Mujahid Kamran The United States was once regarded as the land of liberty and opportunity. It has however slid, inexorably, relentlessly, and irreversibly, into its present-day role as a country whose government has embarked on an imperial project of worldwide conquest, plunder and bloodshed. Its media is no longer free - six corporations own over 80 percent of the US print and electronic media, including book publications, movies and music. As for its politicians, one may quote Howard Zinn: Big corporations and big billionaires fund 90 to 98 percent of Democratic and Republican Party budgets. Helen Caldicott, MD, Founder and President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute in Maryland, states: Politicians have become corporate prostitutes. The judicial system is broken, and for deeper reasons, is no longer functioning as an instrument of justice. More so, the US Constitution has been defaced in the last 15 years. The US is now, almost universally, considered as a country controlled by a cabal of war criminals, all acting in the interests of the wealthiest families on the planet. To quote Edward Hermann: Because of its power and global interests, US leaders have committed crimes as a matter of course and structural necessity. A strict application of international law would have given every American President of the past 50 years Nuremberg treatment. During the Bush era, Zinn stated: This country is in the grip of a President who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits, who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth....The so-called war on terrorism is not only a war on innocent people in other countries, but also a war on the people of the United States: a war on our liberties, a war on our standard of living. The wealth of our country is being stolen from the people and handed over to the superrich. The lives of our young are being stolen. And the thieves are in the White House. There is a hidden and immensely powerful elite in the US, that has, through its paid agents, almost completely subverted the American Public State, and its great Constitution. This evolution has a long history. The creation of the CIA, in 1947, and other less well known organisations that function under the influence of, and in the interest of the elite, bypassing normal channels through which elected governments function, marks the beginning of this great debacle. The CIA, the Congress, the judiciary and other organs of the US are controlled by a tiny financial-industrial-corporate elite. As remarked by Professor Peter Dale Scott, six out of the first seven CIA Directors came from the social register (which lists members of the high society) of New York and that all seven Deputy Directors in the times of President Truman and CIA Director General Walter Bedell Smith, came from the financial and legal circles of the Wall Street. The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy by sections of the US establishment in the 1960s, followed by the penetration of the White House by men like Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Brzezinski, and the establishment of the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s, permitted the wealthy elite to gain unprecedented influence in the White House. Kissinger, for instance, owed a lot to the financial largesse of the Rockefellers, as did Brzezinski. One became National Security Advisor in a Republican government, the other in a Democratic government. The former US Assistant Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, Catherine Austin Fitts, has stated: Indeed, during the 1980s the savings and loans industries was stripped of an estimated $500 billion by syndicates of military, intelligence and private financial interests. The profits were used to buy up banking, industrial and media companies and to finance political campaigns. From a position of political, judicial and economic power in the 1990s, the same syndicates then stripped an estimated $6 trillion of investors value in pump and dump stock market and mortgage market schemes and an estimated $4 trillion of taxpayer money from the US federal government. This is $10 trillion of taxpayer money that has been plundered by the elite and its agents. This is 60 times the Pakistani GDP And the American visitors to Pakistan have the gumption to tell us that we are corrupt. They should first look at their own rulers and their masters. In fact, evidence against members of Federal Reserve and others involved in this criminal plunder had been obtained by investigators. This evidence was destroyed when WT7, a 40-storey building next to WTC, collapsed in its footprints, without having been hit by anything. Richard Gage, founder of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, revealed at a press conference held on September 11, 2010, that there was hard evidence that all three WTC skyscrapers were destroyed by explosive controlled demolition. Under the cover of a response to national emergencies, a whole set of arrangements and organisations with incredible powers have been instituted. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Authority) and COG (Continuity of Government) plans have generated a cult of secrecy and given rise to a 'shadow government. A cabal of men like Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and their cohorts are deeply involved in COG since 1981 at least. Secret plans to suppress dissent at home and to simultaneously hatch wars abroad have been made. The trajectory of these activities leads straight to 9/11 via plunder of US public money, passage of laws that have practically wiped out civil liberties and rights, and false-flag terror attacks. The eruption of US militarism and Americas transformation into a police state are the result of a long chain of planned activity on the part of secret cabals within the US government, its agencies, and the military - all working for the wealthiest families of the planet. As Ms Fitts wrote: Those who win in a rigged game get stupid. The world is witnessing this stupidity that will drown both, the world and the US Empire, in a sea of radioactive blood. The writer is vice chancellor, Punjab University.