Musings on the overthrow of democracy

What are the basic mechanisms to overthrow a democracy?

If you control three institutions, you control a nation:

 First is the press. If you can manipulate the news, suppressing stories, stopping investigations and protecting "flawed" individuals while making the public look under their beds for imaginary enemies, your power is almost unlimited.

Second is government itself. If you can control government by putting the real power in the hands of a few committee chairmen or key "deal makers" and can flood the system with dirty money, there will be no real investigations, only coverups and no real laws, only raids on the public treasury by the powerful while crumbs are passed out to others.

Third is public opinion. Turning an intelligent electorate into a howling mob requires an endless series of both outlandish conspiracies and real threats, the truth behind all being misdirected through a concerted effort to divide a populace and keep them at each other, even to the brink of civil war, all to protect the economic cabal growing fat off "terror war" and "deregulation," a buzzword for massive theft.

When former FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, reported that Osama bin Laden was an active US asset up to the second the planes hit the twin towers on 9/11, she was put under Patriot Act gag orders by Attorney General John Ashcroft that lasted for years. Now that she is speaking, laying out facts supported by key FBI and CIA experts, nothing is hitting our papers. How bad are the facts being kept from us?

"The 2008 Sunday Times series detailed Edmonds' allegations that Bush's Under Secretary of State Grossman --- the third-highest ranking official in the State Department, after Colin Powell and Richard Armitage --- worked closely with both the Turks and Israel in obtaining and selling U.S. nuclear weapons technology on the worldwide black market, and that he had even tipped off Turkish diplomatic colleagues about the true identify of then-covert CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson's front company, Brewster Jennings, several years before the operation was named publicly by columnist Robert Novak"

While we were pretending to use our Patriot Acts to defend America through torturing suspects to get the truth, we are learning that much more of that coerced testimony may have been gathered to support a wide coverup of government crimes, many at the highest level. The American Conservative goes on:

These are some of the things Edmond has sworn to under oath, taken from an interview with former CIA official Philip Geraldi printed in the American Conservative:

. . . Basically, you map out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and members of Congress and agents of foreign governments. These agents were able to obtain information that was either used directly by those foreign governments or sold to third parties, with the proceeds often used as bribes to breed further corruption. Let’s start with the first government official you identified, Marc Grossman, then the third highest-ranking official at the State Department.. .