It's often said that the Bush Administration is engaging in unprecedented levels of this, that, or the other malfeasance. Most of the time, this is exaggeration - he was hardly the first President to spy on Americans, to funnel piles of public money to his friends and supporters, or to support atrocities abroad.

However, there is one area in which their changes appear to be new. Mass 'disappearances' of suspected Enemies Of Whoever's In Charge have, to the best of this author's knowledge, previously been confined to client states. Argentina, Iran, El Salvador - those are where suspected enemies vanish, to be found again with their arms tied behind them, dead in a ditch. It's not surprising to see the 'Salvador Option' proposed in the Pentagon, or to find a few months later that, gee, Iraq is full of death squads. It is new to hear that over eight hundred people were disappeared within the United States before they stopped releasing official totals. A while later, the FBI announced that it couldn't find a few thousand people it wanted to question. Now, while I'm sure some of them quietly left the country, and some of them never existed in the first place, thousands of people just disappearing is not a good sign. The position of the Bush apparatchiks is simple, and honestly stated: they do not believe that noncitizens have a right to a public trial, they do not believe that prohibitions against torture prohibit anything short of murder, and they believe that aiding terrorist organizations constitutes renunciation of citizenship.

When the DSEA was leaked, it garnered widespread opposition - among other things, it explicitly outlined an assertion that attacking the ECONOMIC interests of the United States constituted citizenship-revoking terrorism. If the government decides that Spending On The Day After Thanksgiving is good for the economy, 'Buy Nothing Day' could be terrorism. If the government decides that Unocal is essential to the national interest, suing them over the use of slave labor to build their pipeline through Myanmar could be terrorism. And once you're not a citizen, they're free to outsource handling of your interrogation to such paragons of democracy as Egypt and Syria, and handle the whole case in complete secret right down to its final resolution.

A government that will conduct secret executions is a nightmare waiting to happen - and, with the information currently available, we cannot even tell if this has already begun. Would you KNOW if a dozen people from your city were quietly taken in the night? A hundred? A thousand? Or would you just sit there quietly, not noticing as their homes quietly transferred to loyal supporters of the new order?

There is only one way to ensure that the Salvador Option cannot be used here at home. It is not through voting, or through demonstration, though both will help. It is to simply MAKE IT USELESS. We must ensure that everyone whom any government official may decide to decree an Enemy of the State knows that, in the event they are tortured to extract information, the torturers are unlikely to let them live to spread word of what was done to them. Insist you know nothing of the enemies of the new Reich. Make lists of traitors. All the same, THEY WILL KILL YOU WHEN THEY ARE DONE. And not before, unless, perchance, logistics force them to. You do not save your family and friends by submitting; you doom them all the sooner, and all the more. That being the case, decry the supporters of the regime and its opponents alike as coconspirators, or assert your innocence to the last - they know full well that people will, under enough strain, often confess to spurious crimes to try to end the pain; they cannot count on honesty from any information extracted through torture. The most you can do to stop it is to make the information useless - even if you tell them what they want to hear, they may just start in again from the beginning after a week or a month to make sure that you were telling the truth. The other prisoners will be lying; join them, and at the least you will confound the nightmare state for a few moments; and every moment your torturers waste on you is a moment's reprieve for the next victim.

But being uncooperative under torture is not our only defense. The mainstream authorities cannot all be let in on the plan if the Salvador Option is to be applied, for one or another of them would give it away. It is probable that death squad pickups will tend to resemble kidnappings more than arrests; if Mystery People are trying to haul you off without a good reason to do so, RESIST. Kidnappers are not nice people; whether they're Gestapo agents or common rapists and robbers, going along with them peaceably severely increases the chance that you will wind up in pieces in a ditch. An attempt at escape offers a greater chance of survival, for you may get away, or they may get caught. If they are willing to kill you to keep you from escaping, you can rest assured that they will be willing to kill you once they are through with you. Death by gunfire where they're trying to kidnap you is less painful than death by torture in a pale cream cell. If they try to kill you while you're trying to escape, that also increases the risk that they will either get caught in the act or leave evidence of their activities that will alert others even after they are gone.

If resistance fails, and you find yourself still alive and on your way to some second rate Auschwitz, there are other things to try. And do, please, note the difference between a regular prison and a death camp; the former is a legal structure, and you are still bound by legal limits.

Be ever vigilant for a chance at escape. Better to take a bullet in the back as you flee than to die in the gas chamber. If despair takes you and you feel better death than another day in a living hell, then charge the nearest guard and try to take their weapon. Note those guards who are kindest to the prisoners; do not attack them, and, if perchance you should see them fall in a scuffle - take their weapon, but do not kill them, for they may be themselves sabotaging the camps. To those guards who delight in the torture of their prisoners, direct your wrath. The strike made in despair is the signal for all the prisoners to take whatever advantage they can - scatter. Overwhelm the guardposts. Force down the electrical fences. Run for the hills. Hunting escaped prisoners wastes time they could be using to bring more in, and gives you a chance to expose the camps.

If you are forced to labor for your captors - the best revolt that a slave has is studious incompetence. During the second world war, the Nazis used Jewish watchmakers to build the timing mechanisms that would permit a machine gun to fire through a spinning propeller without shattering it. The Nazis knew enough to test the hardware, and it did indeed work fine on the ground - but it was built in such a way that it would break down very quickly under sustained vibration. It took quite a while for the Nazis to get the design to actually work, and during that time the Allies did benefit from the design flaws.

The Nazis requested the most educated of their prisoners step forward for special assignments; these special assignments turned out to be early executions, so they wouldn't be as likely to foment trouble. The Ottomans sorted out the able-bodied men among the Armenians so they could be killed first, that they would not be able to interfere with the more liesurely killing of the women and children. Confound their sorting procedures. When able-bodied workers are sought, feign weakness; when intelligentsia are sought, become illiterate.

Take note of that which you build. If death camps go online, at some point they will be raided by opponents of the system; knowing what is being made will help them, and may help you to sabotage the product later. And note that, should you reside in a slave camp and find yourself building death chambers or digging pits, you must escape NOW. The first to die in Auschwitz were the Polish slaves who had built the gas chambers, because they knew too much.

Finally, if you are a member of the security forces, you may well consider this message either madness or terrorist recruitment in disguise. I wish, myself, that it were madness. Regardless: keep a watch on goings-on. Would you know if your prisoners were being shuffled off to death squads? If the answer is that you cannot know, what would you need to do to change that? If you find yourself actually working in a death camp or a slave camp - it is your duty to help set your people free. Revolt if you gain a chance; run away; sabotage security systems; prevent atrocities, if you can; if you cannot, document and expose them. And try to make your actions look accidental, so, if you are caught, you can claim stupidity to stall.

I do not say that it has begun, for I do not know, and I cannot know. For the infancy of the nightmare state, only the disappeared will know whether or not the chickens of El Salvador have come home to roost at last. I do not urge treason against our country; if the death squads are loose here, it is no longer our country, and our duty becomes nothing more and nothing less than to set our people free. Therefore, disseminate. This document urges a tactic that can only harm a government if it has stepped over a line that they claim not to seek to cross; therefore, it can do no harm for all to see it.

May you live in freedom.

Author Unknown

A.D. 2005

The United States of America

Copy, Revise, Redistribute at Will

---