You Might Be a Terrorist If..............

You happen to have the audacity to disagree with the government.....

400,000 still on terror watchlist, including author of book on Rove
Over 1 million records on government’s combined watch list

James Moore, a Texas journalist who wrote two searing books on former Bush White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, found himself included on a no-fly list, a component of the combined terrorist watch list, and has not been able to get his name removed. It is unclear why Moore was listed and why he remains on the list — but Moore told RAW STORY that the list hasn’t made anyone safer.

“The terrorist watchlist is an icon for government malfunction and abuse,” Moore wrote in an email message Wednesday. “Politicians can seemingly nominate their enemies for the list or have it done by proxy using their bureaucratic influence. And the lists are maintained using outdated matching software that is incapable of finding discrepancies in all of the various data formats used by federal agencies. The list has made a lot of work for a lot of bureaucrats but it hasn’t caught a single terrorist or made safer one American soul.”

These misidentifications are generally explained as affecting only individuals with common names which they might share with actual terrorism suspects. However, last year Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) called for a probe after learning that the name of CNN correspondent Drew Griffin had appeared on the no-fly list shortly after he had done an investigative report on weaknesses in the federal air marshal system. A TSA spokesperson insisted that any connection between the two events was “absolutely fabricated.”

And look what they can do to you.......

The most visible case of consequences for an individual wrongly placed on the watchlist was Canadian software engineer Maher Arar. In 2002, Arar was detained at a New York City airport, then rendered without a court order to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured—all because Canadian officials had wrongly asked for his name to be included on a watchlist.

Still think you live in a free country? Oh, right,I forgot.... we've been exporting freedom all over the world for years now, must be why we haven't got much left at home.

Targeting the Free Press

Police Seize Journalists Notes About RNC Protest Plans
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIm-IWaOPjo

National Lawyers Guild reports..... A trio of journalists who have a track record of documenting police abuse at political conventions were stopped and searched during the early morning hours in Minneapolis. Police took their video equipment, cell phones, computer, hard drive and notes about protests planned for next week's Republican National Convention. They took away their ability to report.

RNC Raids Have Been Targeting Video Activists
"St. Paul is a free country!" cried a resident of Iglehart Avenue, a neighborhood street in St. Paul, Minn., as she watched her next-door neighbor's house being overtaken by police officers on Saturday afternoon. Just one in a series of house raids over a 24-hour period the weekend before the Republican National Convention, St. Paul police surrounded the private home with weapons drawn, detaining people in the backyard, while journalists, activists and neighbors -- including several children -- looked on.

Their crime? None whatsoever. No one was trespassing or engaging in acts of civil disobedience. Instead, members of I-Witness Video, a New York-based media watchdog group that records police activity in order to protect civil liberties, were holding an organizing meeting at 949 Iglehart, the home of St. Paul resident Mike Whalen, when armed police officers arrived in the early afternoon and ordered their surrender.

Apparently, independent journalists, the last bastion of the free press, are frowned upon in fascist Amerika, only the corporate lapdog press need apply to cover the RNC. The gestapo seems to be actively seeking out journalists who don't publish the official propaganda, detaining them without cause, stealing their equipment and notes, assaulting and intimidating them. Breaking heads and taking names they are...Isn't this type of tyranny exactly why Freedom of the Press is guaranteed by the Constitution? Oh and, by the way, the Declaration of Independence is quite clear on our obligations in just this sort of situation..."But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design 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." Oh..darn...is it still legal to quote the Declaration? Well, I guess I should have at least been in designated "free speech zone"before doing such a radical thing....hell, these days Homeland Security labels you a terrorist if you admit you have read the Constitution....sigh...big red flag attached to my name on the no fly list for sure....no Bahamas vacation for me.

Considering a protest? You Too Could Be Arrested for THOUGHT CRIMES

Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis

Federal government involved in raids on protesters

We've gone from seeing citizens brutalized, intimidated, and arrested for exercising their right to free speech, to a bizarre state of affairs where one can receive that treatment for THINKING about doing so. Or being a journalist covering the story of police thugs attacking people in their homes for THINKING about protesting. OR, even being a lawyer willing to represent innocent, non violent people who have broken no laws. We have reached the ultimate police state. They can kick in your door for thought crimes, for disagreeing with the government. Took a bit longer than Orwell thought, but it is here. The inmates are in charge of the asylum, and the sheeple seem to be content with letting them run the show.

Out of control

Legal rules have changed, allowing federal agents, prosecutors to bypass basic rights.

November 22, 1998
By Bill Moushey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Loren Pogue has served eight years of a 22-year federal prison sentence on drug conspiracy and money laundering charges.

Pogue, a Missouri native, never bought drugs, never sold them, never held them, never used them, never smuggled them, never even saw them.

But because federal prosecutors allowed a paid government informant to lie about Pogue’s involvement in the sale of a parcel of land to supposed drug smugglers, he was convicted. Under tough federal sentencing guidelines, a judge had no choice but to give the Air Force veteran what might effectively be a death sentence.

Pogue — father of 27 children, 15 of them adopted — is 65. He doesn’t expect to leave prison alive, and as details later in this story will show, he is baffled that the government he served for more than 30 years worked so hard to betray him.

This is a fascinating series of ten reports on the criminal justice system n America...very disturbing...and it is nearly 10 years old...things have only gotten worse since then....Fascism did not arrive with the Bush administration folks...accelerated under his regime perhaps, but it has been a slow and steady progression for years.

The American Police State

By Chris Hedges

A Dallas jury, a week ago, caused a mistrial in the government case against this country’s largest Islamic charity. The action raises a defiant fist on the sinking ship of American democracy.

If we lived in a state where due process and the rule of law could curb the despotism of the Bush administration, this mistrial might be counted a victory. But we do not. The jury may have rejected the federal government’s claim that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development funneled millions of dollars to Middle Eastern terrorists. It may have acquitted Mohammad el-Mezain, the former chairman of the foundation, of virtually all criminal charges related to funding terrorism (the jury deadlocked on one of the 32 charges against el-Mezain), and it may have deadlocked on the charges that had been lodged against four other former leaders of the charity, but don’t be fooled. This mistrial will do nothing to impede the administration’s ongoing contempt for the rule of law. It will do nothing to stop the curtailment of our civil liberties and rights. The grim march toward a police state continues.

Constitutional rights are minor inconveniences, noisome chatter, flies to be batted away on the steady road to despotism. And no one, not the courts, not the press, not the gutless Democratic opposition, not a compliant and passive citizenry hypnotized by tawdry television spectacles and celebrity gossip, seems capable of stopping the process. Those in power know this. We, too, might as well know it.

Sigh....some of us do...can't our society manage just a tiny bit of outrage at this insanity? All those men who died in the Revolutionary war to free this country from the tyranny of last King George would shudder to see how shallow, cowardly, and downright pitiful we have become.......well worth the time to read the rest of the article...link is in the title.

We Have Been Ambushed !

VERY QUIETLY AND WITHOUT ANY MEDIA ATTENTION, THE U.S. CONGRESS INTRODUCED THE "VIOLENT RADICALIZATION AND HOMEGROWN TERRORISM ACT" BACK IN APRIL

THE BILL WENT QUIETLY THROUGH COMMITTEE - AND WAS PASSED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES TODAY!

The Bill creates a Commission which will study how to prohibit ". . . . .the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system . . . . .to advance political, religious, or social change.. . . ."

Folks, they are trying to outlaw what people are able to BELIEVE. Outlaw what opinions people are able to utter!

Ladies and Gentlemen, this Bill opens the first skirmish in what will become a direct legislative assault upon our most basic right to freedom of THOUGHT and the ability to speak those thoughts!

Under this type of Legislative thinking, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson Alexander Hamilton and the other Founding Fathers, would be jailed!!!!

Congress has just fired the first shot against what we can THINK! The implications of this effort by government are terrifying. Just open your mouth and say the wrong "radical" thing and POW: you're a "homegrown terrorist." A "radical." Or perhaps a word we've all come to know quite well, "militant." We hear about "militants" all the time these days. . . . "U.S. troops killed x number of Iraqi militants today. . . . . ."

By passing this Bill, the federal government of the United States has officially embarked upon tyranny. Absolute despotism.

It is time for us to muster our resources and engage in the most fierce poltical battle imaginable. If we don't get together to fight this thing right now; we will be left with no choice but to take up arms or submit to absolute despotism in as little as 18 months! --Hal Turner

Happy camp here we come folks...they'll be rounding up people who disagree with the fascist bastards any time now.....will we go meekly like sheep?....like the Good Germans under Hitler......not I.

Follow the link in the title to read the entire text of this bill that will deal the final blow to American Freedom.

Former CEO Says U.S. Punished Phone Firm.... Qwest Feared NSA Plan Was Illegal, Filing Says

A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

Details about the alleged NSA program have been redacted from the documents, but Nacchio's lawyer said last year that the NSA had approached the company about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records.

In the court filings disclosed this week, Nacchio suggests that Qwest's refusal to take part in that program led the government to cancel a separate, lucrative contract with the NSA in retribution. He is using the allegation to try to show why his stock sale should not have been considered improper.


Nacchio's account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

In May 2006, USA Today reported that the NSA had been secretly collecting the phone-call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by major telecom firms. Qwest, it reported, declined to participate because of fears that the program lacked legal standing.

In a statement released after the story was published, Nacchio attorney Herbert Stern said that in fall 2001, Qwest was approached to give the government access to the private phone records of Qwest customers. At the time, Nacchio was chairman of the president's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.

"Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request," Stern said. "When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."

Interesting stuff....inquiring minds will wonder why they needed to institute surveillance to "prevent another 911" 6 MONTHS BEFORE IT HAPPENED!!! And for refusing to cooperate with an illegal and unconstitutional plot....this man was ruined...crossing King George has its price...

Criminalizing Political Opposition and Freedom of Speech

October 2nd, 2007 by Paul

What Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson is trying to do to me is wrong.In America, we cherish the right to engage in politics, to speak our minds, to promote our candidate, to work to pass a voter initiative, without fear of reprisal.That is why today is such a sad day, not only for me, but for all of us who love the initiative process and the right of citizens to control their government.

This indictment unsealed today is not about the law, but rather 100 percent politically motivated. This is politics—very ugly politics.

The highest legal office in the state of Oklahoma seems bent on silencing citizens through harassment and intimidation, threats and coercion. The goal is to silence me, and to frighten you, from petitioning our government.

Those who attempt to put citizens in charge of government spending decisions, through initiatives like the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or any other issue that rankles the powerful political forces of a state, can expect to face an onslaught by the full powers of the government.

This is yet another round in the age-old attempt to stop ideas by force, by harassment, by imprisonment, by anything except a better idea. Oklahomans, your attorney general is not practicing democracy. He is practicing the politics of destruction.

This kind of nonsense is becoming more and more common here in the "land of the free"...people arrested for trying to reform the State, or speaking their minds about government and taxes, and even dragged off in handcuffs for reading the Constitution out loud in public...funny how these incidents rarely make the corporate news...

Interesting...So Many Cover-ups, So Little Time...

A WITNESS in the Lockerbie case has claimed he was offered $4 million (£2 million) by American investigators to lie to the trial judges.

Edwin Bollier, head of the Swiss company MEBO that was said to have manufactured the timer used to detonate the Pan Am bomb, claims he was offered the money by the FBI at its Washington HQ in exchange for making a statement that supported the main line of inquiry - that Libya was responsible for the bombing.

He has told Dr Hans Koechler, who was a UN observer during the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi in the Netherlands, that he was offered a "new life" in the United States if he testified that the timer found in the plane wreckage had been supplied to Libya.

"I rejected this and said this could not possibly be the case," he said. He added that there was a "loud dispute" after he rejected the offer.

The claim follows news that the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, whose evidence led to Megrahi's conviction, was offered $2 million by the CIA.

Yet another "terrorist attack" we will never be told the truth about....but they work for us right?...so whatever they are hiding ...it must have been "for our own good"... after all, the American Sheeple can't be bothered with the day to day trivia of what they do....as long as the cable doesn't go out, the government must be doing a fine job.

Tracking Political Prosecutions

Scott Horton September 22, 2007

In the last two weeks, two sources, one of them inside of the Justice Department, have told me that a scheme was hatched in the upper echelons of the Bush Administration shortly after it took office in 2001 or early in 2002. The project identified John Edwards and Hillary Clinton as likely Democratic challengers to President Bush, and identified prominent trial lawyers around the United States as the likely financial vehicle for Edward’s rise. It directed that their campaign finance records be fly-specked, and that offenses not be treated as administrative matters but rather as serious criminal offenses. The scheme contemplated among other things that raids be staged on the law offices involved, and that the records seized not be limited to campaign finance—there was an acute interest in all politically oriented documents, in order to seize valuable intelligence on strategic planning from the enemy camp. This all sounds rather fantastic—even more insidious than the enemies list days of the Nixon era. It is precisely the sort of crude harassment that a primitive dictatorship would use against its enemies—like Alexander Lukashenko in today’s Belarus, for instance. But as the descriptions were passed to me, I instantly recognized the pattern described recently in a case which has made the headlines in Michigan involving a prominent lawyer there, and a second case in Los Angeles. According to one source, the number of these cases is at least five and they are scattered about the country. One case, described to me in some detail, closely matches the pattern in Michigan and Los Angeles and occurred in the south on the Gulf of Mexico. Why, I wondered, would the attorneys involved not scream bloody murder about this? Then it struck me. The threat of criminal investigation and prosecution is devastating to their law practices. Of course, they would keep it completely secret. And that silence has made the entire scheme possible. I am told that these cases involved the attorneys general personally—both John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales—that their go-ahead was needed to stage the raids. And that in each case, the greatest concern within the political pirates commanding the operation has been that the public would get wind of the bigger picture. It was essential to pull it off that each case be viewed as something standing all on its own, and that the fact that there was a politically motivated project be obscured. The key factor here is that all the cases involve campaign finance violations which are of a rather mundane nature. And in each case the FEC violations have been hyped into something quite preposterous. The political angle, I am told, is simple: make trial attorney’s money radioactive. Dry up the source. Take out a key element of the Democrats’ campaign finance strategy. This looks very suspiciously like a Rove strategy. There is no end to the dirty dealing and criminal activity with this administration...or our government in general...and no one is ever held accountable for the real crimes, just the petty ones...and only enough of those to convince the sheeple that their "representatives" aren't above the law...what a joke.