This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

When Saddam Hussein ruled in Baghdad, Iraqis who spread out their newspaper to read on a café table were careful not to spill any of their coffee on the front page which invariably carried a picture of the Iraqi leader. They feared that such an accident might be misinterpreted by omnipresent informers as a sign of disrespect or even opposition to Saddam, with dire consequences for themselves.

Fast-forward to the US today, where the US administration this week secured an indictment against the former head of the FBI, James B Comey, against whom Donald Trump has long pursued a vendetta in revenge for Comey investigating him for illicit links to Russia. Comey is charged with threatening the life of the President and transmitting that threat across state lines.

Even by Iraqi judicial standards, evidence for the alleged assassination threat is far-fetched, based as it is on a photograph Comey took when he was on holiday on the North Carolina coast. His picture showed seashells on a beach arranged in the shape of the numbers “86 47”. When he posted the picture online, the administration claimed that “86” is a code for killing or eliminating someone, in this case Trump, who is the 47th President of the US. In other words, the charge is that Comey was knowingly calling on somebody to assassinate the President.

In reality, “86” is a short hand commonly used by staff in restaurants, bars and hotels in the US to indicate that a customer is not to be served, most usually because he or she is unruly. Whoever arranged the seashells on that North Carolina beach, conceivably somebody in the hospitality business, may simply have meant that Trump was an unwelcome customer.

Saddam’s Iraq was sometimes called “the Republic of Fear”, a title earned by its merciless repression of real or imaginary opponents. Its defenders claimed that only a dictatorship unrestrained by law could hold together a much-divided country with a powerful tradition of violence. But the US has no such excuse as, on the 250th anniversary of America establishing a republic based on fundamental rights, Trump appears to ignore or manipulate the law underpinning those rights in the course of establishing his arbitrary rule.

Grotesquely excessive punishment for minor or fictional dissent – such as a coffee stain on the leader’s image or an arrangement of seashells on a beach – may appear bizarre, but they are important in stoking a feeling of dread. The message sent is that nobody is safe, however trivial or non-existent their offence.

Trump has his predecessors in the fascist dictators of Europe and the caudillos – strongmen – of South America. Yet the accelerated speed with which the USA is ceasing to be a lawbound society is astonishing. The nearest parallel I have witnessed was in Turkey after the abortive........

© iNews