The Military Plot to Take Over America: Fifty Years Later — Was the Mission Accomplished?

Burt Lancaster in John Frankenheimer's classic Seven Days in May, a film about a plot
to overthrow the US government. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

Homeland Security is providing grants to local police so they can arm to the teeth and practice 'anti-terrorist' training and exercises. "Curiously enough, as the Boston Globe reported, the exercise, planned months in advance and dubbed Operation Urban Shield 'has eerie similarities to the police investigation that led to the capture of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers'."


By John W. Whitehead

“I’m suggesting Mr. President, there’s a military plot to take over the Government of these United States, next Sunday . . .”—Col. Martin ‘Jiggs’ Casey, Seven Days in May (1964)

With a screenplay written by Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, director John Frankenheimer’s 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May is a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. Yet, incredibly enough, 50 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the Constitution.

Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today’s current events—ranging from the government’s steady militarization of law enforcement agencies, and its urban training exercises wherein military troops rappel from Black Hawk helicopters in cities across the country, from Miami and Chicago to Minneapolis, to domestic military training drills timed and formulated to coincide with or portend actual crises, and the Obama administration’s sudden and growing hostilities with Russia—could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May, which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain...

Unfortunately for the American people, it’s long past midnight. Indeed, the coup d’état wresting control of our government from civilians and delivering it into the hands of the military industrial complex happened decades ago, while our backs were turned and our minds distracted.

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