Articles by Greg Guma

As census forms reach homes across the country, some people are being approached by scam artists who disguise themselves as census workers. What they're after, in most cases, is personal information like Social Security numbers, work history and home values, baseline data for possible identity theft. But others are more afraid of what the government might do with the information it collects.

Among the five cases of intelligence operation cover up currently being investigated by the US House Intelligence Committee is the 2001 shoot down of a small plane in Peru, resulting in the death of a Baptist missionary from Michigan and her 7-month-old daughter. The CIA inspector general has already concluded that the CIA improperly concealed information about the incident. So, what happened in Peru, and why? At first, of course, the CIA employed its usual tactics: denial and deflection of blame.

If staging coups, waging secret wars, suspending civil liberties, or torturing people were merely aberrations pursued by a handful of zealots, Congress could simply punish the offenders and get back to "business as usual." But the obvious, and yet unspoken, truth is that destabilizing other governments, unnecessary (and sometimes covert) wars, and abuses of power - at home and abroad - are standard tactics of the modern presidency.

Remember the panic-inducing headlines of 2008? Government Takes Over Troubled Mortgage Giants, Lehman Brothers Files for Bankruptcy, Bank of America Buys Merrill Lynch, and Stock Prices Plummet - that last one just as the government announced an $85 billion emergency loan to rescue insurance giant AIG. And that was just the beginning.