Almost a year after Sept. 11, where are we? In the last year the Bush administration and its constituencies have proved their continued ability to move forward faster than any forces of domestic or international opposition could organize. Optimistic and valiant, but inexperienced, efforts to fight the juggernaut have started and drifted as the blitzkrieg war that “will not end in our lifetimes” has not even looked sideways. Overwhelming evidence of the regime’s crimes in a dozen arenas has been brought to the surface, and yet each new revelation only spurs the Empire to accelerate rather than slow down.

Realistically speaking and based upon past experience, no movement has appeared which offers any likelihood of success. Past experience has been ignored in favor of convenient debates about the arcane aspects of 9/11 while the elephant in the living room is ignored. These debates are worse than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They waste precious energy and time. The proof already exists that the government lied.

Two quick examples make the point. If the Bush administration had no knowledge that aircraft would be used as weapons, then why did the Pentagon stage a two-day drill for an airliner crashing into the Pentagon in 2000? Why was the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, ringed with anti-aircraft guns and the air space closed? The L.A. Times told us why. It was because Italian authorities were afraid a plane would be crashed into the summit to kill W.

When I was a young policeman I responded to a dead body call. The body was a fresh victim of a homicide and his throat had been slashed so badly that he was nearly decapitated. I knelt and started to take a pulse and my training officer stopped me. He said, "When you see someone with their head cut off, it is not necessary to take a pulse." I responded that my training in the L.A. police academy said that you should do this on a dead body call. He said, "When you have a dead body like this and someone asks you whether you took their pulse or not, arrest them for 5150." Section 5150 of the California Health and Safety Code covers persons who are mentally ill and a danger to themselves or others.

Some will cheer because the secret court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has just embarrassed John Ashcroft by releasing a decision showing that the FBI and the Justice Department have provided false information to the court to obtain warrants in criminal cases -- a function that court was never intended to fulfill. They will gloat as a portion of the PATRIOT Act has been ruled unconstitutional in a lower court and somehow forget that most of the entire act, which was never read by members of Congress before they voted, is unconstitutional anyway. They will forget who controls the highest court where John Ashcroft will now appeal.

No one has learned a thing from all of the Americans who spent every molecule of soul, money and physical and emotional strength they had in the cases of the assassinations; Vietnam-era POWs; Agent Orange; the Contra War; CIA drug trafficking; the train deaths in Arkansas; the Savings & Loan scandals; Iraqgate; Gulf War Syndrome; the Drug War; Waco; Oklahoma City; 109 mysterious suicides in the military during the 1980s and '90s; TWA 800; and a dozen other cases.

These elders know that no one now upset about 9/11 cares to listen to their lessons. We all start out believing that our case will be different, that something will work, that right and truth will prevail.

We have lost more than a third of our Bill of Rights and we are about to enshrine a Homeland Security Department that plans to scan us for vaccinations, read our e-mails, monitor every interaction we have with government, use the military in domestic operations and start a permanent hunt for enemies that will have to be found to keep the Department in business.

The FBI, even while Congress is in recess, has stepped up a probe of members of the Senate to find out who dared to leak to the American people the damning fact that the National Security Agency had intercepted warnings on Sept. 10 that the attack was going to occur the next day. Ashcroft's G-Men have moved to make senators and their staffs hand over calendars, phone records and other information that should -- by right -- be privileged information under the separation of powers.

Two members of Congress, Democrat Cynthia McKinney and Republican Bob Barr have been booted out of the House in a very well executed conspiracy. As different as night and day politically, the two had one thing in common: They dared to criticize the administration's actions in the wake of 9/11. They will forever remain an object lesson to any members who would question Caesar.

Bush has already deployed and committed more than 100,000 combat troops in preparation for the invasion of Iraq, which will result in tens of thousands of civilian casualties. That invasion may find it convenient for the U.S. to also occupy our newest declared enemy, Saudi Arabia. Together, those two countries own 36 percent of all the known oil on the planet.

The world is running out of oil. The world is growing desperate for oil. And oil is more than what you put in your car. It is the ability to work and, most importantly, to eat. To quote oil analyst Colin Campbell, Ph.D., "Mankind is not going to become extinct. But the subspecies, Œpetroleum man,' is most certainly going to become extinct very soon."

It has been decided that President Bush need not seek Congressional approval before launching the invasion.

At that moment, everything that America once represented to the world as good will be lost and the U.S. will be, and in some cases already is, viewed as nothing more than a new Roman Empire -- naked in its power, unabashed in its greed and brutal in the imposition of its wishes. We will have reached that unique common denominator which has spelled the decline and fall of every totalitarian empire in human history -- might makes right.

And most of the American people, with their bankrupt and corrupt economy, will welcome cheap oil, while it lasts, and they will engage in a multitude of mentally ill rationales that will, in the end, amount to nothing more than saying, "I don't care how many women and children you kill. Just let me keep my standard of living."

One year after 9/11 the only ones who really got it right are the recent demonstrators in Portland, Ore., who took peacefully to the streets against George W. Bush on Aug. 23, only to be sprayed with pepper spray and shot with rubber bullets. And I'm not sure that even they understand what is at stake yet.

Michael C. Ruppert is the publisher and editor of From The Wilderness, an international newsletter read in 33 countries and by many members of the U.S. Congress. He has lectured at major universities across the U.S. and Canada and is known as perhaps the most outspoken critic of the U.S. government’s actions, before and since the attacks of Sept. 11. His web site is www.fromthewilderness.com.