. Indeed, police have been transformed into extensions of the
military, towns and cities have become battlefields, and the American people
have been turned into enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned,
frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded,
raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up and denied due
process.
Yet this police state did not
come about overnight. As Whitehead notes, this shift into totalitarianism cannot
be traced back to a single individual or event. Rather, the evolution has been
so subtle that most American citizens were hardly even aware of it taking
place. Yet little by little, police authority expanded, one weapon after
another was added to the police arsenal, and one exception after another was
made to the standards that have historically restrained police authority. Add
to this mix the merger of internet megacorporations with government
intelligence agencies, and you have the making of an electronic concentration
camp that not only sees the citizenry as databites but will attempt to control
every aspect of their lives. And if someone dares to step out of line, they
will most likely find an armed SWAT team at their door.
Hardcover, 337 pages