THE VERY IMPORTANT LAST FIVE TRUTHOUT (.ORG) ARTICLES BY MARJORIE COHN

 

     In honor of Marjorie Cohn, Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California, and her TruthOut (.org) articles which she has been absent from writing and posting for the past two months, I hereby post the following series of her last five excellent and very important articles leading up to that absence, as her at-least-weekly articles of truth have been much missed on TruthOut and by this blogger:

 

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Read more of Marjorie Cohn’s columns.

For background, see:
Marjorie Cohn | Big Brother Bush Is Listening
Marjorie Cohn | Bush Mouthpiece Defends Illegal Spying

 

Click here to go to t r u t h o u t ' s 'Marjorie Cohn' Page!    THE HAYDEN CHARADE
    (“Big Brother” is Watching
    All of Us to See Who is a
    “Good Citizen” or “Not”)

    By Marjorie Cohn
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective
    Monday, 22 May 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. and Internationally
    by t r u t h o u t (.org)
    and/or Marjorie Cohn.
    All rights reserved.]

 

    In his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, General Michael Hayden promised to promote autonomy and objectivity in the CIA if confirmed as its new director. Hayden assured the senators he would provide “hard-edged assessments” and be tolerant of dissenting views on intelligence matters. “When it comes to speaking truth to power,” Hayden declared, “I will lead CIA analysts by example. I will… always give our nation’s leaders the best analytic judgment.”

    The evidence, however, suggests precisely the opposite. As head of the National Security Agency, this 4-star general walked in lockstep with his commander in chief, George W. Bush. Hayden helped designed the illegal program of spying on our telephone calls and emails and then repeatedly defended it when interrogated by the senators at his hearing, citing “legal” opinions of Bush’s hired guns in the Justice Department.

    Rather than providing the White House with a neutral assessment of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, we can expect Hayden to give Bush the “intelligence” the president seeks to justify his war on Iran. Things did not run as smoothly as Bush would have wished under the last two CIA directors. He had to dispatch Dick Cheney to the CIA several times to furnish the “intelligence” he needed to rationalize his war on Iraq.

    Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) asked Hayden if he was “comfortable” with under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith’s personal intelligence-analysis cell, which hyped a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Hayden said he wasn’t comfortable with it and protested that he wasn’t aware of a lot of the activity going on leading up to the Iraq war.

    But when questioned about Colin Powell’s use of false WMD information to support his infamous appearance before the United Nations in the run-up the war, Hayden made a telling admission.

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C-SPAN FIRESTORM: 9/11 Truth Symposium Gains Momentum, by Paul Joseph Watson

 

C-Span Firestorm: 9/11 Truth Symposium
Gains Momentum

Scholars symposium to re-air again on Tuesday

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | July 31 2006

Judging by the reaction on the web to C-Span’s airing of the American Scholars Symposium, the 9/11 truth movement has been afforded another jolt of momentum in its quest to bring criminal proceedings against those complicit in the attack and its subsequent cover-up.

C-Span repeated the show Sunday and set to re-air it again Tuesday at 6:10PM EST, 5:10 CST.

The show is currently archived on C-Span’s website and you can watch it for free here.

Webster Tarpley, one of the keynote speakers and panel members at the symposium, today calls for a concerted effort to use the C-Span broadcast to discredit phony left-right gatekeepers who have resolved to blindly accept the government’s version of what happened on 9/11.

“Let us mobilize to organize the biggest audience ever by an incessant and sustained intervention in radio and television call-in talk shows, by blast emails, by direct personal contact alerts, by public signs, leaflets, and by every other means at our disposal,” Tarpley wrote.

——————————————————————————————-
See extended highlights of the conference with full speaker presentations, subscribe, download and share with your friends!
Click here to subscribe!
——————————————————————————————-

“Let us overwhelm Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, Jerry Doyle, Glenn Beck, and the other fascist parrots of the airwaves with the announcement of the Tuesday broadcast. Let us confront Ed Shultz and the other Air America gatekeepers with reality of the Tuesday show. Please do the same in the rest of the world.”

Before its initial screening on Saturday evening, many were concerned that the conference was so unrelenting in its hardcore stance on 9/11, that C-Span would be pressured into canning the show. This proved not to be the case and multiple repeats of the conference within days at peak times prove the program has received very favorable ratings.

This is another hammer blow to the establishment kingpins who had hoped questions about 9/11 would evaporate as we approach the 5th anniversary of the attack.

The 9/11 Blogger website is coordinating numerous activism campaigns in alliance with the C-Span coverage, including encouraging UN members to view the broadcast, targeting left and right radio and TV gatekeepers, and also a flyer campaign.

We implore everyone to get onboard with these campaigns and help spread 9/11 truth to the four corners of the world via the exemplary platform of the American Scholars Symposium.

Prison Planet.tv: The Premier Multimedia Subscription Package: Download and Share the Truth!

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REALITY IN LEBANON, Another Great “ADE” Video Production by Kurt Nimmo

 

Reality in Lebanon

Produced and Directed
by Kurt Nimmo

[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by Another Day in
the Empire (kurtnimmo.com),
ADE, and/or Kurt Nimmo.
All rights reserved.]

 

 

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PATRIOTISM AND THE FOURTH OF JULY, by Howard Zinn

 

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What do you think? The t r u t h o u t Town Meeting is in progress. Join the debate!

Also see below:
Jim Lobe | “Decent Respect” Might Help Image Woes Abroad

    Go to Original.

 

Click here to go to the HowardZinn.org website!    PATRIOTISM AND THE
    FOURTH OF JULY
    (True Patriotism Versus
    False Nationalism)

    By Howard Zinn
    AlterNet.org
    Tuesday, 4 July 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. and Internationally
    by AlterNet(.org)
    and/or Howard Zinn.
    All rights reserved.]

 

    The Declaration of Independence gives us the true meaning of a patriot, someone who supports a country’s ideals, not necessarily its government.

    In celebration of the Fourth of July there will be many speeches about the young people who “died for their country.” But those who gave their lives did not, as they were led to believe, die for their country; they died for their government. The distinction between country and government is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, which will be referred to again and again on July 4, but without attention to its meaning.

    The Declaration of Independence is the fundamental document of democracy. It says governments are artificial creations, established by the people, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and charged by the people to ensure the equal right of all to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Furthermore, as the Declaration says, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” It is the country that is primary—the people, the ideals of the sanctity of human life and the promotion of liberty.

    When a government recklessly expends the lives of its young for crass motives of profit and power, while claiming that its motives are pure and moral, (“Operation Just Cause” was the invasion of Panama and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in the present instance), it is violating its promise to the country. War is almost always a breaking of that promise. It does not enable the pursuit of happiness but brings despair and grief.

    Mark Twain, having been called a “traitor” for criticizing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called “monarchical patriotism.” He said: “The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: ‘The King can do no wrong.’ We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had — the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.”

    If patriotism in the best sense (not in the monarchical sense) is loyalty to the principles of democracy, then who was the true patriot? Theodore Roosevelt, who applauded a massacre by American soldiers of 600 Filipino men, women and children on a remote Philippine island, or Mark Twain, who denounced it? Today, U.S. soldiers who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are not dying for their country; they are dying for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They are dying for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the president. They are dying to cover up the theft of the nation’s wealth to pay for the machines of death. As of July 4, 2006, more than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq, more than 8,500 maimed or injured. With the war in Iraq long declared a “Mission Accomplished,” shall we revel in American military power and insist that the American empire will be beneficent?

    Our own history is enough to make one wary. Empire begins with what was called, in our high school history classes, “westward expansion,”a euphemism for the annihilation or expulsion of the Indian tribes inhabiting the continent, in the name of “progress” and “civilization.” It continues with the expansion of American power into the Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century, then into the Philippines, and then repeated Marine invasions of Central America and long military occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. After World War II, Henry Luce, owner of Time, LIFE, and Fortune, spoke of “the American Century,” in which this country would organize the world “as we see fit.” Indeed, the expansion of American power continued, too often supporting military dictatorships in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, because they were friendly to American corporations and the American government. The record does not justify confidence in Bush’s boast that the United States will bring democracy to Iraq.

    Should Americans welcome the expansion of the nation’s power, with the anger this has generated among so many people in the world? Should we welcome the huge growth of the military budget at the expense of health, education, the needs of children, one fifth of whom grow up in poverty? Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights. I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for her or his country might act on behalf of a different vision. Should we not begin to redefine patriotism? We need to expand it beyond that narrow nationalism that has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade—some call it “globalization”—should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity? Should we not begin to consider all children, everywhere, as our own? In that case, war, which in our time is always an assault on children, would be unacceptable as a solution to the problems of the world. Human ingenuity would have to search for other ways. [(Subtitle and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)]

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ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, READ ‘THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE FOR IMPEACHMENT’ OF BUSH AND COMPANY, by David Swanson

 

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    Go to Original.

 

Click here to go to the AfterDowningStreet.org website!    ON THE 4TH OF JULY, READ “THE
    DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
    FOR IMPEACHMENT” OF BUSH & CO.

    By David Swanson
    AfterDowningStreet.org
    Sunday, 02 July 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. and Internationally
    by AfterDowningStreet(.org)
    and/or David Swanson.
    All rights reserved.]

 

    Veterans for Peace has drafted a Declaration of Impeachment using nothing but excerpts from the Declaration of Independence (plus a few words in parentheses). It reads as follows, and should be read at picnics and protests on the Fourth of July:

    “… (W)henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [‘… that all (people) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these (Rights) are Life, LIBERTY and the pursuit of Happiness…, (and that) Governments are instituted among (the People), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …’], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their [Liberty,] Safety and Happiness …

    “… (A)ll experience hath shewn, that (hu)mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations … design(s) to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their DUTY, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security …

    “The history of the present King (George)… is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States [and the world]. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

  • [“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for public good (and Liberty). He has forbidden his (more independent Lawmakers) to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to (obey) them (or to give his Assent that he must obey them) …]

  • “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance …

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INDEPENDENCE DAY, by S. Wolf Britain

 

Click here to go to my new MySpace blog!

 

INDEPENDENCE DAY

For The Slaughtered Innocents

Written on July 4th, 2004
By S. Wolf Britain
( And Now The Apocalypse
http://www.wolfbritain.com/ )

[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by And Now The
Apocalypse! (wolfbritain.com),
and/or S. Wolf Britain.
All rights reserved.]

 

Are we really independent,
Or are we blindly believing
The lies being told us by warmongers
Lusting after death and destruction?

Is there autonomy between
What the lying politicians say
And the important truths we’re hopefully
Coming to learn about war versus peace?

Are we choosing life rather than death
Or are we ignorantly condoning murder,
Blindness not making us any less guilty
For our complicity in the endless slaughter?

Is there the seeking of separation
From the senseless, inhumane carnage,
And only standing for blessed peacemaking,
That mercy which glorifies humankind?

Are we the merciful who are the only ones’
God will have mercy upon in the very near future,
Instead of the unmerciful who will be condemned
As they themselves condemned the weak and innocent?

Where lay our true days of independence?

 

 

Posted in Blog, Poems, Poetry, Prose, Truth, Technorati, True, Political, Commentary, Uncategorized, Weblog | Leave a comment

RALPH SCHOENMAN: The Category of Terror; by Kurt Nimmo

 

 

BLOGGERS AGAINST
TORTURE

Click here to go to the 'Torture Awareness Month' website!

Join With “Bloggers Against
Torture” in Taking Action(s)
Against Torture by Clicking on
this Pic and/or Text Link!

 

Ralph Schoenman: The

Category of Terror

Produced and Directed
by Kurt Nimmo

[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by Another Day in
the Empire (kurtnimmo.com),
Kurt Nimmo, and/or
Ralph Schoenman.
All rights reserved.]

 

 

Posted in Blog, Technorati, Torture, True, Political, Commentary, Uncategorized, Weblog | Leave a comment

A SERIES OF VERY IMPORTANT RECENT ARTICLES, by Various Authors

 

BLOGGERS AGAINST
TORTURE

Click here to go to the 'Torture Awareness Month' website!

Join With “Bloggers Against
Torture” in Taking Action(s)
Against Torture by Clicking on
this Pic and/or Text Link!

 

     A Series of Very Important Recent Articles (most I’ve been meaning to post since they were issued, now posted in order of when they were issued), particularly on the very important topic of torture in this month of June 2006 designated as Torture Awareness Month, and its associated, highly excellent website, “Bloggers Against Torture”, at http://blogagainsttorture.blogspot.com/ [please join with Bloggers Against Torture in the struggle against torture].

 

 

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Read more of William Rivers Pitt’s columns.

 

    

Click here to go to t r u t h o u t ' s 'William Rivers Pitt' Page!    HOW CRAZY ARE THEY?
    (Crazy Enough to Carry Out
    Systematic Terrorism, etc.)

    By William Rivers Pitt
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective
    Tuesday, 11 April 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. and Internationally
    by t r u t h o u t (.org)
    and/or William Rivers
    Pitt. All rights reserved.]

 

    I had a debate with my boss last night about Sy Hersh’s terrifying New Yorker article describing Bush administration plans to attack Iran, potentially with nuclear weapons. After reading the Hersh piece, my boss was understandably worried, describing his reaction to the article in road-to-Damascus-revelation terms. They’re going to do this, he said.

    I told my boss that I couldn’t believe it was possible the Bush administration would do this. I ran through all the reasons why an attack on Iran, especially with any kind of nuclear weaponry, would be the height of folly.

    Iran, unlike Iraq, has a formidable military. They own the high ground over the Persian Gulf and have deployed missile batteries all throughout the mountains along the shore. Those missile batteries, I told him, include the Sunburn missile, which can travel in excess of Mach 2 and can spoof Aegis radar systems. Every American warship in the Gulf, including the carrier group currently deployed there, would be ducks on the pond.

    The blowback in Iraq would be immediate and catastrophic, I reminded him. The Shi’ite majority that enjoys an alliance with Iran would go indiscriminately crazy and attack anyone and anything flying the stars and stripes.

    Syria, which has inked a mutual defense pact with Iran and is believed to have significant chemical and biological weapons capabilities, would get into the game. Continue reading

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NSA SNOOP PROGRAM: All About The Neocon Enemies List, by Kurt Nimmo

 

NSA Snoop Program: All About
The Neocon Enemies List

Written by Kurt Nimmo
[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by Another Day in
the Empire (kurtnimmo.com),
and/or Kurt Nimmo.
All rights reserved.]

 

     National Review Online, the home of many a Straussian neocon, has posted an excerpt from William Arkin on its Media Blog page. Arkin, who writes a column for the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post (the editors over there like to call Arkin’s Early Warning a blog), declared on May 16, in regard to the massive NSA snoop program, “there is no enemies list” and the “Bush administration has been arrogant and incompetent in communicating to the American public. It has cynically split the country into red and blue in order to give itself greater power to pursue a wrong-headed national security strategy that it claims is red, white and blue…. The Congress has also utterly failed in five months to get to the bottom of the NSA’s warantless surveillance program and thereby resolve its legality and assuage public anxiety.” In other words, it is simply more partisan politics and splenetic political manipulation la mode de Karl Rove. Nothing to see here, except a bit of unresolved legality. Please move along.

If you believe that Bush and the neocons in the White House and the Pentagon, as Arkin suggests, have not drawn up a comprehensive list of domestic enemies, and are not snooping them right now, I have a chartreuse pony to sell you.

It’s no mistake Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden was breezily selected, as predicted, by a large number of senators (78-15 in his favor) earlier today. Hayden will merge CIA and Pentagon covert and snoop operations and scant little of the work will concentrate on Osama’s cartoonish cave dwellers and the spurious boogieman known as “al-Qaeda.” William Arkin may trust his government to employ a colossal snoop program in a myopic effort to gain short term political gain, but those of us who take a look at not too distant history understand otherwise.

Verne Lyon, a former CIA undercover operative, wrote for Covert Action Information Bulletin, Summer 1990, that with “the DCS, the DOD [Domestic Operations Division], the old boy network, and the CIA Office of Security operating without congressional oversight or public knowledge, all that was needed to bring [Operation Chaos] together was a perceived threat to the national security and a presidential directive unleashing the dogs. That happened in 1965 when President Johnson instructed [John] McCone to provide an independent analysis of the growing problem of student protest against the war in Vietnam. Prior to this, Johnson had to rely on information provided by the FBI, intelligence that he perceived to be slanted by Hoover’s personal views, which often ignored the facts.” In order to “achieve the intelligence being asked for by the President, the CIA’s Office of Security, the Counter-Intelligence division, and the newly created DOD turned to the old boy network for help.” Lyon continues:

As campus anti-war protest activity spread across the nation, the CIA reacted by implementing two new domestic operations. The first, Project RESISTANCE, was designed to provide security to CIA recruiters on college campuses. Under this program, the CIA sought active cooperation from college administrators, campus security, and local police to help identify anti-war activists, political dissidents, and “radicals.” Eventually information was provided to all government recruiters on college campuses and directly to the super-secret DOD on thousands of students and dozens of groups. The CIA’s Office of Security also created Project MERRIMAC, to provide warnings about demonstrations being carried out against CIA facilities or personnel in the Washington area.

All of this should be familiar, as the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) kept a database on “a motley group of about 10 peace activists [who] showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton” in 2004, according to Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, in order to protest the corporation’s “supposed” war profiteering. “A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA’s database. It’s not clear why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention,” muses the clueless Isikoff, about as tuned in to domestic spook operations (in the case of the CIA, quite illegal under its charter) as his colleague, William Arkin, who should know better. The CIFA’s activity in regard to Haliburton is reminiscent of Project RESISTANCE, a domestic espionage operation coordinated under the DOD, a fact discovered with a simple Wikipedia search (obviously, writers working for Newsweek and the Washington Post cannot be bothered with online encyclopedias).

Under Operation Chaos and Project MERRIMAC, the CIA went about violating the strictures of the Bill of Rights with customary zeal. The CIA “infiltrated agents into domestic groups of all types and activities. It used its contacts with local police departments and their intelligence units to pick up its ‘police skills’; and began in earnest to pull off burglaries, illegal entries, use of explosives, criminal frame-ups, shared interrogations, and disinformation. CIA teams purchased sophisticated equipment for many starved police departments and in return got to see arrest records, suspect lists, and intelligence reports. Many large police departments, in conjunction with the CIA, carried out illegal, warrantless searches of private properties, to provide intelligence for a report requested by President Johnson,” writes Lyon.

After Johnson left office, Nixon continued the programs. “In June 1970 Nixon met with Hoover, [Richard] Helms, NSA Director Admiral Noel Gaylor, and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) representative Lt. Gen. Donald V. Bennett and told them he wanted a coordinated and concentrated effort against domestic dissenters. To do that, he was creating the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), chaired by Hoover. The first ICI report, in late June, recommended new efforts in ‘black bag operations,’ wiretapping, and a mail-opening program. In late July 1970… the members of the ICI (were told) that their recommendations had been accepted by the White House.”

If not for the Church Committee (the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in 1975), the extent of crimes committed by the CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon would have likely remained secret. According to revelations brought forth by the committee (see the Church Committee’s supplementary detailed staff report on Operation Chaos), during “the life of Operation CHAOS, the CIA had compiled personality files on over 13,000 individuals including more than 7,000 U.S. citizens as well as files on over 1,000 domestic groups. The CIA had shared information on more than 300,000 persons with different law enforcement agencies including the DIA and FBI. It had spied on, burglarized, intimidated, misinformed, lied to, deceived, and carried out criminal acts against thousands of citizens of the United States. It had placed itself above the law, above the Constitution, and in contempt of international diplomacy and the United States Congress. It had violated its charter and had contributed either directly or indirectly to the resignation of a President of the United States (Nixon). It had tainted itself beyond hope.”

Of all this, the CIA’s blatant contempt for the rights of individuals was the worst. This record of deceit and illegality, implored Congress as well as the President to take extreme measures to control the Agency’s activities. However, except for a few cosmetic changes made for public consumption such as the Congressional intelligence oversight committee nothing has been done to control the CIA. In fact, subsequent administrations have chosen to use the CIA for domestic operations as well. These renewed domestic operations began with Gerald Ford, were briefly limited by Jimmy Carter, and then extended dramatically by Ronald Reagan.

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BIG BROTHER’S HISTORY, by John Prados

 

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                    BIG BROTHER’S HISTORY
                    (It Appears that the U.S. Constitution
                    Supposedly Doesn’t Matter Anymore)

                    By John Prados
                    TomPaine.com

                    Thursday, 25 May 2006

                    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
                    U.S.A. and Internationally
                    by TomPaine (.com)
                    and/or John Prados.
                    All rights reserved.]

 

Click here to go to the ACLU's website!    The National Security Agency’s [illegal] warrantless domestic wiretaps and its logs of Americans’ phone calls are the most controversial, but by no means the only, surveillance initiative underway that has chilling implications for all Americans. American history is littered with examples of similar instances of security programs gone awry. It is three decades now since the Church Committee concluded, “The tendency of intelligence activities expanding beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings.”

    In the 20th century, this history of misuse of security programs begins with World War I. A government-sponsored volunteer (read: vigilante) group, the American Protective League, was created to assist the Justice Department and military intelligence, resulting in nearly 2,000 prosecutions for allegedly “disloyal” utterances by Americans.

    Immediately after the war, the “Palmer Raids,” named for then-Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, rounded up 10,000 persons for supposed anarchist or revolutionary views. These became a milestone in the creation of the FBI and the career of its first director (and Palmer’s chief assistant) J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover went on to keep books on all manner of Americans; he used the information collected to exert political pressure at various times.

    Domestic intelligence programs were revived in 1936 and steadily increased in intrusiveness, impelled first by World War II, then by the Cold War. These began with the intention of monitoring foreign influence on American politics and ended up investigating “loyalty.” We hardly need mention the internment of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans on hysterical suspicions of contact with the enemy in World War II.

    Though the two statutes are far different in detail, both the Internal Security Act of 1950 and today’s Patriot Act represent encroachments on constitutionally guaranteed rights.Title II of the Internal Security Act actually permitted the detention of any person suspected of sabotage or espionage during invasion or insurrection and half a dozen holding camps were prepared. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations initiated “loyalty oaths” with boards to review the records of several million government employees-estimates of those fired or forced to resign range from about 2,500 to roughly 7,000. Although it never came to pass, the list of Americans to be rounded up under the Internal Security Act in the event of a national emergency numbered 26,000 persons in 1954.The inquiries carried out under the loyalty program were FBI-controlled. By 1960 it had opened approximately 432,000 files on groups or individual Americans, under guidelines that permitted investigation based on suspicion of “anarchistic or revolutionary beliefs” even if membership in any group had “not been proven” and in the absence of evidence of any current “activity of a subversive nature.”

    The depredations of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the effects of Senator Joe McCarthy’s charges of communist infiltration had disastrous impacts on Americans’ lives, but they served merely as backdrop for more intrusive programs. In 1952 the U.S. Post Office began to record mail sent from the U.S. to Russia, a project taken over by the CIA counterintelligence staff in 1955 and called HT/Lingual. Aimed at identifying Russian spies, in the 1960s Lingual was diverted to spying on Vietnam war protesters. The mail program ended in 1973 when the post office stopped cooperating, but in its last year alone the CIA handled 4.3 million pieces of mail, photographed the envelopes of about 33,000, and opened and copied 8,700 letters-some 60 percent of them on the basis of FBI watch lists.

    The FBI, meanwhile, began an effort to infiltrate and destabilize the American communist party in 1956. Called COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Project), the effort soon expanded. In the guise of preventing communist influence on community groups, in 1960 the FBI was authorized to include “legitimate mass organizations, such as Parent-Teacher Associations, civil organizations, and racial and religious groups.” Only a year later was COINTELPRO applied to the Socialist Workers Party. Before long it extended to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, the Ku Klux Klan, the women’s liberation movement and a host of Vietnam antiwar groups.

    The campaign included planted news items, derogatory rumors spread inside groups, bogus hate mail, entrapment, wiretaps, deliberately aimed leaks and more. The FBI campaign against Martin Luther King, Jr. is a well-known example but only a tiny fraction of the overall effort. In creating its target lists the FBI developed a “Rabble Rouser/Agitator Index” it applied to individuals-“key agitators” and “key black extremists.” There were a half million FBI files on citizens.

    The rest of the government was not far behind. Military intelligence agencies opened over 100,000 files on Americans from 1965 to 1971. The IRS compiled 11,000 “intelligence” files between 1969 and 1973 and opened tax investigations for political reasons. The CIA had another 10,000 files on Americans, and a computerized index of 300,000. Its Projects Chaos, Merrimack and Resistance were all aimed at American antiwar activists. Under Project Mudhen, the CIA, which is prohibited by law from actions inside the United States, followed journalist Jack Anderson and four colleagues in an effort to discover their sources.

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THE THOUGHT POLICE, by S. Wolf Britain

 

I thought it was about time, well past time actually, to return to my poems and post at least one of them on my blog(s):

Click here to go to my new MySpace blog!

THE THOUGHT POLICE

With many thanks to George Orwell
Who warned us about what’s coming

Written on 11 November 2003
By S. Wolf Britain
( And Now The Apocalypse
http://www.wolfbritain.com/ )

[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by And Now The
Apocalypse! (wolfbritain.com),
and/or S. Wolf Britain.
All rights reserved.]

The U.S. government is not a benevolent caretaker
But is rather despotic, malevolent and capricious
While going about fascistically deceiving, colonizing
Serving military-industrial “America” over humans
That don’t profit from insanity, bombing and death
Unlike the many self-serving Machiavellian killers
Who run the corporate murder-for-money machinery
Which gains the whole world but has none of soul’s
Love and mercy for humanity needing to predominate
Over their greed and hate that are compassionless

These “Big Brothers” want to control our thoughts
Leaving us without any True Liberties or Freedoms
And silence our “check and balance” on their aims
Of totally enslaving, dominating and mastering us
While making us absolutely subservient automatons
That do nothing but what we’re told by sociopaths
Seeking to be our completely evil gods and rulers
Who care for nothing and no one except their profits
In the process of sacrificing the freedom of thoughts
For True Liberty and Mastery ONLY over ourselves

Beware the thought police!

 

 

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RICE ON WHITE: In The Time Of Far-Right-Wing U.S. Fascist Retribution, by S. Wolf Britain

 

RICE ON WHITE

In The Time Of Far-Right-Wing
U.S. Theo-Fascist Retribution

By S. Wolf Britain
( And Now The Apocalypse
http://www.wolfbritain.com/ )

[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by And Now The
Apocalypse! (wolfbritain.com),
and/or S. Wolf Britain.
All rights reserved.]

 

Click here to go to the ACLU's website!        Repressive U.S. Government
          Crackdown on Freedom(s)

        The United States and the world are going insane on an express train to hell. That is the ultimate logical conclusion that anyone like myself, who is not anti-religious, or at least anti-Christian, and who truly and fully discerns what is going on right now and refuses to bury their head(s) in the sand about it, has to come to once they cease their avoidance, denial and refusal to believe that it is indeed true, and that IT IS happening.

In particular, the U.S. government and the government of the U.K. are in the process of setting up “panopticon” police states in their respective countries that are almost every day becoming more and more authoritarian, oppressive and repressive like regimes of “third-world dictatorships”. (SEE also Alex Jones’ and Paul Joseph Watson’s great article from the former’s Prison Planet.com website, “The Panopticon: A Mass Surveillance Prison for Humanity.”)

If it wasn’t for the “U.S.A. Patriot Act” recently having been “bipartisanly” (sic) reapproved and extended with very little added protections of civil liberties with any teeth to them, the U.K. would thus far almost appear to be the worst offender, with public video surveilance, invasion of privacy, and arrests of average “anti-war-sentiment” citizens more widespread than in the U.S. as yet, at least as far as most U.S. citizens are thus far aware.

But, as a result of the fact(s) that the “Patriot Act” does exist, with all of the truly-Orwellian, repressive authority that it gives to U.S. police agencies, both federal and local, in what is allegedly the freest, most democratic country on the planet, or ostensibly used to be, that the more and more severe and draconian crackdowns of dissent in the U.S. are ever-increasing and unprecidented, which in all likelihood will very soon, if they do not already, rival and go far beyond the U.K. government in level(s) of repressiveness and severity, in overall numbers of people repressed if nothing else, and the fact that the U.S. government’s extremely dismal, violent, mass-murder, and mass-imprisonment human rights and civil liberties record exists as it does, those who are not and will not be in avoidance and denial of the facts must come to the inescapable and unavoidable conclusion that in sum-total the extent of repression by the U.S. government far exceeds that of the U.K. government, and that the U.S. government is the most extreme offender.

Yes, the U.K. government has its “counterpart repressive law(s)” which are in fact intentionally and/or inadvertanty competing “neck and neck” with the repressive “Patriot Act”, yet the U.K. has never been as democratic and free of “monarchical-dictatorial repression” as the U.S. has been, or at least has never had as much of the appearance of being so-free as the U.S. has had.

 

What do the “Red” Countries and other repressive regimes think of the U.S. government?

All of this ever-increasing repression in the U.S. must make communist China, other repressive regimes, and true terrorists who are not agents, assets, puppets, pawns, and/or patsies of U.S. government and allied “intelligence” and “counter-terrorism”, as most of the “terrorists” are, exceedingly happy that the U.S. government and others’ are “following in their footsteps” by way of instituting ever more red-communist-like crackdowns on freedom and dissent, and that the U.S. presidency is becoming increasingly monarchical and dictatorial, like their “rogue” regimes. Of course, as everyone who is knowledgeable of the True History of the U.S. government knows, the U.S. government is by far the worst “Rogue State” of them all; which, naturally, most if not all of the other “rogue states” have been well-aware of for quite some time, never mind that most of the “American” people have been “blissfully” unaware of that fact for just as long, and still are.

Now, enter the scene last week, President Hu Jintao, leader of red-communist China, in a visit to the U.S. during which, as he began to speak on the White House lawn, he was “heckled” by a dissenting and protesting Chinese-American journalist for his and his country’s notoriously horrific human rights record, and asking President Bush to seek to stop Hu’s and China’s human rights offenses, only to have at least one hand of a U.S. Secret Service agent, as she was arrested and carted off, placed over her mouth in an attempt to silence her in front of God, country and the President of China, in the land of the Constitutional rights to exercise and carry out “free speech” and “dissent”.

Almost but not quite needless to say, the U.S. far-right-wing radical extremist fascism- supporters, propagandists, agents, and/or assets are claiming that the fact this show of protest and dissent by this lone woman was not prevented, will supposedly make Hu and/or China’s other leaders “….mistrust… American intentions towards China” (SEE previous link), while of course completely sidestepping the fact that Bush and Company’s swift police-state response to the incident will undoubtedly make Chinese leaders at least somewhat gleeful for its distinct similarity(ies) to China’s equally-swift responses to such dissent, and rather than “….play to their worst fears and suspicions about the United States….”, on the contrary plays to their admiration for the ways in which China and the U.S. are alike, in ways that are anything but free and democratic, and that are completely contrary to the very Constitutional principles for which China no doubt knows the U.S. is supposed to stand.

In other words, the eerily similar response of the U.S. “goon squad”, to how China’s goon squad would have responded to the incident, is not lost on President Hu and the other leaders of China, and they undoubtedly revelled in it to some degree; in fact, it may very likely have made Hu feel at home, almost as if, at least somewhat, and/or momentarilly, he was home in the repressive country and regime of his birth. What an awful reflection the Bush police state thereby brought about on “….the land of the free….”!

Then add to that the fact that Bush apologized for the protester, which amounts to an apology for the Constitutional, First Amendment freedoms that supposedly exist in the U.S.; and, in addition, add the fact that the U.S. government is deeply “in bed”, or “imbedded”, with China in trade, commerce and in receipt of multi-billion dollar loans from China; and you have even more a recipe for increasing U.S.-government-created dissaster(s) and repression.

 

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

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HOW MASSACRES BECOME THE NORM, by Dahr Jamail

 

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Click here to go to Dahr Jamail's     HOW MASSACRES BECOME THE
    NORM (Yet More Crimes Against
    Humanity & War Crimes Committed
    by the United States Government)

    By Dahr Jamail, Journalist
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective
    Tuesday, 04 April 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. and Internationally
    by t r u t h o u t (.org),
    Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
    and/or DahrJamailIraq.com.
    All rights are reserved.]

 

     US soldiers killing innocent civilians in Iraq is not news. Just as it was not news that US soldiers slaughtered countless innocent civilians in Vietnam. However, when some rare reportage of this non news from Iraq does seep through the cracks of the corporate media, albeit briefly, the American public seems shocked. Private and public statements of denial and dismissal immediately start to fill the air. We hear, “American soldiers would never do such a thing,” or “Who would make such a ridiculous claim?”

     It amazes me that so many people in the US today somehow seriously believe that American soldiers would never kill civilians. Despite the fact that they are in a no-win guerrilla war in Iraq which, like any other guerrilla war, always generates more civilian casualties than combatant casualties on either side.

     Robert J. Lifton is a prominent American psychiatrist who lobbied for the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders after his work with US veterans from Vietnam. His studies on the behavior of those who have committed war crimes led him to believe it does not require an unusual level of mental illness or of personal evil to carry out such crimes. Rather, these crimes are nearly guaranteed to occur in what Lifton refers to as “atrocity-producing situations.”

     Several of his books, like The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, examine how abnormal conditions work on normal minds, enabling them to commit the most horrendous crimes imaginable.

     Iraq today is most certainly an “atrocity-producing situation,” as it has been from the very beginning of the occupation.

     The latest reported war crime, a US military raid on the al-Mustafa Shia mosque in Baghdad on March 26th, which killed at least 16 people, is only one instance of the phenomena that Lifton has spoken of.

     An AP video of the scene shows male bodies tangled together in a bloody mass on the floor of the Imams’ living quarters – all of them with shotgun wounds and other bullet holes. The tape also shows shell casings of the caliber used by the US military scattered about on the floor. An official from the al-Sadr political bloc reported that American forces had surrounded the hospital where the wounded were taken for treatment after the massacre.

     The slaughter was followed by an instant and predictable disinformation blitz by the US military. The second ranking US commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, told reporters “someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was.”

     On March 15th, 11 Iraqis, mostly women and children, were massacred by US troops in Balad. Witnesses told reporters that US helicopters landed near a home, which was then stormed by US troops. Everyone visible was rounded up and taken inside the house where they were killed. The victims’ ages ranged from six months to 75 years.

     The US military acknowledged the raid, but claimed to have captured a resistance fighter and insisted that only four people had been killed. Their claim would have held good but for the discrepancies that the available evidence presents. For one, the photographs that the AP reporter took of the scene reveal a collapsed roof, three destroyed cars and two dead cows. The other indictment comes from the detailed report of the incident prepared by Iraq Police. It matches witness accounts and accuses the American troops of murdering Iraqi civilians.

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OPERATION SWARM OF LIES, by Dahr Jamail

 

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Click here to go to Dahr Jamail's     OPERATION SWARM OF LIES
    (Crimes Against Humanity and War
    Crimes by the U.S. Government)

    By Dahr Jamail
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective
    Monday, 20 March 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. & Internationally
    by t r u t h o u t (.org),
    Dahr …’s Iraq Dispatches
    and/or Dahr Jamail.
    All rights reserved.]

 

     The stated mission of Operation Swarmer, launched late last week in an area just northeast of Samarra, in Iraq, was to “break up a center of insurgent resistance” and to disrupt “terrorist activity,” according to the US military.

     Comprised of over 1,500 US and Iraqi soldiers, 50 US attack and transport helicopters airlifted the bold force into a flat area of farmland filled not with fighters belonging to the “center of insurgent resistance,” but with impoverished farmers, cows, goats and women baking bread. The first drop of soldiers onto the ground from this air-operation doubled the meager population of 1,500 souls living in the 50 square-mile area.

     US troops acted bravely, snatching up 48 “suspected insurgents,” then promptly releasing 17 of them. They were precise in their operations, and did not detain a single cow or goat.

     What did the military say about why no resistance was met?

     “We believe we achieved tactical surprise,” said Lt. Col. Edward Loomis, the spokesman for the 101st Airborne Division.

     Fallaciously hailed as the largest air assault in Iraq since the Anglo-American invasion three years ago, Lt. Col. Loomis said that two days into the operation his forces “continue to move” through the area, and “tactical interviews began immediately.” According to Time magazine reporters:

     “Four Black Hawk helicopters landed in a wheat field and dropped off a television crew, three photographers, three print reporters and three Iraqi government officials right into the middle of Operation Swarmer. Iraqi soldiers in newly painted humvees, green and red Iraqi flags stenciled on the tailgates, had just finished searching the farm populated by a half-dozen skinny cows and a woman kneading freshly risen dough and slapping it to the walls of a mud oven. But contrary to what many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war. (“Air Assault” is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.) In fact, there were no air-strikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op. What’s more, there were no shots fired at all and the units had met no resistance, said the US and Iraqi commanders.”

     Of course, the US military claimed that two local leaders of the group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were to have been in the area, but alas, they were not to be caught up in Operation Swarmer or any of the “tactical interviews.”

     Meanwhile on Sunday, fresh from a relaxing weekend at Camp David, Mr. Bush said of Iraq, “I’m encouraged by the progress,” while talking to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House.

     Bush, his comments sticking to the talking points of his administration which surround this three year anniversary of the launching of Operation Iraqi Freedom, nearly mirrored those made recently by General Peter Pace. Pace, as you recall, when asked on “Meet the Press” about Iraq, said things were “going very, very well from everything you look at.”

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IRAQ: PERMANENT U.S. COLONY, by Dahr Jamail

 

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Click here to go to Dahr Jamail's     IRAQ: PERMANENT U.S. COLONY
    (The U.S. Government is Building
    At Least Four Permanent
    Bases in Iraq)

    By Dahr Jamail
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective
    Tuesday, 14 March 2006
    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
    U.S.A. and Internationally
    by t r u t h o u t (.org)
    and/or Dahr Jamail.
    All rights reserved.]

 

     Why does the Bush Administration refuse to discuss withdrawing occupation forces from Iraq? Why is Halliburton, who landed the no-bid contracts to construct and maintain US military bases in Iraq, posting higher profits than ever before in its 86-year history?

     Why do these bases in Iraq resemble self-contained cities as much as military outposts?

     Why are we hearing such ludicrous and outrageous statements from the highest ranking military general in the United States, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, who when asked how things were going in Iraq on March 5th in an interview on “Meet the Press” said, “I’d say they’re going well. I wouldn’t put a great big smiley face on it, but I would say they’re going very, very well from everything you look at.”

     I wonder if there is a training school, or at least talking point memos for these Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because Pace’s predecessor, Gen. Richard Myers, told Senator John McCain last September that “In a sense, things are going well [in Iraq].”

     General Pace also praised the Iraqi military, saying, “Now there are over 100 [Iraqi] battalions in the field.”

     Wow! General Pace must have waved his magic wand and materialized all these 99 new Iraqi battalions that are diligently keeping things safe and secure in occupied Iraq. Because according to the top US general in Iraq, General George Casey, not long ago there was only one Iraqi battalion (about 500-600 soldiers) capable of fighting on its own in Iraq.

     During a late-September 2005 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Casey acknowledged that the Pentagon estimate of three Iraqi battalions last June had shrunk to one in September. That is less than six months ago.

     I thought it would be a good idea to find someone who is qualified to discuss how feasible it would be to train 99 Iraqi battalions in less than six months, as Pace now claims has occurred.

     I decided that someone who was in the US Army for 26 years and who worked in eight conflict areas, starting in Vietnam and ending with Haiti, would be qualified. If he had served in two parachute infantry units, three Ranger units, two Special Forces Groups and in Delta Force that would be helpful as well. And just to make sure, if he taught tactics at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama and Military Science at the United States Military Academy at West Point, thus knowing a thing or two about training soldiers, that would be a bonus.

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