A Dose of Reality in The Land of Delusion

Privacy in America Is Dead

What in the hell is going on? Have most all in this country lost their minds and their spirit, or concerning freedom, is apathy all that remains? Oh to be a conspiracy theorist! Everything today in actuality is conspiratorial, and those who have been continuously demoralized for their constant suspicions of government are now the only sane ones left. This is evident because "1984" is no longer fiction; it is reality!

The latest crime in a long line of usurpations of liberty by government evildoers has now effectively eliminated privacy as we know it. As reported on LRC and told by Glenn Beck, anyone accessing the "cash for clunkers" program literally gives up ownership of their computer to the federal government...

...Many brutal political "leaders" of the past like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini attempted to monitor and control all citizens and their behavior. The end results were telling, and they were horrible. Mass murder at the hands of the state was the rule not the exception. Starvation was prevalent and sickness was constant. Wars consumed production and economies collapsed. Freedom was unheard of during the reign of these monsters. Can you imagine the political and monitoring capabilities of today being available to those brutal tyrants of the past? There is a reason that the U.S. federal government has taken over and co-opted all the means of society. This same government now controls and monitors all money, banking, transportation, health care, police, and communication, including the internet. Those dictators I mentioned above did not have this capability, and still mass oppression won the day. If this history is any guide, our future looks bleak.

Monumentally Tragic Disappointment on the Horizon

Whenever the herd mentality lines up along a compass point leading to “permanent prosperity,” or a yellow brick road lined with green shoots, or something like that, I tend to see the edge of a cliff up ahead. We are now completely in the grips of the deadly diminishing returns of information technology. The more information comes to us about How Things Are, especially from TV, the more confused or wrong the conventional view gets it.

A broad consensus has formed in the news media and among government mouthpieces and even some “bearish” investors on the street that “the worst is behind us” in this tortured economy. This view is completely crazy. It will only lead to massive disappointment a few weeks or months from now, and that disappointment might easily transmute to political trouble. One even might call the situation tragic, except a closer look at the sordid spectacle of what American culture has become — a non-stop circus of the seven deadly sins — suggests that we deserve to be punished by history.

America the Great ... Police State

For those of us who had hoped that the Obama administration would present us with a rebirth of the old republic that was so rudely erased a few years ago by that team of judicial wreckers, Bush and Gonzales, which led, in turn, to a recent incident in Cambridge, Mass. that inspired a degree of alarm in many Americans. But what was most alarming was the plain fact that neither the president nor a “stupid” local policeman seemed to understand the rules of behavior in a new America, where we find ourselves marooned as well as guarded (is that the verb?) by armed police who have been instructed that they are indeed, once armed, the law and may not be criticized verbally or in any other way and are certainly not subject to any restrictions as to whom they arrest or otherwise torment.

This is rather worse than anyone might have predicted, even though the signs have been clear for some years that ours is now a proto-fascist nation and there appears to be no turning back; nor, indeed, much awareness on the part of our ever-alert media. Forgive me if you find my irony heavy, but I too get tired of carrying it about in “the greatest nation in the country,” as Spiro Agnew liked to say.

How can an entire nation completely ignore reality? How can they blindly take the word of a government that has blatantly lied, time and time again. Despite the obvious, REAL signs of economic, political, and societal meltdown, the majority of Americans choose to believe the official line...you know the one...where they give us a patronizing pat on the head and say that everything will be juuuuust fine if we just believe it to be so. Close you eyes and wish really hard folks....worked for the Germans under Hitler ...right? Or the Russians under Stalin? Or for the...well, I could go on and on with the examples, there have surely been plenty....but we all know don't we...Americans are not a stupid people, we have just made a CHOICE to ignore our troubles in the vain hope that doing so will make them disappear. Well, folks, fairy tales are for children., and these monsters won't disappear when you pull the blankets over your head....facing the harsh realities of life and dealing with them isn't an optional excercise for adults....time to grow up already.

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.

US interrogators may have killed dozens, human rights researcher and rights group say

United States interrogators killed nearly four dozen detainees during or after their interrogations, according a report published by a human rights researcher based on a Human Rights First report and followup investigations.

In all, 98 detainees have died while in US hands. Thirty-four homicides have been identified, with at least eight detainees — and as many as 12 — having been tortured to death, according to a 2006 Human Rights First report that underwrites the researcher’s posting. The causes of 48 more deaths remain uncertain.

Hit the link in the title for the rest of the story...but be warned, the details are pretty gruesome. Very sick...very depressing that this is what our country has become in recent years. All this is done in our names folks, we should be VERY ashamed that we have allowed this to happen.....and continue to allow it today. What exactly is it that makes us any better than the "terrorists" these days? Why isn't there any outrage over these vile acts? Have we lost our humanity completely? And, isn't it grand that our own citizens can be treated this way? After all, any one of us can be declared an "Enemy Combatant" these days and exposed to those "enhanced interrogation techniques" ....just ask 16 year old Ashton Lundeby.

Fascist America: I Live in a Constitution Free Zone...And You Probably Do Too

ACLU Assails 100-Mile Border Zone as 'Constitution-Free'

Government agents should not have the right to stop and question Americans anywhere without suspicion within 100 miles of the border, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday, pointing attention to the little known power of the federal government to set up immigration checkpoints far from the nation's border lines.

The government has long been able to search people entering and exiting the country without need to say why, which is known as the border search exception of the Fourth Amendment.

"It is a classic example of law enforcement powers expanding far beyond their proper boundaries – in this case, literally,” said Caroline Fredrickson, who heads the ACLU's Washington, D.C., Legislative Office.

In a video shown to reporters at a national press conference event Wednesday, retired San Diego social worker Vince Peppard complained that he and his wife were stopped at a checkpoint on a road east of San Diego on I-94, many miles after crossing back into the United States with tiles he'd bought in Mexico.

When he refused to let the Customs and Border Protection officer search his car, the officer led him to a bench, called in the contraband dog and then "ransacked" his car.

"I didn't feel like I was inside the U.S.," Peppard said, calling the search on the side of the road embarrassing. "I felt like I was in a B-movie with Nazis asking for my papers."

ACLU attorney Chris Calabrese is certain there are more people who have been negatively affected than have complained.

As an example, he cited Seattle's domestic ferries, where DHS agents ask passengers for ID to check their citizenship and use license plate readers.

"The people who live on these islands are undergoing this extra scrutiny just when they are going to get their groceries," Calabrese said.

Be sure to hit the link and see the map there...You'll be amazed to find that Homeland Security has placed these Constitution Free Zones in such a manner as to encompass two thirds of our population. Obviously it is us, the citizens of the United Fascist States of America that are to be controlled, not immigrants. I too have to pass through one of these checkpoints--100 miles in from the border-- to go grocery shopping, and I drive away fuming each and every time. On several occasions, we've been hauled out of the vehicle to be searched and questioned. Once, in our RV, they claimed that the dogs signaled we might be smuggling an illegal alien...they searched everything, tearing through our luggage and all...apparently they thought I might have concealed a very small Mexican among my clean underwear. This is America? "Your Papers Please" for going to buy food?

Well....That Whole Freedom Thing Was Good While it Lasted, Wasn't It?

Cramer: It's a Worldwide Crash

Now along comes Sheila Bair and Hank Paulson, who alternately want us to believe that everything is sound (with public pronouncements that the worry is misplaced) and that there is a list of obscure banks that might have to be taken over.

Then Paulson comes to the Capitol and says the truth, that the Western world of finance is going to break, and Bair seizes Washington Mutual and tries to seize Wachovia(WB Quote - Cramer on WB - Stock Picks), no doubt to save Citigroup(C Quote - Cramer on C - Stock Picks), which could have risen, done an equity offering and joined Bank of America(BAC Quote - Cramer on BAC - Stock Picks), JPMorgan(JPM Quote - Cramer on JPM - Stock Picks) and Wells Fargo(WFC Quote - Cramer on WFC - Stock Picks) as the new titans of finance.

Which is where we are this morning, in a worldwide crash that will leave us with gigantic institutions that we have never heard of, with balance sheets that are ridiculously large that must fall, and a hedge fund community that has lost control of its asset base.

Down the Road to Serfdom

Sensing a pushback by the world's dollar-surplus regions – Asia and the Mideast – to finance the largest debtor economy, the U.S. government will now plunder its own countrymen to keep capital running "uphill." As with most statist remedies, it is being marketed as a boon for Main Street, tantalizing its inhabitants with the prospect of profits wafting westward from those malodorous Wall Street investments. However, Congress has inured the Treasury from accountability and legal recourse, giving Paulson dictatorial power over the nation's financial sector. Rather than let this bloated segment of the economy shrink and consolidate, Paulson and his successor will extend it unlimited life support, bloodletting everything else, in a final ruin of the nation.

French Premier Francois Fillon: We're on "the edge of the abyss”
Now we're in a terrible fix. People are scared and removing their money from the banks and money markets which is intensifying the freeze in the credit markets and driving stocks into the ground like a tent stake. Meanwhile, our leaders are "caught in the headlights", still believing they can "finesse" their way through the biggest economic cataclysm since the Great Depression. It's madness.

Naomi Wolf: Americans are facing a coup, as of this morning it’s happened

Martial Law in the Making

Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1

3rd Infantry’s 1st BCT trains for a new dwell-time mission. Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or man made emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

[....] In the meantime, they’ll learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it.

They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.

Ominous. I wonder, will we even have an election? The current economic crisis would surely make as good of an excuse as any for the Bushco regime to take advantage of those "emergency powers"....Ah well, at least the guys will get to use some of those skills they learned in the war zone on the folks back home...regardless of that old fashioned American delusion that the people have Constitutional rights.

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.

The American Gestapo is Busy Today

Amy Goodman and Two Democracy Now! Producers Unlawfully Arrested At the RNC

ST. PAUL, MN—Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was unlawfully arrested in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota at approximately 5 p.m. local time. Police violently manhandled Goodman, yanking her arm, as they arrested her. Video of her arrest can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYjyvkR0bGQ

Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.

Interesting. Generally, the more well known journalists are left alone, as they don't want to outrage the people...they must be pretty sure that the American public has degraded to spineless sheeple to pull this one. Unfortunately, they're probably right, and they probably haven't got much to worry about.

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.

Change, Obama Style....Scrapping the 4th Amendment

Congress votes to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, legalize warrantless eavesdropping

The Democratic-led Congress this afternoon voted to put an end to the NSA spying scandal, as the Senate approved a bill -- approved last week by the House -- to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, terminate all pending lawsuits against them, and vest whole new warrantless eavesdropping powers in the President. The vote in favor of the new FISA bill was 69-28. Barack Obama joined every Senate Republican (and every House Republican other than one) by voting in favor of it, while his now-vanquished primary rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, voted against it. John McCain wasn't present for any of the votes, but shared Obama's support for the bill. The bill will now be sent to an extremely happy George Bush, who already announced that he enthusiastically supports it, and he will sign it into law very shortly.

The hope and change candidate indeed...more like bait and switch. Even though I predicted Obama would be no different than any of the other political prostitutes out there, I really hoped to be wrong. Unfortunately not...this country is in big trouble no matter which of the presumed nominees win the presidency.

Sold Out Again

Yep...we elected them for change. To stop the Bushco assault on our Constitutional rights. We got change alright....they changed the speed at which Congress rolls over for Bushie from lightening speed to warp speed, and threw in a little hemming and hawing about it to try to appear to give a damn. Apparently defending the Constitution is "off the table" as well.

Compromise (SELLOUT)reached on government wiretaps

Senate leaders announced a compromise Thursday on legislation to expand the government's eavesdropping authority and protect telephone companies that cooperate from being sued.

If approved, the compromise would give U.S. spy agencies sweeping power to siphon international e-mails and phone calls from fiber-optic networks in the United States.

Update: Big surprise...the House has indeed approved the Sellout Agreement: House Approves Spy Bill Protecting Phone Firms

The Last Roundup

For decades the federal government has been developing a highly classified plan that would override the Constitution in the event of a terrorist attack. Is it also compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who could face detention under martial law?

By Christopher Ketcham

05/05/08 "Radar Magazine" -- - 28/04/08 --- -In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

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A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as "warrantless wiretapping." In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor "huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records." Authorities employ "sophisticated software programs" to sift through the data, searching for "suspicious patterns." In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it's notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. "The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed," the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. "Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach."

The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.

Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor anti-war protestors and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.

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Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to designate any American citizen an "enemy combatant" forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic insurrections—as permitted under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807—but also to deal with a wide range of calamities, including "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident."

More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence
expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."

"We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off," says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. "To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There's no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this—for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, 'You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.' "

As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an "endemic surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)

Disturbing stuff...and interesting....well worth the time to read in its entirety, as always, the link is in the title

China's All-Seeing Eye

Interesting stuff...and quite likely to be a glimpse of the future here if Americans continue to behave like sheep.....

With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

American commentators like CNN's Jack Cafferty dismiss the Chinese as "the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years." But nobody told the people of Shenzhen, who are busily putting on a 24-hour-a-day show called "America" — a pirated version of the original, only with flashier design, higher profits and less complaining. This has not happened by accident. China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.

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Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.

Just a couple paragraphs from a rather long but incredibly interesting article...7 pages....the link is in the title

Feds Accuse Student Of "Terror and Espionage" For Talking About Constitution

A student of a large bible college in east Texas was accused by federal agents of committing an "act of terror and espionage" after he gave a talk to a group of Boy Scouts in which he encouraged them to educate themselves about the U.S. constitution.

Jeff, who wishes to remain anonymous at present, is a student of the college and an interim pastor of a small church in Mount Vernon, Texas. He appeared today as a guest on the Alex Jones Show to relate what took place.

As part of his duties as an advisor in the college office, Jeff was tasked with the role of giving a short speech and a tour to a group of Boy Scouts that were visiting the college, with a focus on how patriotism and liberty are emphasized in the teaching style of the university.

Jeff said he told the boys, "It's going to be you who is going to take this country and either make or break it - you need to get back to your constitution, you need to get to know your bill of rights and you need to stand up for them."

Jeff also mentioned that the freedoms enumerated in the bill of rights were fast being usurped by the government and he briefly talked about the USA Patriot Act.

"I said they're stripping us of what we know to be America, what you need to do is re-orient yourself to the constitution because that is the very founding basis of our government and it is the supreme law of the land," he added.

The next day Jeff was called into the main administrative office of the university where he was met by college officials and two men wearing dark suits and sunglasses who did not identify themselves. A state trooper was also guarding the door to make sure everyone stayed inside the office.

Jeff was asked by the men if he talked to the Boy Scouts about the constitution the previous day. Jeff was then shown a transcript of what he said and asked to fill in the blanks.

"I saw the transcript of what I said and every word that those boys had said," stated Jeff.

Jeff speculated that the recording of his talk with the Boy Scouts may have been made by a scout master who looked like a Marine that was taking the tour with Jeff.

After asking the men where they were from, Jeff was told he was committing "acts of terror and espionage" by talking to the Boy Scouts about the constitution and the bill of rights.

Jeff was unable to ascertain exactly where the feds were from but university officials later indicated that DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and the FBI were involved.

Hit the link in the title to read the story in its entirety. We live in scary times when such abuses of our rights happen day after day, only to be met with apathy and indifference by the American sheeple. Those who fought against tyranny at great personal risk to establish the Constitution and our Bill of Rights must be spinning in their graves to see how easily we capitulate to the police state.

The Bush Legacy: Journey to the Dark Side

As a people, we Americans have not faintly come to grips with how centrally the Bush Administration has planted certain practices in our midst--at the very heart of governmental practice, of the news, of everyday life. Many of these practices were not in themselves creations of this administration. For instance, the practice of kidnapping abroad --"rendition"--began at least in the Clinton era, if not earlier. Waterboarding, a medieval torture, was first practiced by American troops in the Philippine insurrection at the dawn of the previous century. (It was then known as "the water cure.")

Torture of various sorts was widely used in CIA interrogation centers in Vietnam in the 1960s. Back in that era, the CIA also ran its own airline, Air America, rather than just leasing planes for its torture capers from various corporate entities through front businesses. Abu Ghraib-style torture and abuse, pioneered by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, was taught and used by American military, CIA, and police officials in Latin America from the 1960s into the 1980s. If you doubt any of this, just check out Alfred McCoy's still shocking book, A Question of Torture. Even offshore secret CIA prisons aren't a unique creation of the Bush Administration. According to Tim Weiner in his new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes, in the 1950s the Agency had three of them--in Japan, Germany and the Panama Canal Zone--where they brought double agents of questionable loyalty for "secret experiments" in harsh interrogation, "using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing."

And yet, don't for a second think that nothing has changed. Part of the Bush legacy lies in a new ethos in this country. In my childhood in the 1950s, for example, we knew just who the torturers were. We saw them in the movies. They were the sadistic Japanese in their prison camps, the Gestapo in their prisons, and the Soviet Secret police, the KGB, in their gulags (even if that name hadn't yet entered our world). As the President now says at every opportunity, and as we then knew, Americans did not torture.

Today, and it's a measure of our changing American world, a child turning on the TV serial 24dotermed a "no-brainer," a "dunk in the water" in the torture chamber. There is no deniability left in the movies --and little enough of it in real life. or heading for the nearest hot, new action flick at the local multiplex knows that Americans torture and that torture, once the cultural province of our most evil enemies, is now a practice that is 100 percent all-American and perfectly justifiable (normally by the ticking-bomb scenario). And few even blink. In lockdown America, it computes. The snarl at the border fits well enough with what our Vice President has termed a "no-brainer," a "dunk in the water" in the torture chamber. There is no deniability left in the movies --and little enough of it in real life.

For those who thought true bi-partisanship was a impossible, our descent into fascism is surely a model of seamless cooperation between the repuglinazis and demofascists capable of convincing the most stubborn skeptic. The rest of the article is well worth your time...just hit the link in the title.

Top Ten Signs Your Country May Be Going Fascist

Creeping Fascism: History's Lessons

“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater. ... Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later....”


These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German).

The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages—in English as “Defying Hitler.”

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and e-mailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America. ... This is almost unbelievable.”

More about Haffner below. Let’s set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how “odd” it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such “calm, superior indifference.”

The parallels are stunning....but still, we follow like mindless sheep down the path to tyranny, much as the Germans did under Hitler, stepping over the victims of of our criminal government along the way.

New Orleans: Locked Outside the Gates

In a remarkable symbol of the injustices of post-Katrina reconstruction, hundreds of people were locked out of a public New Orleans City Council meeting addressing demolition of 4,500 public housing apartments. Some were tasered, many pepper sprayed and a dozen arrested.

Outside the chambers, iron gates were chained and padlocked even before the scheduled start.

The scene looked like one of those countries on TV that is undergoing a people's revolution - and the similarities were only beginning. (See video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMBWAXfGsc4)

Dozens of uniformed police secured the gates and other entrances. Only developers and those with special permission from council members were allowed in - the rest were kept locked outside the gates. Despite dozens of open seats in the council chambers, pleas to be allowed in were ignored.

Chants of "Housing is a human right!" and "Let us in!" thundered through the concrete breezeway.

Public housing residents came and spoke out despite an intense campaign of intimidation. Residents were warned by phone that if they publicly opposed the demolitions they would lose all housing assistance. Residents opposed to the demolition had simple demands. If the authorities insisted on spending hundreds of millions to tear down hundreds of structurally sound buildings containing 4,500 public housing subsidized apartments, there should be a guarantee that every resident could return to a similarly subsidized apartment. Alternatively, the government should use the hundreds of millions to repair the apartments so people could come home. Neither alternative was acceptable to HUD. A plan of residents to partner with the AFL-CIO Housing Trust to save their homes was also ignored.

Outside, SWAT team members and police in riot gear and on horses began to arrive as rain started falling. Those locked out included public housing residents, a professor from Southern University, graduate students, the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, ministers, lawyers, law students, homeless people who lived in tents across the street from City Hall, affordable housing allies from across the country and dozens of others.

Inside the chambers, the Rev. Torin Sanders and others insisted that the locked out persons be allowed to come and stand inside along the walls - a common practice for over 30 years. No one could recall any city council locking people out of a public meeting. The request to allow people to stand was denied. The council then demanded silence from those inside. Those who continued to demand that the others be let in were pointed out by police, physically taken down and arrested. Ironically, some young men were tasered right in front of the speaker's podium.

This was a meeting the council had repeatedly tried to avoid. It was only held after residents (100 percent African-American and nearly all mothers and grandmothers) got an emergency court order stopping demolitions until the council acted. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced long ago it was going to demolish 4,500 public housing apartments despite the Katrina crisis of affordable housing, no matter what anyone said. HUD had no plans to ask the council or anyone else for approval. The judge said otherwise, so the meeting was scheduled.

Opponents cited the affordable housing crisis in New Orleans. Homeless people camped across from City Hall and for blocks under the interstate. The number of homeless people has doubled since Katrina. Thousands of residents in FEMA trailers across the Gulf Coast were being evicted.

The brutality that happened in this case was incredible to see, one woman with a cane shoved around by the thugs in uniform repeatedly, then pepper sprayed. She left by ambulance, as did several others. We pay these thugs....and I mean both the police involved and the city government people who ordered these attacks on tax-paying citizens....and we ALLOW our employees to abuse us this way? And, for simply trying to attend a PUBLIC meeting, at a TAX-PAYER OWNED building? What has become of this country? It is sickening.....astounding and sickening.

We Are All Prisoners Now, By Paul Craig Roberts

Excerpts:

Americans are also imprisoned by fear, a false fear created by the hoax of “terrorism.” It has turned out that headline terrorist events since 9/11 have been orchestrated by the US government. For example, the alleged terrorist plot to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower was the brainchild of a FBI agent who searched out a few disaffected people to give lip service to the plot devised by the FBI agent. He arrested his victims, whose trial ended in acquittal and mistrial.

Many Europeans regard 9/11 itself as an orchestrated event. Former cabinet members of the British, Canadian and German governments and the Chief of Staff of the Russian Army have publicly expressed their doubts about the official 9/11 story. Recently, a former president of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, said in an interview with the newspaper, Corriere della Sera (November 30, 2007), that “democratic elements in America and Europe, with the Italian center-left in the forefront, now know that the 9/11 attack was planned and executed by the American CIA and Mossad in order to blame the Arab countries, and to persuade the Western powers to undertake military action both in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

....Cossiga’s statement has not been reported by a US newspaper or TV channel. Raising doubts among Americans about the government is not a strong point of the corporate media. Americans live in a world of propaganda designed to secure their acquiescence to war crimes, torture, searches and police state measures, military aggression, hegemony and oppression, while portraying Americans (and Israelis) as the salt of the earth who are threatened by Muslims who hate their “freedom and democracy.”

Americans cling to this “truth” while the Bush regime and a complicit Congress destroy the Bill of Rights and engineer the theft of elections.

Freedom and democracy in America have been reduced to no-fly lists, spying without warrants, arrests without warrants or evidence, permanent detention despite the constitutional protection of habeas corpus, torture despite the prohibition against self-incrimination--the list goes on and on. http://www.truthnews.us/?p=1115]

In today’s fearful America, a US Senator, whose elder brothers were (1) a military hero killed in action, (2) a President of the United States assassinated in office, (3) an Attorney General of the United States and likely president except he was assassinated like his brother, can find himself on the no-fly list. Present and former high government officials, with top secret security clearances, cannot fly with a tube of toothpaste or a bottle of water despite the absence of any evidence that extreme measures imposed by “airport security” makes flying safer. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071221/us_nm/security_airports_dc;_ylt=ApzEobAIQMfiX02LTvKbk1UXIr0F

Elderly American citizens with walkers and young mothers with children are meticulously searched because US Homeland Security cannot tell the difference between an American citizen and a terrorist.

All Americans should note the ominous implications of the inability of Homeland Security to distinguish an American citizen from a terrorist.

An article well worth reading in its entirety...just hit the link in the title...The condition this country is in is clear to so many, but apparently not enough to stop the noose from slowly tightening, as the oblivious majority slowly hang us all. We have merely been given the rope to do it ourselves...which we have cheerfully done. What a shame it is to see...sometimes I just barely resist the impulse to shake people, or scream at them...as they fret about nonsense like who is winning American Idol or how their kids will be sniveling if they don't get the latest $500 video game system...I can't stand it...

The torture tape fingering Bush as a war criminal

The Washington Post reported that “current and former officials” said the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these “alternative procedures”, as Bush described them, are illegal under US law and the Geneva conventions. They are, in fact, war crimes. And they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of torture in various American legal cases.

And that is where the story becomes interesting. The Bush administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not “torture” but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of Zubaydah’s incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president of the United States authorised war crimes.

And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed...........

........ This is not, of course, the first big scandal to have emerged over the administration’s interrogation policies. You can fill a book with the sometimes sickening details that have come out of Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan, Camp Cropper in Iraq and, of course, Abu Ghraib.

The administration has admitted that several prisoners have been killed in interrogation, and dozens more have died in the secret network of interrogation sites the US has set up across the world. The policy of rendition has sent countless suspects into torture cells in Uzbekistan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere to feed the West’s intelligence on jihadist terrorism.

But this case is more ominous for the administration because it presents a core example of what seems to be a cover-up, obstruction of justice and a direct connection between torture and the president, the vice-president and their closest aides.

Because several courts had pending cases in which testimony from Zubaydah’s interrogation was salient, the destruction of such evidence triggers a legal process that is hard for the executive branch to stymie or stall - and its first attempt was flatly rebuffed by a judge last week.

Its key argument is a weakly technical one: that the interrogation took place outside US territory - and therefore the courts do not have jurisdiction over it. It’s the same rationale for imprisoning hundreds of suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba - a legal no man’s land. But Congress can get involved - especially if it believes that what we have here is a cover-up.

What are the odds that a legal effective interrogation of a key Al-Qaeda operative would have led many highly respected professionals in the US intelligence community to risk their careers by leaking top-secret details to the press?

What are the odds that the CIA would have sought to destroy tapes that could prove it had legally prevented serious and dangerous attacks against innocent civilians? What are the odds that a president who had never authorised waterboarding would be unable to say whether such waterboarding was torture?

What are the odds that, under congressional grilling, the new attorney-general would also refuse to say whether he believed waterboarding was illegal, if there was any doubt that the president had authorised it? The odds are beyond minimal.

Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed.

It is clear to me that most Americans simply don't care what the government does to these people, choosing to believe the propaganda that paints these people as somehow less human than us, less civilized, allowing them to achieve some sort of twisted justification in their minds for allowing this to continue. However, if basic humanity isn't enough to spur an outcry against this cruelty, perhaps self interest will be. The government has already begun to treat its "free citizens" savagely, and the brutality that is perpetrated in our names in the secret CIA prisons, Gitmo, Iraq, and Afghanistan has begun to travel home, and when it does, they will have perfected their techniques. Our society bears more resemblance to that of Saddam Hussein's Iraq ...the man that, of course, our CIA sponsored into power...than the free nation it claims to be.... It won't be long until Americans are waterboarded...in the name of "National Security"...and "for our own good", of course.