Like Lazarus in the New Testament, Osama bin Laden, dead and buried these last few years, will soon rise from the dead to wreak havoc on the Great Satan, the United States of America. “Osama bin laden is expected to remain in hiding until he stages another attack on the United States, an ex-CIA expert who had tracked the terror mastermind for two decades warned in an interview,” reports AFP. “Bin Laden last surfaced in a video footage aired on the eve of the US presidential elections in November last year. In the tape, declared authentic by the authorities, the Saudi-born radical directly admitted he ordered the September 11 attacks.” But it would appear these nameless “authorities” left their reading glasses at home because the man in the October 29, 2004, tape does not resemble Osama (see this animation).

As we know, the real Osama, who died and his obit was published in the Egyptian newspaper al-Wafd, on December 26, 2001, claimed no responsibility for the nine eleven attacks. “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States,” Bin Laden told Ummat Karachi, on 28th September 2001, in a report ignored by the corporate media, for obvious reasons: “I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act…. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself…. They needed an enemy.”

But then, if we are to believe the government and the corporate media, Osama had a change of heart and started bragging about his responsibility for the attacks, notably in a video released by the Pentagon—there were neocons crawling all over the Pentagon at the time and, as we know, neocons never tell lies—a video that just so happened to be left behind in a house in Kandahar after a dinner party. “I was thinking that the fire from the fuel in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and the floors above it only,” declared the Kandahar Osama, who does not look like the pre-nine eleven Osama, unless the pre-nine eleven Osama put on an appreciable amount of weight and had his nose reconfigured (see this image comparing the real and fake Osama).

“As soon as [the dead Osama] hits us in the United States again we’ll see how important he is in the Islamic world,” Michael Scheuer, the former head of the “bin Laden unit” at the CIA, told AFP in an interview. “We mistake quiet for defeat or irrelevance,” the former spook added. Of course, there is no mistaking the fact dead men are eternally quiet, but then, in Bushzarro world, as in the New Testament, dead men are known to rise and walk the earth. Or maybe Mr. Scheuer, formerly known as “Anonymous,” has another book manuscript to sell.

Naturally, the time is ripe for the dead Osama to hit “us in the United States again,” especially considering all the methodical prep work the Bushites have engaged in over the last few months.

“Today, somewhere in the DC metropolitan area, the military is conducting a highly classified Granite Shadow ‘demonstration,’” William Arkin, a former Army intelligence analyst and consultant, wrote for the Washington Post on September 21. “Granite Shadow posits domestic military operations, including intelligence collection and surveillance, unique rules of engagement regarding the use of lethal force, the use of experimental non-lethal weapons, and federal and military control of incident locations that are highly controversial and might border on the illegal” and “Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military’s extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.”

We’ve heard those words quite a bit lately—”operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control”—and we are likely to hear them again over the next few months, or at least until Posse Comitatus is finally murdered.

It’s all engineered for our consumption. For instance, sending the military into New Orleans. Or Bush going to the U.S. Northern Command to observe the “military response” to Hurricane Rita—a response once upon a time assigned to the National Guard. And then there is the Avian flu, an trial balloon for Bush’s desire to send in the Marines and have them quarantine afflicted cities and regions of the country—after, of course, all the legal guns are confiscated. All of this stuff is designed to get the military into our lives in a big way. It will get a big shot of steroids if the dead Osama bin “Lazarus” Laden strikes again, as promised.

Of course, the ugly visage of Bush’s emerging police state is not limited to Katrina, Rita, and the Avian flu. Bush signed an executive order recently creating the National Security Service (NSS), “a branch of the FBI that now works entirely under his authority,” writes Mike Whitney. “It is America’s first secret police; no different than the East German Stasi or the Soviet Union’s KGB. It operates completely beyond congressional oversight and is answerable to the president alone. It is Bush’s personal Gestapo.” Apparently, this new bureaucracy, Bush’s own praetorian guard, so to speak, is of little importance to the corporate media because a Google News Search returns zero results beyond Whitney’s article (it is mentioned in relation to Kyrgyzstan, a country where people demonstrating against the government are occasionally shot by the police, something that may happen in America soon enough if Bush keeps carving up the Constitution and local law enforcement continues its disturbing trend of militarization and SWAT-like responses to pedestrian civil infractions).

It is simply breath-taking how effortlessly Bush has excised the Bill of Rights—and with nary a bleat from Congress or the populace at large. Let us count the ways.

In September the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously upheld Bush’s unconstitutional imprisonment of Jose Padilla, thus erasing the Sixth Amendment. In New Orleans, Bush empowered mercenaries to illegally enter homes and confiscate legal firearms, thus eradicating both the Second and Fourth Amendment in one fell swoop. The Fourth Amendment will soon experience a yet another fatal blow after Congress passes the new and revised Patriot Act, allowing so-called “administrative subpoenas,” that is to say allowing government agents and spooks to carry out searches without a court order. Finally, Bush has threatened to veto the Pentagon’s budget if the bill carries a provision forbidding torture, otherwise known as cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. In five short years, Bush has managed to do serious damage if not render null and void the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution. And we may as well throw in the Tenth Amendment, since Bush has assumed powers not delegated to him by the Constitution.

So that leaves the Ninth, Seventh, Third, and First. Of course, the Third Amendment will go out the window after Bush imposes martial law (as he is now doing in bits and pieces), since troops will have to sleep somewhere, and as for the First Amendment, well, the corporate media, largely a disinformation and propaganda ministry for the government and its mega-corporate owners, has that one in a vapor lock, except for the internet which is under increasing attack as a medium rife with nuts and conspiracy theorists, to say nothing of spammers, pornographers, and pedophiles. I guess, after they emasculate the internet—a process well under way as mega-corporations buy up the wires and shut out traffic they deem subversive or inappropriate—we can stand on street corners passing out leaflets, that is until the local SWAT team comes along and zaps us tasers.

As I write this, New York has “stepped up security” in its subways (more cops searching little old ladies) after “receiving what city officials called a credible threat,” according to the Guardian. “Despite the differing takes on the seriousness of the threat, New York officials mobilized police officers to begin looking through commuters’ bags, briefcases, baby strollers and luggage.” Of course, you never know about those babies or what their reprobate parents may be concealing in their strollers—maybe a bomb or some marijuana. “Some commuters took the [ill-defined terrorist] threat in stride.” Of course they did—and that is precisely the point: to get people accustomed to random searches and widespread violations of their right to be left alone unless the cops have a damn good reason to suspect them of doing something wrong.

But never mind. Osama is on the move. He has risen from the grave and has a mighty and unquenchable hankering to kill innocent Americans, especially now that Granite Shadow is a done deal and FEMA, the Ministry of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon have taken copious notes in Louisiana and Texas (a field test on how best to forcibly evacuate large cities and confiscate guns). Now that Osama is back in the saddle again—after spending four years six feet under—the technocrats can set the stage for the real McCoy: a “dirty bomb” going off somewhere in America, thus marshaling in martial law for real, complete with a military lockdown and Bush’s National Security Service rounding up the usual suspects who have long been profiled in Total Information Awareness databanks.

Reagan’s Rex 84, or Readiness Exercise 1984—a plan conceived to “accommodate the detention of large numbers of American citizens in case of massive civil unrest or national emergency,” as Wikipedia innocuously defines it—didn’t go away, it simply was shifted to the back burner for a couple decades. If not for the First Amendment (now under strain), and the investigative journalism (now all but dead, except here on the internet) of the Miami Herald in the wake of Iran-Contra, we’d likely have no inkling the government has plans to lock us up in concentration camps.

Couple this with the fact Bush can kidnap and detain any citizen he wants—with the blessing of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit—and you have a near perfect scenario for totalitarianism, American style.

Chalk it up to another job well done by Osama bin Goldstein.