Lindorff: Well, I wrote a book back during the Bush [former US president] administration called the case for impeachment, where I documented all the ways in which that president had undermined the constitution, undermined the bill of rights and it created a move towards a police state.

I had never imagined at that time that the next president would take it further but we now have a president, ironically, who taught constitutional law, who is taking us back now to an era before the American Revolution to the way things were under the British.

And to precisely the conditions: arbitrary arrest, detention without trial, terminating execution without a trial all these things that led the colonists to throw the British out of the United States.

It's an astonishing regression to an era of tyranny and I think that the problem is that most Americans are unaware of it. It hasn't even been written about in most of the media- the mainstream media in the United States is being blacked out and even when people hear about it, the tendency for people these days is to think well that really doesn't apply to me, this is about terrorists and so on.

And it doesn't. It applies to everyone like myself and to peace activists, writers all of us who are critical of the administration and foreign policy are at risk.