LinkBlog: dictatorship

If he is, indeed, the 9-11 mastermind, I surely would like to ask him a question or two. The first would be how on earth he was able to persuade Osama and the boys that the plan would have any chance at all to succeed. From the beginning, it depended upon complete ineptitude on the part of America’s air defenses. Even though Tom Clancy, a man who seems to be on the best of terms with the Pentagon crowd, had already written two novels in which terrorists hijack airliners, Debt of Honor, and Executive Orders, with the intent of crashing them into important buildings, the very notion that someone would actually do it was beyond our leaders’ wildest imagination, we have been told. Though the top U.S. bulb might be an exceptionally dim one, how does one make grandiose plans that depend utterly upon such unimaginably low wattage up and down the chain of command? Wouldn’t Mohammed have to be more than a mastermind, but a master mindreader? More than that, wouldn’t it even have required a degree of clairvoyance that would surely have made the plan very hard to sell to superiors? The hijackers would all have to be able to get through security without their weapons being detected and those weapons would have to be perceived as lethal enough to allow them to control the far larger numbers of passengers and crew of the airplanes. What are the chances, really, of so many people behaving so much like sheep? “Sorry, Khalid,” I can hear Osama saying, “Go back to the drawing board and come up with something a bit simpler that has a greater likelihood of success,” and we haven’t even mentioned the need for virtuoso piloting and navigating performances by novice pilots on harrowing suicide missions.

Today, Detroit looks like a war zone. The slowly rotting corpse of what had been America’s backbone, the leading city in the industrial “Rust Belt.” Today, those cities are on the decline and scheduled to be bulldozed, shrunk and returned to nature. Detroit, Flint, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Memphis. These centers of production and high-wage working class jobs are now collapsing in every sense. Their city governments are broke. Foreclosures range around 1 in 5 in the worst areas. Neighbors are in decline. The last jobs are about to go.

In Philadelphia, the FBI has instructed tattoo shops to rat out their customers if they demand privacy, insist on paying with cash, engage in “suspicious behavior,” make “anti-US” comments, or request tattoos that are “extremist symbols.”

Feingold, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and new Democrat Arlen Specter (Pa.) had the constitutional courage to oppose the Judiciary Committee bill eventually going to the floor that with few exceptions, leaves the Patriot Act intact. I'll be reporting on the crucial fight to bring the Bill of Rights back into the Patriot Act as Senate and House versions merge into a law to be signed by Obama as he continues the Bush-Cheney legacy. It was Feingold who, in October 2001, was the only member of the Senate to vote against the original Patriot Act as, on the floor, he accurately predicted our greatly weakened privacy, due process and other rights since then.

Millions of people are refusing to take the H1N1 vaccine. In the weeks ahead — if Obama’s emergency declaration falls under the above directives — we may witness a move toward martial law, forced vaccination, and internment of those who refuse. At best, Obama’s declaration is a flimsy attempt to scare people into taking the toxic soft kill vaccination. Let’s hope this is the case.

The declaration of this national emergency seems suspicious from the start. Where's the emergency? The number of people killed by swine flu in the United States is far smaller than the number of people killed each year from seasonal flu, according to CDC statistics. People obviously aren't dropping dead by the millions from H1N1 influenza. Most people are just getting mild flu symptoms and a few days later they're fine. So where's the emergency? The only emergency I can see is the emergency fabricated by Big Pharma to sell more vaccines. By declaring a national emergency over the H1N1 pandemic, Obama is playing right into their hands. I find the timing of all this curious. Two days ago, New York gave up on its efforts to require mandatory vaccinations of health care workers. This was designed to defuse a large number of planned protests from health freedom-conscious people who don't want government-mandated chemicals pumped into their veins.

Jackson was still gone. My guess is that all of this took place within a period of 10 minutes or less. It felt like hours… days even. My son was gone.

Note: A friend on the Hill made an important point to me by email. Maxine Waters and Ron Paul get almost nothing [from the financial lobby. Sherman, Kucinich, Grayson and Kaptur are some other congress members who have not been bought and paid for]. The story isn’t just that a lot of members are bought and paid for, it’s that some aren’t.

From 1998 - 2007, financial and banking companies "spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists." In 1999, Glass-Steagall was repealed, the landmark 1933 law that curbed speculation and separated commercial from investment banks and insurance companies. In January 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act legitimized swap agreements and other hybrid instruments, at the core of today's problems by preventing regulatory oversight of derivatives and leveraging, thus letting Wall Street legally pillage and speculate, so they did. The result was a financial coup d'etat "cement(ing) the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders" who choose candidates, control elections, weaken financial regulations, and run the country for their own self-interest. As a result, Washington today is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Wall Street financial giants. What they want, they get, no questions asked.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary - based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids. Mrs. Norris testified before the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime this summer. The hearing's topic: the rapid and dangerous expansion of federal criminal law, an expansion that is often unprincipled and highly partisan. Chairman Robert C. Scott, Virginia Democrat, and ranking member Louie Gohmert, Texas Republican, conducted a truly bipartisan hearing (a D.C. rarity this year). These two leaders have begun giving voice to the increasing number of experts who worry about "overcriminalization." Astronomical numbers of federal criminal laws lack specifics, can apply to almost anyone and fail to protect innocents by requiring substantial proof that an accused person acted with actual criminal intent.

G20 security officials took responsibility Friday afternoon for a video that seemed to depict US troops ‘kidnapping’ a protester. The military was not involved in the incident, but G20 security did acknowledge that “law enforcement officers from a multi-agency tactical response team” had detained a protester they said was believed to be vandalizing a store. Video posted at YouTube shows onlookers calling out “what the fuck” and “what the fuck is wrong with you?” as people in camo uniforms haul a protester along by his collar, shove him into the back seat of a car, and rapidly drive off.

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2009. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency the former President declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat. This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress. BARACK OBAMA THE WHITE HOUSE, September 10, 2009.

If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight. Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.

OK, you’ve caught me in a rare moment of sarcasm. Maybe I wasn't really that surprised. After all, government bureaucrats attempt to control what types of substances you put into your body, what kind of work you do with your body, and even how you can legally dispose of your body after death; it makes perfect sense that they would also scramble for power over what parts of your body should remain attached. Yes, that’s right. The CDC is now considering a campaign for universal circumcision in the US.

A new law just passed in Massachusetts imposes fines of up to $1000 per day and up to a 30 day jail sentence for not obeying authorities during a public health emergency. So if you are instructed to take the swine flu vaccine in Massachusetts and you refuse, you could be facing fines that will bankrupt you and a prison sentence on top of that.

A man is suing the Kissimmee Police Department for an arrest over mints. When officers pulled Donald May over for an expired tag, they thought the mints he was chewing were crack and arrested him. May told Eyewitness News they wouldn't let him out of jail for three months until tests proved the so-called drugs were candy.

In Los Angeles, the fine for truancy is $250; in Dallas, it can be as much as $500 — crushing amounts for people living near the poverty level. According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, an advocacy group, 12,000 students were ticketed for truancy in 2008. Why does the Bus Riders Union care? Because it estimates that 80 percent of the “truants,” especially those who are black or Latino, are merely late for school, thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping. I met people in Los Angeles who told me they keep their children home if there’s the slightest chance of their being late. It’s an ingenious anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters to school. The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks. And if you should make the mistake of trying to escape via a brief marijuana-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too. One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing.

If another attack occurs against the US, false-flag or real, President Obama has the legal authority to declare himself the sole authority of US government, bypassing any authority of Congress and the Federal Court System. Under National Security Presidential Directive 51[8] (NSPD-51), issued May 9, 2007, if the President declares a “national emergency,” all government authority is “coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches.” This means that the President is the legal dictator of the United States, with only his discretion allowing influence by Congress and/or the Courts. Details of this plan are secret for “national security,” even to the members in Congress on the Committee for Homeland Security.[9] Just after passing the MCA, Congress also repealed the Posse Comitatus Act, and gave the President legal authority to command the state’s National Guard without consulting with state governors for the purpose of “suppressing public disorder.”[10] If the President invoked NSPD-51 and the states’ National Guards to suppress public protest, Americans would have to be arrested and detained in large facilities. For the past several years, FEMA has been constructing and renovating such “camps” with Congressional funding.[11] The existence of detention camps for Americans was originally disclosed to the public in Congressional Hearings on the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987 under the name REX-84.[12] Information Operations Roadmap is a program approved by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in 2003, and surprisingly released to George Washington University’s National Security Archive in a Freedom of Information Act request.[13] Wikipedia acknowledges its existence, but fails to inform of its content for government influence of American public opinion for support of US military operations. The existence of this document confirms governmental planning to replace fact with spin for the American public’s consumption.[14] In 2000, CNN reluctantly acknowledged that they employ military PSYOPS (Psychological Operations Group) personnel at their news station.[15] The express purpose of US military PSYOPS is propaganda; to manipulate public opinion in favor of government military policy.

The 2001 anthrax attacks underscore the dangers posed to our health and safety by the Bioweapons-Industrial Complex. The killer(s) employed a military-grade version of the deadly pathogen, a four-mutation blend of anthrax prepared at the government's test site at the remote Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Based on available evidence it's a near certainty that the weapon came from stockpiles at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Ft. Detrick, Maryland.

Well then, if we have these essential elements of truth and suffering, why is there still no large, forceful, coherent, and well organized body of popular grassroots resistance in the US? The main reason is simply that the requisite deep suffering and penetrating hard truths are not yet sufficiently widespread. Another reason is the extensive dumbing down of our society, along with the non-stop lies and propaganda spoon fed us daily by mainstream corporate media. Also there’s the ever present fear created by our government, using both rhetoric and legislation designed to consistently reinforce the clear threat so plainly put to us in the wake of 9-11 by George W. Bush: “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” In any case, with our Bush initiated upward spiraling national debt, exploding unemployment, and massive war related economic hemorrhaging, all continuing unabated under Obama and our wholly owned Congress, the furtherance of expanded suffering is a foregone conclusion. It will be left to the small but growing numbers of would-be resisters and truth-tellers (citizens Big Brother will vilify as home-grown terrorists) to advance the spread of truth.

We need to teach those Kenyans that if they don't prosecute their criminals in high office, then they'll perpetuate their "culture of impunity," and that would be awful. Those Kenyans apparently fail to understand that if you immunize high political officials when they commit crimes, that creates a "culture of impunity" -- I love that phrase -- which ensures future rampant criminality in the political class. How can those Kenyans not realize this? Clinton's sentiments echoed what Obama told Africans when he spoke in Ghana last month, when he demanded that they apply "the rule of law, which ensures the equal administration of justice" and vowed that "we will stand behind efforts to hold war criminals accountable" -- meaning African war criminals. As we send murderous, crusading civilian units around the world to accompany our invading armies -- while ushering a regime of torture wherever we go -- and then announce we will only Look to the Future, Not the Past, when their crimes are exposed (despite our best efforts to keep them concealed), do we actually expect anyone to take these sermons seriously?

This would have violated both Fourth Amendment guarantees against search and seizure without probable cause and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it illegal to use the military for law enforcement. Despite those prohibitions, Cheney argued that the president did have the power to use the military on US soil, citing an October 23, 2001 Justice Department memorandum co-authored by John Yoo which claimed that presidential power extended to the domestic use of the military as long as it served a national security purpose. The Lackawanna Six were a group of young Yememi-Americans who had attended an al Qaeda training camp in 2001. They were arrested in September 2002, and President Bush bragged of having broken their “cell” in his January 2003 State of the Union address. However, an investigation by Salon failed to turn up any evidence that they were actually a “sleeper cell” or that they had been planning any kind of violent attack. Most of them were convicted merely of providing material aid to terrorists.

Why is Padilla’s lawsuit important? Because the ultimate ruling in the case will apply not just to him but also to all Americans. The suit alleges that the U.S. government took Padilla into custody and held him for several years without charge, until finally indicting him and convicting him in federal district court of the federal crime of terrorism. For years prior to the indictment, Padilla was held in the custody of the U.S. military, where he was denied right to counsel, the right to due process of law, the right to bail, the right to a speedy trial, the right to a jury trial, and other procedural protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. He was also subjected to torture, sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation, and many other cruel and unusual pre-trial measures. The government takes the position that it had the legitimate authority to do these things to Padilla and that it, in fact, has the legitimate authority to do them to every other American, as part of its ”war on terrorism.“ Yoo is saying that as a government lawyer who was just delivering legal opinions, he is immune from Padilla’s suit. The district judge disagreed. He held that the U.S. government lacks constitutional authority to subject the American people to such treatment and that any lawyer who knowingly participates in a scheme to subject Americans to such mistreatment is not immune from suit. Given the predilection of the courts against interlocutory appeals, in my opinion the Court of Appeals will quickly rule against Yoo’s appeal, enabling Padilla to continue with his case and begin taking sworn depositions. That will be when things start to get interesting.

TSA screeners are tested frequently on their job skills, whether by the TSA and its parent bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, or the Government Accountability Office or even by the occasional college student. Typically, screeners who never miss your bottle of Chardonnay or Chanel fail to find 65%, 75%, even 90% of the weapons undercover investigators smuggle past them. And they fail this overwhelmingly even though they cheat! Turns out a bureaucrat in the TSA's headquarters was alerting "Federal Security Directors" at airports so that they could inform screeners what the undercover agents looked like and what tricks they'd pull. Screeners' scores plunged further, to 0%, when a guy completely unaffiliated with the Feds whose plans couldn't be leaked ran his own tests. Nathaniel Heatwole was a 20-year-old college student in 2003 when he spirited packages containing box-cutters, matches, bleach, molding clay, and a note aboard six planes. Nat then emailed the TSA and told them what he'd done; he considered himself a civic-minded hero who'd helped the country by showing the TSA its vulnerabilities. He must have been pretty disillusioned when the TSA ignored him. In fact, his packages would still be aboard all those flights -- except that the airline's maintenance crews found them and snitched to the Feds. Nat had made an utter fool of the TSA, so the government charged him with a felony. That could have put him in prison for a decade. It eventually settled for fining him $500, putting him on probation for two years, and requiring him to perform 100 hours of community service. Revealing the TSA for a total sham apparently doesn't count as "community service."

Built upon Thirteen Techniques for Truth Suppression by David Martin, the following may be useful to the initiate in the world of dealing with veiled and half-truth, lies, and suppression of truth when serious crimes are studied in public forums. This, sadly, includes every day news media, one of the worst offenders with respect to being a source of disinformation. Where the crime involves a conspiracy, or a conspiracy to cover up the crime, there will invariably be a disinformation campaign launched against those seeking to uncover and expose the truth and/or the conspiracy. There are specific tactics which disinfo artists tend to apply, as revealed here. Also included with this material are seven common traits of the disinfo artist which may also prove useful in identifying players and motives.

The European Union has arrested a British man for the crime of sending a DVD to a judge. Anthony John Hill of Sheffield was arrested at his home in Carrick Street, Kells, on the foot of a European Arrest Warrant, according to the Irish Times. UK authorities claim Hill perverted the course of justice in a case related to the July 7, 2005 bomb attacks in London. British authorities claim copies of the DVD were sent, in packaging with Irish postal marks, between September 2007 and December 2007 to five relatives of people who had been killed during the bombing. In addition, copies were sent to a judge and jury foreman in the case.

This is not simply a ploy to cover up the fact that these prisoners were brutally tortured. It is also a way to silence them forever, so that they can never tell what their real role was in the 9/11 attacks, and who they received assistance from, and how they were able to convince the mightiest military the world has ever known to stand down from standard air defense protocols on 9/11.

An observation by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib abuses, seems to underscore my point. "I am not sure what purpose [releasing the 2,000 additional photos of prisoner abuse] would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy – " Hold it right there: Taguba said "protectors of our foreign policy," not "defenders of our independence" or "guardians of our liberties." The foreign policy referred to entails open-ended entanglements in the affairs of nearly every nation on earth, as well as plundering huge sums from taxpayers to sustain a grotesquely huge military establishment and bribe political elites abroad. That foreign policy cultivates misery and harvests war and terrorism. Why in God's Name would any decent human being defend that foreign policy in the abstract, much less spill blood to implement it?

President Obama told human rights advocates at the White House on Wednesday that he was mulling the need for a “preventive detention” system that would establish a legal basis for the United States to incarcerate terrorism suspects who are deemed a threat to national security but cannot be tried, two participants in the private session said.

The federal government's "no-fly" list of people forbidden to board commercial airliners has been the target of much-deserved criticism. Court documents reveal that the grounds for placing people on the list are "not hard and fast rules" but "necessarily subjective" judgments exercised by squabbling agencies. Getting off the list requires navigating an opaque and reluctantly implemented appeals process or a lawsuit. Even the size of the no-fly list is uncertain, with the Transportation Security Administration insisting that high estimates result from people being denied boarding because they've been confused with names on the list (a distinction without a difference). And now enrollment on that bureaucratic nightmare is poised to become grounds for denying Americans the ability to purchase firearms. What could possibly go wrong with that scheme? Would-be gun-owners may be introduced to the arbitrary justice of the no-fly list courtesy of H.R. 2401, the "No Fly, No Buy Act of 2009." Introduced last week by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, the announced intention of the legislation is "[t]o increase public safety and reduce the threat to domestic security by including persons who may be prevented from boarding an aircraft in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, and for other purposes."

What gives, I think, is that Gitmo is but a prototype, with a view of every police station and every county jail in the US of A being eventually gitmoized. And while they ain't there yet, not by a long shot, I can't help but say that some progress is apparantly being made in that direction.

The deplorable irony of this incident is almost too much to stomach given the origins of the image seen above. The coiled rattlesnake and the defiant “Don’t Tread on Me” motto are taken from the Gadsden flag, named after American patriot Colonel Christopher Gadsden. The flag dates from around 1775 and was used by The United States Marine Corps as an early motto flag. The rattlesnake was used to signify the fact that it only strikes after giving warning and if it feels under threat of attack.

The Obama administration is now considering reinstating the Military Commissions Act after a four-month suspension, in contradiction to the president’s promise to end military tribunals for detainees and to close down Gitmo. While there is talk about reforming the act to restrict hearsay evidence and to permit defendants to challenge intelligence used against them, the disparity between the tribunals and due process for other criminals leaves intact the concept of “unlawful enemy combatant,” as contained in the act, and thus threatens further evisceration of the rule of law. Running on the platform of a constitutional law professor who would restore the rule of law to the United States, the stench of hypocrisy pervades Barack Obama’s administration. This is not to challenge the need to make decisions based on available evidence and to fine-tune these decisions according to the facts—something that Obama has often held up as his modus operandi. The problem is that one of these facts to be taken into account is that evidence against at least some of these detainees was unlawfully obtained.

Daniel Estulin, Jim Tucker, and other sources who have infiltrated Bilderberg meetings in the past have routinely provided information about the Bilderberg agenda that later plays out on the world stage, proving that the organization is not merely a “talking shop” as debunkers claim, but an integral planning forum for the new world order agenda. Indeed, just last month Belgian viscount and current Bilderberg-chairman Étienne Davignon bragged that Bilderberg helped create the Euro by first introducing the policy agenda for a single currency in the early 1990’s. Bilderberg’s agenda for a European federal superstate and a single currency likely goes back even further. A BBC investigation uncovered documents from the early Bilderberg meetings which confirmed that the European Union was a brainchild of Bilderberg. In spring 2002, when war hawks in the Bush administration were pushing for a summer invasion of Iraq, Bilderbergers expressed their desire for a delay and the attack was not launched until March the following year.

Mohamed Abdel Aziz has bolted from trouble a number of times, including dashing from security forces closing in on a demonstration in the port city of Alexandria. His less mercurial moments have three times landed him in police stations, but upon each release he has returned to his computer, opened his blog and conspired in cyberspace to end President Hosni Mubarak's 27-year rule of Egypt. That's an unlikely prospect. But Aziz, a thin man in black clothes with a wristwatch shimmying up and down his arm, is a founder of the April 6 Youth Movement, which draws from a Facebook group of nearly 76,000 people, mostly high school and university students. The movement opines, plots and Twitters, though it has yet to generate feet in the street: Three of its calls for nationwide strikes drew more police than protesters.

Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do. Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights. "We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution," she said. "It wasn't intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can't even defend."

In the same breath as radical Cuban Communists, the “decentralized terrorist movement,” “lone terrorists,” “racist skinheads” and the Mexican separatist movement, we find an entry for “alternative media,” alongside the blurb, “a term used to describe various information sources that provide a forum for interpretations of events and issues that differ radically from those presented in mass media products and outlets.” That’s right folks - the federal government is training its enforcers that people who don’t believe everything they see on Fox News, CNN or read in the New York Times are to be treated as a “threat” and a potential violent domestic terrorist. Apparently it’s not enough to treat Ron Paul supporters, people who fly U.S. flags or people who are able to accurately recite the Bill of Rights as potential mass killers, now anyone who merely questions what is reported by the corporate media is also a danger, according to the federal government.

Jay Bybee wrote another memo that nobody has noticed, one purporting to authorize crimes far worse than torture, the same crimes the torture was itself intended to create false justifications for. On October 23, 2002, Assistant Attorney General Bybee signed a 48-page memo to the "counsel to the president" (Alberto Gonzales) titled "Authority of the President Under Domestic and International Law to Use Military Force Against Iraq." This was another secret law, but instead of authorizing particular uses of torture (which in reality were far exceeded, engaged in prior to the memos, etc.), this one authorized any president to single-handedly commit what Nuremberg called "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." And while the torture memos extensively and grotesquely limited the days of sleep deprivation and the hours of waterboarding, the aggressive war memo included only a single paragraph at the bottom of page 47 requiring that: "Were the President to determine that the use of force in self-defense is necessary to counter the threat posed by Iraq's WMD program, such force should be proportional; in other words, it should be limited to that which is needed to eliminate the threat posed by Iraq." When this memo was written, our president, vice president, and top cabinet officials were screaming about Iraq's vast quantities of weapons, but Bybee was already crafting his justifications around the idea of weapons "programs."

Again in the air, and preparing for another four hours of travel, a man who identified himself as the copilot came to me. Trying to look discreet, he asked if I was "Mr. Calvo Ospina." I told him yes. "The captain wants to sleep, that's why I came here," he said, and he invited me to accompany him to the back of the plane. There, he told me that I was the person "responsible" for the detour. I was astonished. My first reaction was to ask him: "Do you think I'm a terrorist?" He said no, that's the reason I'm telling you this. He also assured me that it was strange that this was the first time it happened on an Air France plane. Shortly before we landed in Martinique, a stewardess had told me that, in her 11-year career, nothing like that had ever happened to her.

Statements of this nature on the "inevitable spread" of the disease, create, quite deliberately, an atmosphere of fear, insecurity and panic. They also serve to distract people's attention from a devastating global economic crisis which is leading the World into mass poverty and unemployment, not to mention the war in the Middle East and the broader issue of US-NATO war crimes. The Real Global Crisis is marked by poverty, economic collapse, ethnic strife, death and destruction, the derogation of civil rights and the demise of State social programs. The EU announcement of the swine flu pandemic inevitably serves to weaken the social protest movement which has spread across Europe. In Mexico, the swine flu emergency measures which have "closed down" entire urban areas, are widely perceived as a pretext of the Felipe Calderon government to curb mounting social dissent against one of the most corrupt administrations in Mexican history. In Mexico, the May 1st Parade, which was directed against the Calderon government, was cancelled.

I DID NOT RESIST OR FIGHT BACK. YET I WAS TAZERED REPEATEDLY AND SHOVED IN BROKEN GLASS REPEATEDLY! I was IN the United States!!! I had crossed no international border!!! This occured on the night of April 14/15, 2009.

There is no reason for this moron to be carring that much CASH with him. Get a Money order or something! He should go to jail for being dumb!

TSA agents claim having a large sum of money which could be any amount over $50.00 is cause to be detained and interrogated. When Mr. Bierfeldt asks if the interrogation over having cash is lawful he was threatened with further detainment and investigation by DEA and FBI. TSA continues to threaten and detain Mr. Bierfeldt even after discovering the cash in his possession are funds belonging to Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty. TSA contacts an FBI agent who quickly discovers the funds being transported are political contributions the FBI agent tells Mr. Bierfeldt he is free to go. However the lead TSA agent quickly responds that he must contact his supervisor first because Mr. Bierfeldt is a “suspicious person” in his opinion. This incident with national police is particular chilling in the shadow of the politically motivated Missouri Fusion Center MIAC Report labeling Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), his supporters, Campaign for Liberty, and anyone one who believes in conservative issues as a threat to national security.

Henceforth, our SEC, Commodities Trading Commission, Federal Reserve Board and other regulators will have to march to the beat of drums pounded by the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a body of central bankers from each of the G-20 states and the European Union. The mandate conferred on the FSB is remarkable for its scope and open-endedness. It is to set a “framework of internationally agreed high standards that a global financial system requires.” These standards are to include the extension of “regulation and oversight to all systemically important financial institutions, instruments, and markets…[including] systemically important hedge funds.”

On 9/11 the Bush administration declared a State of Emergency (SOE), which was formally proclaimed on September 14, 2001, and extended by Bush repeatedly thereafter, most recently on August 28, 2008.(1) Under cover of this SOE, Bush secretly enacted many extreme measures, ranging from suspension of habeas corpus to preparations for martial law in America; all these were undertaken as part of secret so-called "Continuity of Government" (COG) procedures associated with the SOE, and first instituted on 9/11.

Sure, pro-tyranny advocates might respond by saying that Bush didn’t abuse his powers, while Hitler did, but doesn’t that miss the point? The point is not whether America has had a more benevolent dictator for the past 7 years than the German people did under Hitler. The point is that both the German people and the American people were living under some form of dictatorship — a type of political system in which there are no constraints on the power of the ruler. Remember: dictatorship entails the existence of omnipotent power, even if such power isn’t always being exercised to its full extent. The cases of Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri do reflect the exercise of the omnipotent power wielded by Bush and his military forces over the American people for the past 7 years. Padilla is an American citizen and al-Marri is a foreigner. Both were arrested on American soil and given the enemy-combatant treatment — i.e., indefinite incarceration for years, denial of due process, denial of trial by jury, and touchless torture in the form of isolation and sensory deprivation. For the last 7 years, Bush and his military have wielded the power to subject all Americans to the Padilla treatment. Why would that not be considered dictatorship?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.

Scott Horton - a professor at Columbia Law School and writer for Harper's - says of the Bush administration memos authorizing torture, spying, indefinite detention without charge, the use of the military within the U.S. and the suspension of free speech and press rights: We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it.

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators. But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Edmonds’s case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

A former CIA officer has said its ridiculous that the Bush administration didn't execute numerous prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, regardless of whether they have had a trial, when it had the chance.

So no international tribunals or foreign countries have any power to investigate or prosecute American officials for war crimes (even when those war crimes are against citizens of those countries and/or committed within their borders). And, American political officials must also not be prosecuted inside the U.S., by American courts. "Nobody is entitled" to do that either, because "attempting to prosecute political opponents at home or facilitating their prosecution abroad is like pouring acid into our democratic machinery." The implication of their argument -- which is now the conventional Beltway view -- is too obvious to require much elaboration. If our political leaders can't be held accountable for their war crimes and other serious felonies in foreign countries or international tribunals, and must never be held accountable in the U.S. either (because to do so is to "pour acid into our democratic machinery"), then it means that American political officials (in contrast to most other leaders) are completely and explicitly exempt from, placed above, the rule of law. That conclusion is compelled from their premises.

Few people have the chance to watch a shy young man grow into a ruthless dictator -- and live to talk about it.

A video released as part of a lawsuit against police in Millville, Philadelphia, shows an officer forcefully punching a woman in the face four times after he bungled an attempt to arrest her for riding a bike on the sidewalk.

Earlier this week on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Russell Tice revealed that the agency had “monitored all communications” of Americans — specifically targeting journalists. To discuss this development, Olbermann yesterday hosted Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen, who famously angered the Bush administration by revealing the government’s domestic wiretapping program and its secret snooping on the financial records of thousands of Americans allegedly linked to terrorists. Since that time, the Bush Justice Department had been trying to identify Risen’s sources for his book on the nation’s spy agencies, called State of War. In April, the New York Times reported that former government officials had been called before a grand jury and confronted with phone records documenting their calls with Risen. Neither Risen nor the New York Times had received a subpoena for those records.

When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, he sought to dismantle the evolving Federalist tradition of pomp and circumstance. In a ceremonial sense, royalism seemed to have been restored, or so it seemed to him. As this blogger put it, "Dressed in simple attire, Jefferson walked over to the Capitol with a phalanx of riflemen, friends, and fellow citizens from his home state of Virginia." In these last days of the American Empire, such austere republicanism would be considered impossibly quaint. Having long ago morphed into Jefferson's worst nightmare, the closer we get to the end, the more glamorous our inaugurals become. The poorer we are, the more millions we'll throw at a ceremony that is really the crowning of a monarch – and not just any old king, but an emperor bestriding the globe.

Finally, under the post-9/11 "homeland security" laws, the government almost certainl routinely demands full access to ISPs and websites. In other words, we've all seen polls at Digg, Reddit, YouTube, and mainstream news sites suddenly disappear entirely if a sufficiently pro-government sentiment was not expressed. Do you doubt that the military and homeland security apparatus would step in to take control of what it considered an "enemy" message? And remember, the government considers any message questioning anything the government does as an enemy message.

ARE you afraid that the eco nomic downturn could get out of hand? I mean, really out of hand? Well, don’t worry. The US Army War College is on the case - ready to handle “unforeseen economic collapse” and the “rapid dissolution of public order in all or significant parts of the US.” And you thought we were just dealing with a recession!

Earlier this month Obama spelled out his subservience to the Pentagon by declaring, “To ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad, we all share the belief we have to maintain the strongest military on the planet.” To that end, he has pledged to increase the size of US ground forces by 100,000 soldiers and Marines and made it clear that there will be no significant cuts to a military budget that is gobbling up some $850 billion annually under conditions of soaring deficits and an intensifying financial crisis. There is no doubt a significant element of political calculation in Obama’s decision to surround himself with military brass and assure that he is seen as “supporting our troops.” There is, after all, the bitter experience of the last Democratic administration. Bill Clinton’s first term was nearly shipwrecked by his confrontation with the uniformed command over his proposal to scrap the ban on gays in the military. For the remainder of his presidency, he was treated with open or barely concealed contempt by much of the officer corps.

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution?

While we support everyone's right to their individual opinions about these proceedings, including, of course, other family members who have suffered the devastation we have, we also feel obliged to make clear that many of us do not believe these military commissions to be fair, in accordance with American values, or capable of achieving the justice that 9/11 family members and all Americans deserve. We believe that the secretive and unconstitutional nature of these proceedings deprive us of the right to know the full truth about what happened on 9/11. These prosecutions have been politically motivated from the start, are designed to ensure quick convictions at the expense of due process and transparency, and are structured to prevent the revelation of abusive interrogations and torture engaged in by the U.S. government. Unfortunately, any verdict borne of these proceedings will lack legitimacy and leave us wondering if true justice has been served. No comfort or closure can come from military commissions that ignore the rule of law and stain America's reputation at home and abroad.

The new set of “confessions” will hold about as much credibility of those of purported “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheik Mohammed when he first spilled the beans in March 2007, After only five years of torture, KSM confessed to nearly everything under the sun, only stopping short at accepting responsibility for killing Kennedy, creating AIDS and being the real Santa Claus. Indeed, KSM was so keen on never seeing a cattle prod again that he even confessed to being responsible for attacking banks that were founded after his arrest, seemingly invoking the power of long range telekinesis to commit his dastardly deeds.

Gun control advocates tell us that removing guns from society makes us safer. If that were the case why do the worst shootings happen in gun free zones, like schools? And while accidents do happen, aggressive, terroristic shootings like this are unheard of at gun and knife shows, or military bases. It bears repeating that an armed society truly is a polite society. The fact is that firearm technology exists. It cannot be uninvented. As long as there is metalworking and welding capability, it matters not what gun laws are imposed upon law-abiding people. Those that wish to have guns, and disregard the law, will have guns. Gun control makes violence safer and more effective for the aggressive, whether the aggressor is a terrorist or a government.

Saudi officials reportedly formed the military militia after recent polls conducted in Bahrain and northern parts of Saudi Arabia revealed that people in the area will support Iran in the event of a possible US or Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic. The implication is that any aggression against Iran could paralyze the oil-rich country. It was suggested that activities by the al-Qaeda militia could threaten reformist movements inside the country. Saudi Arabia has been accused of forging such links before, for example, documents have been discovered which reveal Saudi Arabia formed a group in Yemen in an attempt to crush unrest in the country.

We are entering upon a sequence of events that will, in the end, transform the American economy even more than now into a slow-growth, no-growth, inflationary, regulated, stalled, and inefficient economy. It will be a miracle if the Fed’s expansion is brought under control and reduced. The Fed will maintain its lending and even expand it. This can only atrophy both the banking system and the capital markets. Inflationary pressures are bound to build up, and that will lead to economic controls. The Treasury will look for ways to regulate capital markets still further, and this will undermine them. There is no worse signal than the Treasury’s intrusion into maintaining zombie institutions that should fail and be re-organized. This has already happened in the cases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This all means that efficient institutions, companies, and persons will be penalized at the expense of the inefficient ones or the deadbeats. More and more will buy tickets to Washington to beg for relief. The end of the road is government control of the means of production. When companies can no longer finance themselves through the standard private means of capital markets and banks, they turn to government. When government can no longer handle the bankruptcies, it seizes the means of production.

And nobody seems to think there's anything wrong with the police inflicting horrible pain on people on the thinnest of pretexts. As long as there's no permanent damage, there's no harm in it. Heck, even if there is permanent damage, it's the victim's fault for failing to be properly cooperative --- or agreeing to do it as part of their job. You can see why waterboarding is now considered perfectly acceptable. The authorities only use it when they believe they need to (and ok, sometimes just because they're in a bad mood) and it doesn't leave any permanent damage either. No harm no foul. What's the problem?

About 6,000 people have contracted cholera in recent weeks, according to the UN, and almost 300 have died. A chronic shortage of medicine has sent hundreds of people south to seek treatment in South Africa. "Unless this root cause of the political absence of a legitimate government is solved, the situation will get worse and may implode and collapse ... It is now an urgent matter, because people are dying," said South Africa's caretaker president, Kgalema Motlanthe.

Following Judge Richard J. Leon’s decision today in U.S. District Court ordering the release of five of the six Boumediene habeas defendants, Center for Constitutional Rights Executive Director Vincent Warren released the following statement:

“Somebody in D.C. was feeding you guys quite a story prior to the bailout, a story that if we didn’t do this we were going to see something on the scale of the depression, there were people talking about martial law being instituted, civil unrest….who was feeding you guys this stuff?,” asked host Pat Campbell. “That’s Henry Paulson,” responded Inhofe, “We had a conference call early on, it was on a Friday I think – a week and half before the vote on Oct. 1. So it would have been the middle … what was it – the 19th of September, we had a conference call. In this conference call – and I guess there’s no reason for me not to repeat what he said, but he said – he painted this picture you just described. He said, ‘This is serious. This is the most serious thing that we faced.’”

Among 82 researchers polled by Ms Kempner, who had received money from the NIH, almost a quarter had dropped or reframed studies around sexual behaviour they judged to be politically sensitive, and four had made career changes and left academia as a result of the controversy. Half reframed their studies to avoid work on marginalised populations, or dropped studies they thought would be politically sensitive, such as those on sexual orientation, abortion, childhood sexual abuse, and condom use. One interviewee said: “I do not study sex workers, I study ‘women at risk’.” Almost four-fifths believed NIH funding decisions had become more political under President George W. Bush than under his predecessor Bill Clinton, and more than a third believed they were less likely to receive NIH funding as a result of the controversy.

Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, testified before Congress last month, proposing that 401(k)s and IRAs be confiscated and converted into universal Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs) managed by the Social Security Administration. The GRAs would be enforced by means of a mandatory savings tax equating to 5 per cent of an individual’s annual paycheck deposited to the GRA. Social Security and Medicare taxes would still be payable, employers would no longer would be able to write off their contributions and capital gains would be taxable year-on-year. In addition, workers could bequeath only half of their account balances to their heirs, unlike full balances from existing 401(k) and IRA accounts.

The ACLU says a "Constitution-free zone" exists within 100 miles of the US border, where DHS claims the authority to stop, search and detain anyone for any reason. Nearly two-thirds of the US population lives within 100 miles of the border, according to the ACLU, and the border zone encompasses scores of major metropolitan areas and even entire states.

When asked about President Bush's statement that the intercepts were directed only at known al-Qaeda suspects, Kinne stated, "That is completely a lie." She said that military officers, journalists, and Red Cross workers were among the people whose calls she transcribed. Faulk told ABC that certain calls were even passed around among the intercept operators like office jokes. "I was told, 'Hey, check this out, there's some good phone sex.' ... It was there, stored the way you'd look at songs on your iPod."

The plans to implement martial law in America have been taking shape for decades, hidden behind "Continuity of Government" contingency planning. Now, with public outcry over the banker bailout bill at fever pitch, all of the pieces are in place for the U.S. Army to start policing American citizens. For more information and analysis, please visit http://www.corbettreport.com

On Thursday's edition of The Colbert Report, bestselling author Naomi Klein argued that the Bush Administration creates crises in order to "enrich themselves and their friends," drawing parallels between the torture of prisoners and the economic bailout being provided to Wall St. by US leaders. Previously, Klein called out the sprawling economic crisis as just another example of the Bush 'shock doctrine,' a key component to the ruling regime's corporate agenda.

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her -- not McCain's -- speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies -- not McCain's -- to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners -- this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit -- but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain. Then I saw and heard more. Palin is embracing lawlessness in defying Alaskan Legislature subpoenas -- this is what Rove-Cheney, and not McCain, believe in doing. She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women's shelters -- Rove's style, not McCain's. I realized what I was seeing. Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal. The strategy became clear. Time magazine reported that Rove is "dialed in" to the McCain campaign. Rove's protege Steve Schmidt is now campaign manager. And Politico reported that Rove was heavily involved in McCain's vice presidential selection. Finally a new report shows that there are dozens of Bush and Rove operatives surrounding Sarah Palin and orchestrating her every move.

There were many viable, reasonable, eminently centrist alternatives to the radical, plutocratic Bush-Obama scam -- alternatives which would have been politically palatable to a broad spectrum of the electorate. One of the best ones of this ilk that I've seen was outlined in the eminently mainstream Washington Post earlier this week by two eminently respectable Yale economists. (You can find it here.) There were many other such practical and effective plans offered by reputable experts, any one of which could have gone a long way toward protecting ordinary citizens now exposed by the meltdown, supporting the banks, and stabilizing the markets -- all without effecting one of the largest single redistributions of wealth since the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917. None of these plans were considered or debated or even mentioned, not even for a single moment, by the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate. Instead, they joined the Republican leadership and the Bush Administration in repeating, over and over, the Big Lie that there was NO OTHER CHOICE but some basic version of the unworkable Bush plan. The Democrats -- led by Barack Obama -- not only threw a political lifeline to the most despised president in American history (in the middle of an election year!), they deliberately took ownership of a measure widely rejected by the American public -- a class war weapon of mass destruction whose malign effects will reverberate through American society for years, perhaps generations to come.

Excuse me! I believe that the 'goddamned piece of paper' --otherwise known as the Constitution of the United States --makes the use of armed forces against American citizens on American soil a matter of 'high treason' i.,e the government waging 'war' upon the people, a matter that is expressly forbidden by the "Goddamn piece of paper", Article III:

This is precisely how political campaigns are run in despotic third world countries and dictatorships that pretend to be democracies. In Bolivia, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Burma, Georgia, Haiti — there is no shortage of recent examples — the opposition is routinely arrested, even killed, but we are supposedly above such tactics here in America. Instead, we just fix the voting machines and nix thousands of voters from the rolls. It appears all of this has changed under Obama. Isn’t this the sort of behavior Hitler’s goons engaged in before he swept into power and killed millions of people, beginning with his political opponents? Isn’t this the sort of thing Stalin and Mao did, eventually graduating to mass murder and genocide? Didn’t East Germany’s Stasi encourage people to turn in their neighbors, even their family and friends, for holding the wrong political opinions?

We are witnessing a bankers' coup d’etat. In the name of saving the economy from a crisis created by their own greed and immense profits, the biggest bankers have taken a country and a people hostage. “Give us your money and tear up what’s left of your Constitution or we will sink your economy,” is the message from Wall Street and the Bush Administration. “Give us the power and money we demand or you will be left jobless from a new economic depression." Under the pretext of the banking crisis, the Bush Administration is changing the way this country operates. This is not simply taking trillions of dollars from the people and giving it to the richest bankers to do with as they see fit.

In case you haven't heard, the bill would not only stick up American taxpayers for an additional $700 billion, but would literally give Paulson and the government fascist powers. Don't believe me? Well, as the Bloomberg article notes: "The bill would bar courts from reviewing actions taken under its authority."

Yes it is. It has become painfully clear that not only is Sarah Palin not an advocate for rape victims, she is not an advocate for women. But Palin doesn't hate women; she just doesn't care about them.

Ten days ago, as the nation focused attention on the hurricane nearing the Mississippi delta, another storm was brewing far upstream in St. Paul, Minnesota — a storm far more dangerous, it turned out, but one by and large overlooked by the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).

However, Brian Kilmeade appeared disappointed that the women had not been handled more aggressively. "Why did she knock a Secret Service agent off of her?" he wanted to know. "That is a reason where they -- didn't the other guy 'tase him bro' because of that? Where is the taser? They tased the guy at Florida State, but with maybe a future president feet away this woman's allowed to get up and scream? She could have had a gun."

The strongest accusations were made by RNC Welcoming Committee co-founder William Gillis, who has been among those planning the protests for the last two years. “Police kicked down doors with guns drawn on families with their children at dinnertime,” Gillis charged. “Reporters and the media at large have been repeatedly targeted for repression. Activists have been abducted off the street in unmarked vans and political prisoners held without access to medical attention."

Behind all the patriotic hyperbole that accompanies the conventions, and the thousands of journalists and media workers who arrive to cover the staged events, there are serious violations of the basic right of freedom of the press. Here on the streets of St. Paul, the press is free to report on the official proceedings of the RNC, but not to report on the police violence and mass arrests directed at those who have come to petition their government, to protest.

Oliver North, who worked on COG planning with Rumsfeld and Cheney in the 1980s, was asked in the Iran-Contra Hearings about his work on an emergency plan “that would suspend the American constitution.” Democratic Senator Inouye, who was presiding, pounded his gavel and interjected that this was a “highly sensitive and classified matter,” not to be dealt with in an open hearing.[7] Congress has never discussed COG plans publicly since that time.

Food Not Bombs has been peacefully participating in nonviolent protests for 20 years. They served meals to rescue workers at the World Trade Center after 9/11 and to nearly 20 communities in the Gulf region following Hurricane Katrina (see this). To think that they planned violence at the Minnesota convention is almost like saying that Gandhi secretly advocated violence. If the group had been called "Bombs Not Food", had advocated for waging war against Iran and other countries, and had argued that the U.S. cannot afford to fund social programs like feeding poor when we need every cent to fight the "war on terror" abroad, do you think they would have been targeted and charged with terrorism? I think, instead, they might be invited to speak on the tv news shows and perhaps even inside the Convention.

The criminal complaints filed by the Ramsey County Attorney do not allege that any of the defendants personally have engaged in any act of violence or damage to property. The complaints list all of alleged violations of law during the last few days of the RNC -- other than violations of human rights carried out by law enforcement -- and seeks to hold the 8 defendants responsible for acts committed by other individuals. None of the defendants have any prior criminal history involving acts of violence. Searches conducted in connection with the raids failed to turn up any physical evidence to support the allegations of organized attacks on law enforcement. Although claiming probable cause to believe that gunpowder, acids, and assembled incendiary devices would be found, no such items were seized by police. As a result, police sought to claim that the seizure of common household items such as glass bottles, charcoal lighter, nails, a rusty machete, and two hatchets, supported the allegations of the confidential informants. "Police found what they claim was a single plastic shield, a rusty machete, and two hatchets used in Minnesota to split wood. This doesn't amount to evidence of an organized insurrection, particularly when over 3,500 police are present in the Twin Cities, armed with assault rifles, concussion grenades, chemical weapons and full riot gear," said Nestor. In addition, the National Lawyers Guild has previously pointed out how law enforcement has fabricated evidence such as the claims that urine was seized which demonstrators intended to throw at police.

Moreover, the protesters who were targeted in Minnesota were mainly those who were peacefully filming the protests. Indeed, a 2003 FBI memo describes protesters' use of videotaping as an "intimidation" technique, even though - as the ACLU points out - "Most mainstream demonstrators often use videotape during protests to document law enforcement activity and, more importantly, deter police from acting outside the law."

Glenn Greenwald tells a harrowing tale of police-state tactics in Minneapolis, with armed security forces conducting Baghdad-like raids on the houses of activists, terrorizing many and arresting some for thought crimes — such as "planning to cause a riot" — and other bogus charges. The sweeps — guided and aided by the federal government — are designed to "ensure domestic tranquility" during the imminent Republican convention in the city. As Greenwald points out, not one of those who were shackled, arrested and hauled out at gunpoint had committed any crime whatsoever. Heinous indeed, and entirely worthy of the anger that Greenwald marshals in his reports from the scene. But we must disagree with him on one crucial point: his repeated declaration that these incidents are "extraordinary." On the contrary, there is nothing at all remarkable about them. They are all of a piece with the similar tactics employed to cleanse the city of Denver of any unseemly expressions of old-fashioned, long-gone American liberties during the Democratic convention, where any protests that escaped the grotesque official "cage" set aside for them were strangled by militarized police and mass arrests.

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning -- one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided houses is known by neighbors as a "hippie house," where 5-10 college-aged individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were filled with "peaceful kids" who are politically active but entirely unthreatening and friendly. Posted below is the video of the scene, including various interviews, which convey a very clear sense of what is actually going on here.

Part of a proposal for Guantanamo Bay legal detainees, the provision before Congress seeks to “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.” The New York Times' page 8 placement of the article in its Saturday edition seems to downplay its importance. Such a re-affirmation of war carries broad legal implications that could imperil Americans' civil liberties and the rights of foreign nationals for decades to come. It was under the guise of war that President Bush claimed a legal mandate for his warrantless wiretapping program, giving the National Security Agency power to intercept calls Americans made abroad. More of this program has emerged in recent years, and it includes the surveillance of Americans' information and exchanges online. "War powers" have also given President Bush cover to hold Americans without habeas corpus -- detainment without explanation or charge. Jose Padilla, a Chicago resident arrested in 2002, was held without trial for five years before being convicted of conspiring to kill individuals abroad and provide support for terrorism.

And here we come to one of the bedrock dichotomies (read: lies) of modern American politics: the politicians and pundits tell us that our freedom is dependent on political stability, but in fact political stability (or at least the kind they care about) can only be maintained at the expense of freedom -- your freedom. It's the old "we had to destroy it in order to save it" argument again, only this time we're not talking about a hamlet half a world away, but about your future, and the future of your children.

Amy Goodman and producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar have all been released from police custody in St. Paul following their illegal arrest by Minneapolis Police on Monday afternoon. All three were violently manhandled by law enforcement officers. Abdel Kouddous was slammed against a wall and the ground, leaving his arms scraped and bloodied. He sustained other injuries to his chest and back. Salazar's violent arrest by baton-wielding officers, during which she was slammed to the ground while yelling, "I'm Press! Press!," resulted in her nose bleeding, as well as causing facial pain. Goodman's arm was violently yanked by police as she was arrested.

After reviewing some of the more than 400 mainstream media articles written yesterday about the NIST final report on the collapse of WTC 7, it is easy to get the impression that no credible alternative explanations exist. Why would any American question the NIST report? They have no exposure to opposing views expressed by professional engineers and architects. It is as if none exist if you rely on the mainstream media. Only two outlets quoted members of the professional organization, AE911truth.org. More outlets quoted me than reputable scientists. Go figure. While many of the reports mentioned that NIST dismissed the possibility that explosives were used, not one outlet reported that NIST failed to perform a single scientific test for explosive residue. NIST ruled out the use of explosives because "...the noise associated with such an explosion would have been ten times louder than being in front of the speakers at a rock concert...". There you have it--government funded science at its best. NIST also claimed that no loud noise was heard by witnesses. I guess they did not have access to the oral histories from the New York Fire Department made public after suit by the New York Times, the source for the quote by NIST that there were no witness reports of loud noises. There goes that liberal media again, always attacking the Bush administration at every possible turn. Yesterday, while we were listening to the press conference hosted by AE911truth.org, we received many calls from media outlets inquiring about our take on what the NIST presented. We provided these "journalists" with the number for the conference call and suggested they contact members of AE911truth.org to get the perspective of professional, credentialed engineers and architects. After reviewing the media accounts of how the WTC 7 mystery is now solved, it is apparent that not one of these "journalists" chose to report what these professionals had to say. Based on the misquoted snippet from 911truth.org interviews on the subject, it is clear they neither listened to the press conference nor contacted any of the structural engineers or architects to whom they were referred. In the two and a half years as media coordinator for 911truth.org, I have learned that the reality created by the media is anything but fair and balanced. The producer of CNN's Showbiz Tonight demonstrated more intellectual curiosity about why we continue to raise questions than most of the journalists I have encountered. Earlier in the year, I received a call from a show producer at WOR radio in New York City, asking if I would go on the show to debate the host. I asked how much time we had for the debate. He said, without skipping a beat, 5 minutes. What kind of debate about the complex events of 9/11 can take place in 5 minutes? I accepted the offer on the condition that they play a few short sound bites I would supply in advance so that, at the very least, we would have a few specific issues to discuss. Here are the clips I sent for them to choose from, which include: President Bush at a town hall meeting, Ohio Senator Mark Dayton, Charlie Rose and 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean, Secretary of Transportation Norman Minetta and Commissioner Hamilton, Commissioner Ben Veniste questioning Condaleeza Rice, Missouri Representative Ike Skelton, Chris Matthews and Representative Dana Rohrabacher, George Tenet. Listen here. On the morning of the debate, the producer called to let me know that we were going ahead with the "debate" but the station would not play the sound bites. He told me that I could read the text of the sound bites but station management would not let me "program" the show. So let me get this straight, I can read what President Bush repeated at two publicly televised town hall meetings recounting his experience on the morning of 9/11 but the citizens of New York City could not hear him say it in his own words. When I suggested the possibility of media bias, he then told me the "host of the show did not know how to respond to the sound bites."

The Professor explained that the motive behind the attacks was clear: "I believe the first anthrax attack was designed to ram through the PATRIOT ACT because Senators Daschle and Leahy were holding it up and once the anthrax occurred it rammed right through, indeed, on the renewal of the USA PATRIOT ACT, Senator Feingold was holding it up and all of sudden out of nowhere some white powdered substance appeared at one of the Senate office buildings, and all of a sudden the renewal of the PATRIOT ACT went through." The evidence becomes more compelling when you take into consideration the fact that the White House was on anthrax fighting antibiotics weeks prior to the attacks.

Therefore, whether Ivins or another scientist working for the U.S. government carried out the anthrax attacks is actually not the primary question. The main question is who within the U.S. government framed Arabs for the attacks, and whether the attacks were motivated primarily as a justification for war against Middle Eastern oil countries or to intimidate the U.S. Congress and the American people into accepting fascism.

Apparently not accepting the government's version of events surrounding 9/11 may land you in trouble with the cops if you're writing from Utah. Questioning the collapse of WTC 7 for example, an incident that was totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission Report, could get you reported. Asking your elected representative how he or she thinks a man dying from kidney failure in a cave half way across the world was able to organize four breeches of U.S. air defenses in one day might embroil you in a police investigation.

Others have written in about 9/11 conspiracies, global takeovers or secret CIA mind-control techniques that "got so crazy we actually had to hand them over to Capitol Police," he said.

And there you have it. Border guards can seize data storage devices of any kind, from laptops to handwritten notes, without any grounds. They are required to give seized items back to their owners in a reasonable time, but they get to decide what's reasonable. They can make copies of your data and share it with other government agencies, but if it turns out that you're not a terrorist they are supposed to destroy their copies of your data. How would you ever know whether or not they had done so? And what would prevent them from secretly adding your data to the Main Core database? Even more disturbingly, perhaps, this is the result of policies promulgated in secrecy, implemented without any publicity, and only now coming to light. Michael Chertoff says doing it any other way would be chilling and dangerous. And not a voice is raised in opposition -- at least not in the mainstream press.

“There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war,” Hersh explained. “The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.” Given that only a few weeks ago Hersh’s exclusive story concerning the vamping up of covert U.S. military activity inside Iran made headlines everywhere, in every major publication and outlet, it begs the question where are they now for an even bigger story? The Financial Times even carries a story today about how Hersh is “The Last Great American Reporter”, yet the lengthy piece contains no mention of his latest revelations.

Ron Paul talks about the bailout out of the housing industry and how it really just destroys the dollar and adds enormously to the debt.

Max Obuszewski is a seasoned, nonviolent peace activist in Maryland. But to the Maryland State Police, he is suspected of committing the "primary crime" of "terrorism -- anti-war protestors" and the "secondary crime" of "terrorism -- anti-govern." That is how the Maryland State Police designated him in internal documents that the ACLU of Maryland obtained through a lawsuit and released on July 17. The documents also show that the Maryland State Police entered his name into a database dealing with "high intensity drug activity." These documents reveal an elaborate undercover operation against peace groups and anti-capital-punishment groups.

The Bush Regime’s “terrorist” protection schemes have reached the height of total incompetence and utter absurdity. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, a private organization that defends the US Constitution that inattentive Americans neglect, there are now one million names on the “terrorist” watch list. One of them is that of former Assistant US Attorney General Jim Robinson, whose top security clearances are current. Every time Mr.Robinson flies away on business, he is delayed by a totally incompetent “terrorist” protection racket that cannot tell a person named Jim Robinson, who served in the highest echelons of the US government, from a Muslim terrorist.

This past Sunday night I was subjected to another stark reminder of how far the UK has descended into a total police state when I was stopped on the street by "Police Community Support Officers" for putting my hand in my pocket.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has reported that Michael Goldfarb, a Weekly Standard staff member, has been named Deputy Communications Director of John McCain’s campaign. Goldfarb believes, or so he says, that a president of the United States has near dictatorial powers.

Lest we forget that from this same wellspring of tyranny emerged Operation TIPS, which was supposedly nixed by Congress, a DOJ, FBI, DHS and FEMA coordinated program that would have recruited one in twenty-four Americans as domestic informants, a higher percentage than was used by the Stasi in East Germany.

"The situation has worsened in just two days," one shocked aid volunteer said as crowds of children mobbed his vehicle, their hands reaching through the window for scraps of food. Few refugee settlements have been erected, and, as a result, bands of homeless people are wandering the soaked countryside in search of shelter or dry land. They're camping in monasteries and schools, which have become breeding grounds for water-borne diseases. Yesterday, Myanmar's state television increased the official death toll to almost 78,000, with another 56,000 missing. For more than a week, the regime claimed the cyclone took between 30,000 and 40,000 lives. International relief agencies and the United Nations claim the death toll could reach 200,000. They estimate that up to 2.5 million people were affected by the cyclone.

Actions which the government claims were launched against non-U.S. citizens have in the past been used against Americans within the United States. Why should we believe any differently about its new, even more tyrannical programs?

At this point in our history, America is like a victim of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, held captive in a pit, softened up, and then murdered for our supple skin so that the batshit killer can prance around and imagine he's the belle of the ball. If you're living the end of your days in a chamber of horrors, then, really, nothing awful is surprising anymore. The gruel you're fed has maggots in it? Yeah, okay. You're blasted with cold water every now and then? Sure, sure, whatever. You're in a goddamn dirt pit, a pseudo-grave, fer fuck's sake. Waiting to be skinned. What the fuck else is gonna be worse? So it is with the endless streams of revelations of how nightmarish and cynical the Bush administration actually is. The Pentagon was manipulating the media through the placement of ex-military members as "analysts" on the news networks and programs in order to hype the war? Fine, fine. What else ya got? Homeland Security is doping up immigrants for deportation? Really, what would have been shocking is if the Bush administration hadn't been shooting drugs into detainees.

Lawyers for Mayor Bloomberg are asking a judge to ban any reference to the Second Amendment during the upcoming trial of a gun shop owner who was sued by the city. While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity. “Apparently Mayor Bloomberg has a problem with both the First and the Second amendments,” Lawrence Keane, the general counsel of a firearms industry association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said. The trial, set to begin May 27, involves a Georgia gun shop, Adventure Outdoors, which the city alleges is responsible for a disproportionate number of the firearms recovered from criminals in New York City. The gun store’s owner, Jay Wallace, says his store abides by Georgia and federal regulations and takes steps to avoid selling firearms to gun traffickers. Mr. Wallace’s store is one of 27 out-of-state gun shops sued by New York City, and the first to go to trial.

The six that the United States are bringing to "trial" include two child soldiers for the Taliban and a car pool driver who allegedly drove Osama bin Laden. The Taliban did not attack the United States. The child soldiers were fighting in an Afghan civil war. The United States attacked the Taliban. How does that make Taliban soldiers terrorists who should be locked up and abused in Gitmo and brought before a kangaroo military tribunal? If a terrorist hires a driver or a taxi, does that make the driver a terrorist? What about the pilots of the airliners who brought the alleged 9-11 terrorists to the United States? Are they guilty, too?

Six detainees currently at Guantanamo have appeared before a military judge, and five of those have joined the boycott, which is expected to spread as more suspected terrorists are arraigned. The mass action threatens to give America's first war-crimes trials since the World War II era the appearance of perfunctory proceedings and reduce the image of justice being served.

Well, in the summer 2007, Congressman Peter DeFazio, on the Homeland Security Committee (and so with proper security access to be briefed on COG issues), inquired about continuity of government plans, and was refused access. Indeed, DeFazio told Congress that the entire Homeland Security Committee of the U.S. Congress has been denied access to the plans by the White House (video; or here is the transcript). The Homeland Security Committee has full clearance to view all information about COG plans. DeFazio concluded: "Maybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right”. Professor Scott's point that COG planning may have already superseded the Constitution can be summarized by making an analogy. Let's assume that the police are not supposed to seize and sell a suspect's house unless a court has held a full trial and found that person guilty of a certain offense. And let's say that the police seize and sell somebody's house, but that the suspect's relatives cannot find any record that there has been a trial, let alone a finding of guilt by the court. Let's say they go to the City Council (which is the local counterpart of the U.S. Congress -- that is, part of the legislative branch), and the City Council asks the police if the suspect was found guilty by the court. If the police refuse to even answer the City Council's question, that shows that the rule of law has broken down. In other words, whether or not there was a trial and a guilty verdict, the failure of the police to answer the question shows that the police (part of the executive branch) are acting outside of the law by failing to respect the separation of powers between the police and the City Council.

The process to find and fund a site for as many as six-hundred young men and women in Wilmington's inner city is underway. Curriculum choices for students, who are to be called Cadets, range from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) through prison guard, water rescue, paramedic, fireman, professional demolition and emergency response operator, according to a Board statement.

Remember that Continuity of Government plans -- that is, the measures that go into effect in case of emergency -- suspend the Constitutional form of government, cut elected officials out of the loop, and may even allow the government to tell the media what it can and cannot report. Remember also that the entire Homeland Security Committee of the U.S. Congress has been denied access to the government's Continuity of Government Plans even though it has clearance to view such plans (video; or here is the transcript). Indeed, a member of that Committee has said "Maybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right”.

Among those arrested were two recently-elected members of parliament, two officials with the MDC's information office and a freelance journalist who was talking to them, Makoni said.

The government plans to begin collecting DNA samples from anyone arrested by a federal law enforcement agency — a move intended to prevent violent crime but which also is raising concerns about the privacy of innocent people.

Dale Williams interviews Mike Rivero, webmaster of WhatReallyHappened.com. Most of the content on Mike's site has been banned by Digg. Why the censorship? Find out with this in-depth interview. H.R. 1955 - the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 and the Truth and Freedom Movements are just a few of the topics discussed.

It is easy to lose hope Or to have the fire of righteous anger doused by the dampness of fatigue Or to ease up on trying to fix things

Three rather unsettling news pieces from today, the anniversary of Dr. King's assassination . . . wow. 1) "Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear" . . . (Remember when the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was still in force?) 2) "The October 2001 memo arguing for unregulated military searches on U.S. soil has not been formally withdrawn and remains a secret but unclassified document." 3) 2003 Justice Department memo justifies torture, presidential dictatorship Thanks to Lori Price of Citizens for Legitimate Government for bringing these items to our attention. Almost seems important enough the corporate media would cover it, too, eh?!

Excuse me, Mr. Emperor, Sir, but ... You can stifle our voices in the short run. But all tyrannical governments eventually end, and the tyrants are eventually thrown in jail or forced to flee.

Witnesses say Chinese tanks and soldiers were out in force in capitol city of Lhasa following Friday's protests against the occupation.

The two MTV commercials below blatantly warn its viewers to wake up and start thinking about the direction our society is headed towards. These small warning chirps coming from the young canaries at MTV are a sign that the human spirit can break the tight grip of the corporate controlled media.

Although Pasdar has refused to name the carrier, and those working for the carrier who have knowledge of the Quantico Circuit's user aren't saying what they know, Wired's Threat Level blog connected the pieces and points us to the 2006 wiretapping lawsuit against the telcos, which alleges that Verizon "has engaged and maintained and still does maintain a high speed data transmission line from its wireless call center to a remote location in Quantico, Virginia, the site of a U.S. government intelligence and military base." The lawsuit also asserts that "the transmission line provided the Quantico recipient direct access to all content and all information concerning the origin and termination of telephone calls placed on the Verizon Wireless network as well as the actual content of calls." Providing any third party with unfettered network access to such a broad spectrum of sensitive consumer data would seem to constitute a very clear violation of the Communications Act, which broadly forbids disclosure of such information.

As doctors struggle to eradicate polio worldwide, one of their biggest problems is persuading parents to vaccinate their children. In Belgium, authorities are resorting to an extreme measure: prison sentences. Two sets of parents in Belgium were recently handed five month prison terms for failing to vaccinate their children against polio. Each parent was also fined 4,100 euros ($8,000). "It's a pretty extraordinary case," said Dr. Ross Upshur, director of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto. "The Belgians have a right to take some action against the parents, given the seriousness of polio, but the question is, is a prison sentence disproportionate?"

The mother was out of her car for just minutes and no more than 10 yards (9 metres) away. But that was long and far enough to land Treffly Coyne in court after a police officer spotted her sleeping 2-year-old daughter alone in the vehicle. Mrs Coyne had taken her two older daughters to pour £4 in coins into a Salvation Army collection box. Minutes later, she was under arrest - the focus of both a police investigation and a probe by the state's child welfare agency.

The FBI now keeps a list of over 900,000 names belonging to known or suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union said today. If that number is accurate, it would be an all-time high, exponentially more than the 100,000 names on the list several years ago. But the number needs to be taken with a grain of salt: after all, the ACLU doesn't keep the list, the FBI does, and the bureau doesn't generally like to talk about it. (Indeed, the FBI has not yet responded to a request for comment for this post.) But if the ACLU's figure isn't accurate, it's also unlikely to be off by that much. Last September, the ACLU notes, the Department of Justice's Inspector General reported the FBI watch list was at 700,000 names, and growing at 20,000 names per month. The ACLU says they "extrapolated" from those figures to determine the list's current size. ACLU's Barry Steinhardt added that the group had spoken privately with people familiar with the watch list, who told them the 900,000 figure was not outlandish.

A commenter on Joe Scarborough suggests putting 9-11 Truthers in secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Too expensive and inefficient; I suggest that the Secret Service bring Chinese-made guillotines to every Clinton event. We'd see an end to all this nonsense in about ten seconds.

In other words, the corporate behemoth MSNBC believes people who disagree with the government not only do not deserve First Amendment rights and protection, but also believe demonstrators should be kidnapped by the CIA and taken to a “special prison” to be tortured and ultimately killed, as this is the fate many who disappear suffer. Is it possible the United States is about to become like Pinochet’s Chile? In 1973, thanks to the CIA and U.S. corporations, Chile became a brutal police state. Chileans were subjected to systematic and massive violations of their most basic human rights. Official figures indicate that nearly 3,000 people were executed, disappeared or lost their lives as a result of torture and political violence. It would seem “Morning Joe” would enthusiastically welcome the installation of a fascist state where those he disagrees with are disappeared, tortured, and murdered.

Since taking office in 2001, President Bush has issued signing statements on more than 750 new laws, declaring that he has the power to set aside the laws when they conflict with his legal interpretation of the Constitution. The federal government is instructed to follow the statements when it enforces the laws. Here are 10 examples and the dates Bush signed them:

Col. Davis recounted a 2005 meeting with the Bush administration-appointed Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes, who now oversees the prosecutions and the defense for the tribunal process. Haynes said “We can't have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.”

From the American Protective League to InfraGard, it has been a long, tortuous road, one which ceaselessly destroyed liberty and individual rights. The ultimate destination has never changed: the installation of an unassailable, enormously privileged ruling elite -- which, no matter the cost in liberty or blood, will get what it wants. You need not despair, and you need not be paralyzed by depression. To change our direction, we must understand fully and completely how we arrived here, and we must appreciate just how dire our predicament is. And to change it, we need a great deal of courage.

Wells wrote the first edition of "The Open Conspiracy" in 1928. This book details what Wells called the "Open Conspiracy" among intellectual elites who despise the old order of things and desire to work towards a grand world directorate, a global society in which individuals no longer hold fast to tradition, but yield themselves willingly to the world state for the good of all. The Open Conspiracy utilizes propaganda, educational and governmental reform, and other forms of influence to achieve its goals. The scientific management of the world is at the heart of the open conspirators agenda. Of course, this tight management is sold as being for the benefit of all.

As we know, thousands of Americans are on the Federal Aviation Administration’s No-Fly List and the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center has compiled a terrorist watch list of over 700,000 people. Moreover, as Dave Lindorff writes, the government is in the business of passing this information out to private companies. “The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI made its list of people with even remote links to terrorism — having associated, perhaps inadvertently, with a terror suspect, for example — available to a wide range of private companies, from banks and rental-car companies to casinos.” And who exactly are these primary terrorists, the ones you don’t want to associate with, that is if you ever want to fly again? They are “law-abiding Americans” who were detained and questioned — we used to call this harassment — “based on their political viewpoints,” according to Nancy Chang, a senior litigation attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “I think what they are doing is harassing people who are opposing the war and publicly speaking out against administration policy,” John Dear, a Jesuit priest and member of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, told Lindorff. Back in 2003, we learned that the FBI “collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and … advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads,” the New York Times reported. Of course, this is simply a continuation of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, initiated in the 1960s to “neutralize” the opposition — i.e., render activists not only politically impotent, but often wreck their lives as well.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what the agenda is here. Just as we were told that there were reds under the bed during the cold war era, without the specter of potential terrorists running around our backyards, the war on terror itself and all the fearmongering attached to it is rendered impotent. So the new potential terrorists are our friends, our neighbors and even us - mandating that the whole police state apparatus that has been constructed since 9/11 be swung around to target the American and British people.

In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the "sheepish submissiveness" with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances "saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one's telephone would be tapped, one's letters opened, and one's desk might be broken into." But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here? In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the "cowardly treachery" of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was the Englishman who renewed the assault on liberty, which centuries of English reforms had created. Bentham believed that tyranny was no longer a problem, because people were empowered by democracy to control the government. He argued that any restraint placed on government’s powers would limit the ability of government to do good. To protect citizens from crime, Bentham favored preventive arrest of everyone whose social class, bone structure or other chosen indicator suggested a proclivity toward crime. "The greatest good for the greatest number." The Bush regime is comprised of modern day Benthamites. Their agenda is to overthrow the civil liberties that make law a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of the state. As anyone can be declared a suspect, the weapons that Bush would use to fight "the global war on terror" would soon be turned on the American people. Without habeas corpus, there is no liberty.

This well-crafted, well-documented film from Australia exposes the 2002 Bali Bombings as yet another case of False Flag Terror. Using a formula that has worked so well for the Loose Change crew, the filmmaker has crafted a very watchable piece that flows well, with interesting visuals, a soundtrack that moves from hip to emotionally engaging, and most importantly, and most damaging of all to the powers that be... the Truth.

1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it. 2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.

Am I a terrorist with exteme beliefs because I remember a time when Americans reached out to pull each other up for the betterment of us all? Am I a terrorist because I can still hear these historical speeches resounding in my mind, each time George Bush lies about WMDs? Am I a terrorist because I know the difference between a great leader and a shill? Well, if those be the determining factors, then yes, you will find my beliefs a bit extreme. I still believe in the America of King and Lincoln and Kennedy and even of Roosevelt. I believe we stand for more than just ‘our interests in the region” or some wall street guru on CNBC screaming and crying for the Federal Reserve to drop the Prime once again to bail out the investment class profit machines. So if that extreme belief system is what determines a ‘terrorist” in America these days then I will save you the time and effort; I am a terrorist.

So, What were they thinking? Why would more than 200 architects and engineers who are calling on Congress to hold an independent investigation as to what really happened to the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 get associated with islamic extremists? It has become painfully obvious that when Glenn Beck (a CNN host who recently said that Truthers were of the same ilk as Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh) and a Homeland Security subcommittee do a smear job on Truthers they are doing so not because they are violent, or because their ideas are helping to recruit terrorists, but because they are threatening to the whole "War on Terror" agenda -- an agenda foisted on us by the military industrial complex and their corporate sponsors.

As Ralph Nader describes it, Olver and the rest of Congress are afraid that -- if Bush or Cheney are impeached -- they might declare martial law and suspend the 2008 elections. How is Congress failing to remove Bush and Cheney from office based upon such fears any different from Neville Chamberlain trying to appease Hitler so Hitler would not attack?

The administration's demand that Congress shield the telecommunications industry from lawsuits for aiding in the systematic warrantless wiretapping of Americans has far less to do with protecting national security than its own exposed flanks. Make no mistake, telecom immunity is about keeping a flagrantly illegal program from public scrutiny and maintaining the illusion that the president ordered a small, precision surveillance program, when the opposite is true.

Under National Security Presidential Directive-51, only limited ‘National Essential Functions’ of government will continue, which may or may not include Congress and the courts. Can you think of anyone better than Bush with whom to entrust the dictatorial powers hinted at in NSPD-51? Or perhaps you are unwilling to trust anyone with such powers.

We have further exposed how the infrastructure for a martial law police state is already in place, and in many cases is in use. We have a whole archive on the revelations that FEMA has concentration camps set up and ready to go in the event of any emergency that is deemed suitable for their use. As we have also seen recently, these camps need not have barbed wire and observation towers, they can simply be well guarded sports stadiums. Detention centers are common features of any public protest event now, as we saw at the 2004 Republican National Convention and G8 protests. In May 2006, we also exposed the existence of a nationwide FEMA program which is training Pastors and other religious representatives to become secret police enforcers who teach their congregations to "obey the government" in preparation for the implementation of martial law, property and firearm seizures, mass vaccination programs and forced relocation.

Why don't they just come right out and say it? They view all Americans as terrorists . . . except, of course, the handful of sociopaths who support dictatorship.

Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office -- to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access -- via a cable splitting device. "My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room," said Klein. "And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room -- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet."

An American military lawyer and veteran of dozens of secret Guantanamo tribunals has made a devastating attack on the legal process for determining whether Guantanamo prisoners are "enemy combatants". The whistleblower, an army major inside the military court system which the United States has established at Guantanamo Bay, has described the detention of one prisoner, a hospital administrator from Sudan, as "unconscionable".

The long and the short of it was that an Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States. So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice. As I read the opinion I realized it was a 44 page epic, too long for me to print out. I blogged about the opinion while I read it online and then posted the blog as I ate lunch. Then something strange happened: a few minutes after I posted the blog, the opinion vanished from the Court of Appeals website! I had never seen this before, and what made all the more strange was that it involved a coerced confession over 9/11. What the hell was going on? I let some other legal bloggers know about this, particulary the How Appealing blog and Appellate Law and Practice. They both ran a commentary on the missing opinion. Then someone sent How Appealing a PDF of the decision (probably very few of them were floating around since the opinion was posted for a brief period of time) and How Appealing posted the decison. Then things got even stranger. The Court of Appeals actually phoned How Appealing to request that he remove the opinion from his website since it contained classified information. The Court said that a revised opinion would come out the next day without the classified information. How Appealing actually refused to remove the opinion. Through it all, hundreds of people came to my legal blog to see my summary of the opinion. It was either my blog or printing out and reading a 44 page epic. The next day, the Court of Appeals reissued the Higazy opinion. With a redaction. The court simply omitted from the revised decision facts about how the FBI agent extracted the false confession from Higazy. For some reason, this information is classified. Just as the opinion gets interesting, when we are about to learn how an FBI agent named Templeton squeezed the "truth" out of Higazy, the opinion reads at page 7: "This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced."

The Second Amendment Foundation today called the arrest of WPLG reporter Jeffrey Weinsier a “First Amendment outrage” that only subsequently focused on a concealed handgun he was carrying “simply to deflect public attention from the fact that Weinsier was arrested for doing his job.”

The definition of violent radicalization uses vague language to define this term of promoting any belief system that the government considers to be an extremist agenda. Since the bill doesn’t specifically define what an extremist belief system is, it is entirely up to the interpretation of the government. Considering how much the government has done to destroy the Constitution they could even define Ron Paul supporters as promoting an extremist belief system. Literally, the government according to this definition can define whatever they want as an extremist belief system. Essentially they have defined violent radicalization as thought crime. The definition as defined in the bill is shown below. `(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term `violent radicalization' means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change. The definition of homegrown terrorism uses equally vague language to further define thought crime. The bill includes the planned use of force or violence as homegrown terrorism which could be interpreted as thinking about using force or violence. Not only that but the definition is so vaguely defined, that petty crimes could even fall into the category of homegrown terrorism. The definition as defined in the bill is shown below.

Our President is an ignorant, egotistical jackass and our country is in shambles. Sometimes, as we sit in cozy coffee shops sipping on our lattes, we rail against this fact. We consider things like the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq and we wonder how those things came to be. We wrinkle our brows and ask ourselves if the basic premise of democracy is that majority rules, how is it possible that Bush is still in office even though almost every single person in this country hates his guts? Then we shrug our shoulders, pay our bills, and continue to live our lives under the guise of supposed ‘freedom’ while our sons and daughters die in a war that none of us (You know, the majority) want to be fighting. Standing before that deer this morning, I think I figured out exactly how all of this happened. Americans have gone soft. We have become completely and totally dependent on our government. We don’t know how to take care of ourselves. We’re whining, puling, stupid, weak willed little children wearing big kid clothes. We don’t understand real hardship because our big, strong government has shielded from it. And while this might sound like a good thing at first glance, we need to consider that our government is corrupt. What they give with one hand, they take away with another. So as our basic rights are slowly being whittled away, we remain complacent because deep down, we know we lack the basic survival skills that would enable us to hack it on our own.

Republicans joined with Democrats yesterday to offer Maher Arar something he has never received from the Bush administration – an apology for the U.S. role in wrongly detaining him, then sending him to Syria where he was tortured. More than five years after his nightmare began, Arar received the apologies from congressmen as far apart on the ideological spectrum as possible in Washington, even if they differed widely on the value and legality of the Bush administration's practice of "extraordinary rendition" of terror suspects.

Yes, it seems that recently, Walla's solo record (which has been scheduled to come out at various points over the past, well, four years) took another step toward oblivion when the master hard drive — containing all song files — was confiscated by Homeland Security at the Canadian border, for reasons not abundantly clear, and sent to the department's computer-forensics division for further inspection. If it sounds like a huge joke, Walla ensures you it isn't. "It's a true story. Barsuk [Records, which is putting out the record] had hired a courier — who does international stuff all the time and who they had used before — to bring [the album] back from Canada, where I was working on it. And he got to the border and he had all his paperwork and it was all cool, only they turned him away, and they confiscated the drive and gave it to the computer-forensics division of our Homeland Security-type people," sighed Walla, who has produced nearly all Death Cab's output, as well as records by the Decemberists, Hot Hot Heat, Nada Surf, Tegan and Sara and others. "And now I couldn't even venture a guess as to where it is, or what it's doing there. I mean, I can't just call their customer-service center and ask about my drive. There's nothing I can do. I don't know if we can hire an attorney ... is there a black-hole attorney? You can't take a black hole to court."

Josh was eventually allowed to leave but not before being cited for a misdemeanor and given a ticket. The comments section of the ticket reads "passing out 9-11 CD's," which is supposedly now a crime in police state America. Skoll's court date is to be set within the next few weeks. Skoll is not the first to be harassed and abused by police for handing out free information. In 2004, Kelly Rushing was charged with making "terroristic threats" after he handed out Alex Jones' videos and recordings of a Ron Paul speech on C-Span to Lyon County, Kentucky officials and Kentucky State Trooper Lewis Dobbs. A jury later ruled in favor of Rushing but he continues to be harassed by authorities and local law enforcement.

"A border crossing guard may have information readily available in his or her booth computer concerning a traveller's unpaid U.S. tax liabilities and may bar the traveller's entry into the United States," she writes in the latest edition of the Canadian Tax Foundation's publication Tax Highlights. In addition, anecdotal evidence suggests that Homeland Security agents are becoming more sophisticated about U.S. tax laws and may ask travellers with a green card or non-resident U.S. citizens whether they have been filing U.S. tax returns, she says. "Even if a non-U.S. passport is used at the U.S. point of entry, most countries' passports list the place of birth, allowing Homeland Security to easily identify a traveller who is a U.S. citizen by reason of his or her birth in the United States," she says.

In Boulder, two days ago, a rosy-cheeked thirtysomething mother of two small children, in soft yoga velours, started to tear up when she said to me: "I want to take action but I am so scared. I look at my kids and I am scared. How do you deal with fear? Is it safer for them if I act or stay quiet? I don't want to get on a list." In D.C., before that, a beefy, handsome civil servant, a government department head -- probably a Republican -- confides in a lowered voice that he is scared to sign the new ID requirement for all government employees, that exposes all his most personal information to the State -- but he is scared not to sign it: "If I don't, I lose my job, my house. It's like the German National ID card," he said quietly. This morning in Denver I talked for almost an hour to a brave, much-decorated high-level military man who is not only on the watch list for his criticism of the administration -- his family is now on the list. His elderly mother is on the list. His teenage son is on the list. He has flown many dangerous combat missions over the course of his military career, but his voice cracks when he talks about the possibility that he is exposing his children to harassment. Jim Spencer, a former columnist for the Denver Post who has been critical of the Bush administration, told me today that I could use his name: he is on the watch list. An attorney contacts me to say that she told her colleagues at the Justice Department not to torture a detainee; she says she then faced a criminal investigation, a professional referral, saw her emails deleted -- and now she is on the watch list. I was told last night that a leader of Code Pink, the anti-war women's action group, was refused entry to Canada. I hear from a tech guy who works for the airlines -- again, probably a Republican -- that once you are on the list you never get off. Someone else says that his friend opened his luggage to find a letter from the TSA saying that they did not appreciate his reading material. Before I go into the security lines, I find myself editing my possessions. In New York's LaGuardia, I reluctantly found myself putting a hardcover copy of Tara McKelvey's excellent Monstering, an expose of CIA interrogation practices, in a garbage can before I get in the security line; it is based on classified information. This morning at my hotel, before going to the sirport, I threw away a very nice black T-shirt that said "We Will Not be Silenced" -- with an Arabic translation -- that someone had given me, along with a copy of poems written by detainees at Guantanamo.

The boy wasn't charged with attempting to carry out an act of terrorism, or even plotting an act of terrorism. He was charged because he had a book. Obviously the wrong book. But a book, all the same. Philip K Dick's concept of pre-crime - arresting someone before they even attempt to break the law - is now a rock solid reality in the UK, the US and Australia, thanks to the vaguely defined sprawl of anti-terror laws.

So I checked the recording device and, accompanied by my lawyer, the indomitable Mary D. Dorman, made my way to Courtroom 18D, a stately room in the upper reaches of the building that houses the oldest district court in the nation. There, I met our legal nemesis, a city attorney whose official title is "assistant corporation counsel." After what might pass for a cordial greeting, he asked relatively politely whether I was going to except the city's monetary offer of $8,500 -- which I had rejected the previous week-- to settle my lawsuit for false arrest. As soon as I indicated I wouldn't (as I had from the moment the city started the bidding at $2,500), any hint of cordiality fled the room. Almost immediately, he was referring to me as a "criminal" -- declassified NYPD documents actually refer to me as a "perp." Soon, he launched into a bout of remarkable bluster, threatening lengthy depositions to waste my time and monetary penalties associated with court costs that would swallow my savings. Then, we were all directed to a small jury room off the main courtroom, where the city's attorney hauled out a threatening prop to bolster his act -- an imposingly gigantic file folder stuffed with reams of "Nick Turse" documents, including copies of some of my disreputable Tomdispatch articles as well as printouts of suspicious webpages from the American Empire Project -- the obviously criminal series that will be publishing my upcoming book, The Complex.

This is Bush America. You can voluntarily give up your civil liberties or voluntarily choose to lose your job. Those are your “choices.” Is this is what they mean when they say “get government off our backs?” Keep in mind that Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number 12 is NOT A LAW. Congress and the Supreme Court have had no say in it or in its implementation (covered under FIPS 201 (PDF)). It is a declaration made by Bush, not a law legislated by Congress. Let me ask you this: When the President of a nation can make a unilateral declaration that invalidates laws passed by Congress (e.g. the Privacy Act of 1974), laws passed by the States, and the Constitution itself, what do you have: a.) a democracy, b.) a republic, c.) a dictatorship. The answer is “c.” When laws and the Constitution are subservient to the directives of a single individual, it is a dictatorship. I am sorry. But I cannot interpret this in any other way. Call it a nascent dictatorship if you prefer. But we now have a system where a directive by a single individual takes precedence over law (Federal and State) and Constitution. THAT is about as un-American as you can get.

Psychologists tell us that rallying around the authoritarian leader is a very infantile way to affirm one's masculinity. Sometimes I wonder whether the guys who fall for this b.s. are trying to compensate for their lack of confidence as men. Testosterone levels in American men have, on average, been dropping for the last 20 years. Is that why so many men are following for the fascist dog-and-pony show now?

Beginning in February 2008, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will implement their ¨Advance Passenger Information System (APIS),¨ the gist of which is that you will need permission from the United States Government to travel on any air or sea vessel that goes to, from or through the U.S. The travel companies will not be able to issue a boarding pass until you are cleared by DHS. This applies to ALL passengers, US citizens and visitors alike. And how do you get said permission to travel? That´s for your government to know and you to never find out.

The Bush administration wants the power to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that are slapped with privacy suits for cooperating with the White House's controversial warrantless eavesdropping program. The authority would effectively shut down dozens of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies accused of helping set up the program.

While many would reject the idea of Bush as permanent dictator as offensive, unlikely, and absurd, this article echoes a document signed by President Bush himself, which would theoretically give him a dictatorship in the aftermath of a “Catastrophic Emergency”. The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive signed on May 9, 2007 reads: “’Catastrophic Emergency’ means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions… The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government.”

Obviously, that result was the desired outcome all along, and Taco Bell employee Padilla was just a poor sap they used as a tool. (Remember all the “dirty bomb” fear-mongering that went away because they couldn’t gin up the vaguest of evidence? Of course you do.)

But hey, if torturing someone till they love the person who threw them in jail; if taking years to bring someone to trial; if making someone so paranoid that they won't cooperate in their own defense counts as "the system working", then the American justice system is sure a model system. I'm sure next time some American is tortured overseas; is denied a timely trial; is so delusional after years in prison that he can't cooperate properly with his defense attorneys, that those who are declaring victory now will nod and smile and talk about how wonderful the justice system is operating overseas - about how American ideas of justice, civil and human rights are spreading. Sorry, I'm stepping off the spin machine. It's making me so nauseous that if I stay on one more second I'm going to puke.

The sheer abhorrence of the diatribe could lead many to think that this was some kind of attempt at black humor, a faux article written by a liberal intended as a parody to ridicule right-wingers, but it's not, it's real - this is what many of the Neo-Cons actually embrace. To the kind of people who think like this, carrying out a 9/11 style attack is like a walk in the park.

Well, during my time with him, some of his reasoning seemed somewhat impaired, some of his thinking seemed impaired, his memory certainly, his ability to pay attention seemed very impaired. I developed a differential diagnosis from this: severe anxiety. Post-traumatic stress disorder can do that. But also, we know from really basic neuroscience studies that extreme isolation for prolonged periods of time -- and I’m talking, you know, the studies are on maybe days or weeks, and he had extreme isolation for years -- really do, in fact, impair higher brain function. And I recommended that we get some neuropsychological testing. And, unfortunately, he wasn't able to fully cooperate with that. However, the testing we did do was consistent with brain damage, yes.

Journalist Horacio Verbitsky recently published a book on the Catholic Church's involvement with the military dictatorship. In his book, El Silencio (The Silence), he reports that the Catholic Church actively participated in the 1976-1983 dictatorship while having full knowledge of the human rights violations being committed at the time.

In May 2006, we exposed the existence of a nationwide FEMA program which is training Pastors and other religious representatives to become secret police enforcers who teach their congregations to "obey the government" in preparation for the implementation of martial law, property and firearm seizures, mass vaccination programs and forced relocation. A whistleblower who was secretly enrolled into the program told us that the feds were clandestinely recruiting religious leaders to help implement Homeland Security directives in anticipation of a potential bio-terrorist attack, any natural disaster or a nationally declared emergency.

Two senior Justice Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in a teleconference with reporters, reiterated the administration's position that it was invoking the so-called "state secrets privilege" in arguing that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals must dismiss the cases because they threaten to expose information authorities say is essential to the nation's security.

The top ten advances towards tyranny in the United States during the tenure of the Bush administration, from the Patriot Act to the latest expansion of the illegal eavesdropping surveillance program.

I wish more people in this country would really revere the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment and the Eighth Amendment. But Cheney and Bush themselves are intolerant of the freedoms that are enshrined in our Bill of Rights. In my book, “You Have No Rights,” I tell the story of a guy named Steve Howards who was walking through Beaver Creek, Colo., an open-air mall there. Of all people, Dick Cheney is there, shaking hands. And Steve Howards goes up to the vice president, about three feet away, and says, “Mr. Vice President, I think your policy in Iraq is reprehensible.” ... And then he walked away. But the Secret Service approached him 10 minutes later and said, “Did you assault the vice president of the United States?” Steve Howards said, “No, I was just expressing my First Amendment rights.” And they responded, “No, you assaulted the vice president of the United States. You’re under arrest.”

The Bush administration used the events of 9/11 to launch an unnecessary war, curtail the rights of Americans, torture, illegally spy, and violate the Constitution. The right-wing can’t wait for “another 9/11? so they can take it to the next level.

While the American people faced these three crises – the Great Depression, the communist threat, and the war on terrorism at three separate times, the German people during the Hitler regime faced the same three crises all within a short span of time. Given that, why would it surprise anyone that many Germans would gravitate toward the support of their government just as many Americans gravitated toward the support of their government during each of those crises? Even Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans eagerly joined the Hitler Youth when they were in high school. In the ever-growing crisis environment of the 1930s, millions of other ordinary Germans also came to support their government, enthusiastically cheering their leaders, supporting their policies, and sending their children into national service and looking the other way when the government became abusive. Among the few who resisted were Robert and Magdalena Scholl, the parents of Hans and Sophie, who gradually opened the minds of their children to the truth.

It is time to think about the “unthinkable.” The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.

Talk-show host, Hal Turner, has reported receiving a leaked copy of a "Top Secret" U.S. military document stating that massive citizen unrest in now inevitable and that it plans to deal with American dissidents as insurgents. The tactics are to be the same as used against "insurgents" in U.S occupied countries in the Middle East. I cannot vouch for the validity of this document but I can say that it has the sound of truth. It is exactly the kind of startegic planning one would expect from a government with a rising tide of unrest from its citizens. We are providing a link to Hal Turner's report because we believe that the document probably is authentic, and Americans need to know what may be coming down the pike in the near future.

Well, what else would make this picture complete? Have you guessed it yet? I know I thought I had seen it all until just yesterday. As I sat down at my computer I opened an email from a friend who shares my love of politics and, from time to time, emails job postings from various government departments and agencies, this time it was the White House internship program. As I clicked the link and waited for the page to load I took a sip of my coffee and then choked and spit the hot coffee all over the desk as the words leapt off the screen and pounded my eyeballs… “Thank you for your interest in SERVING PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH”

The report makes reference to London's surveillance network, known as the "Ring of Steel," which is said to have aided in the capture of suspects, including those accused of a pair of attempted car bombings in June. What it does not report however is that in addition to London being the most surveilled city in the world with 4 million cameras, it also has an extremely high crime rate. A recent report highlighted that despite one 650-yard section of a major London road being surveilled by over 100 cameras, it is also one of the most crime rid

Whereas history presents numerous examples of governments manufacturing incidents to further agendas of war and expanded executive power; We call upon the United States Congress and the governments of the fifty states, in the name of their constituents, to advise the administration that any terrorist incident within the United States will be promptly, fully, and independently investigated, with the constitutional system of checks-and-balances and states rights remaining fully in force; and further urge the repeal of the provisions of the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act which enable the President to deploy United States forces anywhere in the country for domestic policing purposes without the consent of state or local authorities; and that the questions persisting around the attacks of September 11, 2001 which the 9/11 Commission left unexamined be made the subject of a full and independent investigation.

I have stopped wasting much of my hard earned time on educating the general public and have focused it on the Police. Police are the weakest link in the New World Order's plans at total domination. Without anyone to enforce tyranny, they have no tyranny.

While NSPD 51 has the appearances of a domestic national security decision, it is, nonetheless, an integral part of US foreign policy. It belongs to a longstanding military national security agenda. Were NSPD 51 to be invoked, Vice President Dick Cheney, who constitutes the real power behind the Executive, would essentially assume de facto dictatorial powers, circumventing both the US Congress and the Judiciary, while continuing to use President George W. Bush as a proxy figurehead.

While the Department of Homeland security is throwing money at cities and towns to put cameras everywhere to film the public, and police routinely film public gatherings, the right of citizens to film and photograph in the streets is under direct attack. In addition, the Mayor of New York is Michael Bloomberg, who owns one of the biggest media outlets in the country. This move also therefore represents a direct conflict of interest on behalf of the mayor's office.

Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.” As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President's position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President's staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President's executive order.

"What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part. The episode was a defining moment in Cheney's tenure as the 46th vice president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but devoid of formal authority. "Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.

It's just one of those obscure little unreported-upon conspiracy theory-ready hunks of floating White House detritus, a couple of odd, sticky, foul-smelling documents no one really wants to touch and no one knows quite what to make of, probably means nothing, probably being misread anyway, all a bit overblown and strange and not all that important and not all that different than the way things are now. Unless, you know, it's not. Unless the violent twinge of queasy paranoia crossed with that uncontrolled bout of colon-clenching sighing you experience is deadly accurate and your radar for all things sinister and Rovean is right on target as you read about the delightfully titled National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 and the Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20, wherein it is calmly and furtively revealed that, in essence, George W. Bush owns your sorry ass.

Whelp folks, I hate to be the pallbearer at our country's funeral, but I am here to inform you, in case you missed it on Fox News, that the apparatus for martial law is being quietly, but steadily, implemented. If one has been paying attention to the laws that are getting passed over the last few years we can see the telltale signs that we are getting closer and closer to such a scenario. Not only is this government setting up the legal framework for martial law, but they are also setting up the policing apparatus and infrastructure to carry it out. I will get into the latter two issues in this three part series, but first, let's look at the legal framework for setting up martial law in this country.

One can easily see how the concept of the "noble lie" fits neatly into the neoconservative scheme of things, and the run-up to the Iraq war is surely a textbook example of the Straussian method in action: an enlightened elite deceives the public into an action that must be taken, after all, for their own good. In this case, we were lied into invading and occupying Iraq, for reasons that had nothing to do with "weapons of mass destruction" and Saddam's alleged links to al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, both of which the promulgators knew to be lies, and yet reiterated ceaselessly.

If Padilla is convicted by the jury, the judge will likely sentence him to serve much of the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary for having conspired to violate federal criminal laws against terrorism. On the other hand, if Padilla is acquitted, the U.S. military is likely to exercise its post-9/11-acquired power to declare Americans (and foreigners) “enemy combatants” in the war on terror and throw Padilla back into a military dungeon. That is where he was before the government, as part of a clever legal maneuver that was obviously designed to avoid Supreme Court review of Padilla’s request for habeas-corpus relief, converted him from an “enemy combatant” in the war on terror to a federal-court criminal defendant charged with violating federal terrorism laws. While the military, of course, could decline to exercise its power to retake Padilla into custody after an acquittal by the jury, that course of action is unlikely given the government’s repeated assertion that Padilla is one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists.

Abby Newman was arrested for not showing ID in August 2000 and fell victim to an illegal vehicle search in which police found items of subversive literature, including a "pocket Constitution." One officer asked the other "Is this legal?" (Case in point, where the very society of freedom is violated by the system that regulates that society.) But that has become all too common in the new American police state. A Christian group in Philadelphia was arrested in 2004 and charged with counts of criminal conspiracy, ethnic intimidation and riot for "praying, singing and reading scripture during an annual 'gay pride' event. Of course, the question here is not one of Christianity vs. homosexuality, but the criminal prosecution of free speech. The eroding inherent right threatens the freedom of Christians, homosexuals, pink-and-polka dotted people, and other groups who were previously guaranteed protection of their voices - whether right or wrong, embarrassing, hateful or supportive, blasphemous, sinful or true. An attorney in Portland, Oregon was falsely arrested under anti-terrorism laws shortly after the 2004 Madrid bombings.

Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons.

As I wrote earlier this year, "The regulation of the personal habit of smoking, including new legislative moves in San Francisco to ban cigarettes in private homes, and its enforcement by an eager cadre of state snoops and snitches, represents nothing more than a move on behalf of big brother towards the complete subjugation and shackling of the individual." Read these shocking parallels and compare them to the endless lecturing we are forced to endure today about our personal lifestyle choices by the state and their propaganda arm, the mass media.

It only took a few paragraphs in a $500 billion, 591-page bill to raze one of the most important limits on federal power. Congress passed the Insurrection Act in 1807 to severely restrict the president’s ability to deploy the military within the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 tightened these restrictions, imposing a two-year prison sentence on anyone who used the military within the U.S. without the express permission of Congress. But there is a loophole: Posse Comitatus is waived if the president invokes the Insurrection Act. Section 1076 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 changed the name of the key provision in the statute book from “Insurrection Act” to “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.” The Insurrection Act of 1807 stated that the president could deploy troops within the United States only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The new law expands the list to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition”—and such “condition” is not defined or limited.

Fear begets fear and dulls rationality. Under fear's influence, the autonomic nervous system shifts into fight-or-flight mode. Perhaps this either-or response clarifies the bipartisanship of laboring freedom fighters and the willingly deceived. The former empower themselves with knowledge. The latter, so fearful of annihilating reassuring illusions, continue to defend the crimes of their pseudo-conservative leaders, and in so doing, stave off the anxieties which would surely accompany enlightenment. So desperate to believe in an imaginary benevolent Big Brother, We the People unknowingly and sometimes willingly turn a deaf ear to the truth, choosing instead to believe a lie. We lull ourselves into complacency or forced submission. We allow fear to breed a culture of silent ignorance and unthinking loyalty by which dictatorial regimes are allowed to flourish.

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

The lesson that we should have learned from Waco is that we have a right, indeed a duty, to be suspicious and distrustful of our government. For generations, this suspicion was a uniquely American quality. However, during World War II and then the Cold War, Americans began to trust their government. As with totalitarian regimes, American politicians recognized the benefits of having foreign enemies, even imaginary ones. People band behind their government, seeking protection from the enemy. We now live with that legacy.

Accused al-Qaida agent Jose Padilla could be thrown back in a military brig even if he's acquitted or gets a light sentence in his civilian criminal trial beginning this week, experts say. All President Bush would have to do is sign papers again branding him an "enemy combatant," and Padilla would be back behind bars. Bush did that in 2002, when the Brooklyn-born terror suspect was stripped of his constitutional rights and held in a Navy jail for three years without charges. "There is nothing stopping the president from doing it," said Gary Solis, a former Marine prosecutor who teaches law at Georgetown University. "If he were acquitted, he's not necessarily going anywhere." And if Padilla is returned to military custody, he could be held indefinitely until the end of the war on terror, Solis said.

In Grants Pass, Ore., at the Daily Courier, and at the Texas Sun, down in Texas City, journalists Dan Guthrie and Tom Gutting — separated by about 30 years in age but not at all by their conviction — were thinking: Where was Bush? Where was the presence that the nation craved in that terrible aftermath, but wasn't getting? As Guthrie wrote: "He didn't storm back to the capital and lead us through our darkest hour…. He skedaddled" to one Air Force base, then another. Guthrie praised New York firefighters and the passengers aboard United Flight 93 as "the heroes of this rotten week." As for Bush, Guthrie wrote: "We're praying for him." That was after he used, fatally, the word "cowardice." Hundreds of miles away, Gutting, who'd been a newspaperman since he was an Indiana teenager, was writing what turned out to be his last column. He praised Rudy Giuliani's decision to be "highly visible." He lambasted Bush: "It's time we snapped out of the 'support our president' trance and start to be vigilant citizens, as our Constitution demands." Well. The reaction didn't stop with the men's firings. An Alaskan fisherman professed a wish to use Guthrie for crab bait. In Texas, Gutting became, as the more colorful threats went, "a man who needed killin'."

As shown above, the cards are stacked against 9/11 truth being covered by the media. But we have the ability to outsmart the bad guys. We can "be the media" ourselves. We can be the movie-makers, the commentators, the reporters and writers. A thousand voices are louder than one voice with a megaphone. We cannot leave governance to our "leaders", as "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" (Jefferson). Similarly, we cannot leave news to the corporate media.

In the wake of the tragic shooting massacre in Virginia this week gun control advocates have once again come crawling out of the woodwork to capitalize on the ill informed and automated response of blaming the destructiveness of a mentally ill person's rampage on the second amendment.

This report does an excellent job of illustrating how US authorities try to censor and suppress those who challenge the official theory of 9/11 and seek to educate their fellow citizens about the truth regarding those events. While some of the footage provided below was shot in locations as prominent as the WTC site in Lower Manhattan or even in front of the New York Times Building itself you most likely will not read about this in any mainstream publication in the US. The reason for that is a policy of self-censorship to which most of the media sources adhere. However, whether they cover it or not, the 9/11 Truth Movement is here to stay - and, hopefully, win.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul has warned that the US is now at a crisis point because the people have been so neglectful of protecting their liberties and big government has been so effective in eroding them. He warned that the elite are prepared to concoct events to scare the American people and asserted that the 2008 Presidential election is a contest between the people who care about their freedoms and those who are willing to succumb to the temptations of dictatorship.

When inquiring with a clerk why he was on the list, Murphy was asked if he had participated in any peace marches. "We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," a clerk said. Murphy then explained that he had not marched, but had "in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution." The clerk responded, "That'll do it."

And by voting on bills whose content they do not know the Representatives have effectively abbrogated their responsibilities. And at this point we need to either disband the Congress and stop wasting taxpayer dollars on paying those who deliberately sabotage their work - or we need to see a Congress that absolutely demands that its authority be respected.

What kind of American isn't just instinctively repulsed by the notion that the President has the power to imprison Americans with no charges? And what does it say about the current state of our political culture that one of the two political parties has all but adopted as a plank in its platform a view of presidential powers and the federal government that is -- literally -- the exact opposite of what this country is?

In the below, I provide massive amounts of documentation wherein the U.S. government itself admits it is holding innocent people indefinitely without charges (including children and U.S. citizens), torturing them, raping them--including homosexually anally raping them--and murdering them, and that the orders to do so came from the highest levels of the U.S. government.

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.

They said primary school pupil, George, was being investigated for a 'very serious' homophobic crime after using the comment in an e-mail to a 10-year-old classmate. But now his parents have hit out at the police, who they accused of being heavy-handed and pandering to political correctness.

Why would Crawford secretly circumvent the prosecutors and the judge and negotiate a deal with Hicks’ attorneys behind their backs? After all, isn’t negotiating a plea bargain the job of the prosecutors? Isn’t it the judge’s job to determine whether a plea bargain should be accepted as fair and just? Not in the Hicks case. The deal that Crawford struck with Hicks’ attorneys was final and binding on the prosecutors, the judge, and the military tribunal. Even more unusual were the actual terms of the deal. After the Pentagon had repeatedly said that Hicks was one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists, Crawford agreed to a 7-year sentence, all but 9 months of which will be suspended. That means that after all the hullabaloo about how dangerous and evil Hicks is, he only has to serve 9 months in jail, and he gets to serve them all in his home country of Australia.

Our 18th-century American ancestors would have found Judge Cooke’s ruling to be ludicrous. If a military department of government is exempt from the restrictions of the Bill of Rights, then the entire executive branch is exempt for the obvious reason: Whenever the government wants to exempt itself from the Bill of Rights, all it has to do is employ the military to do the dirty deed. The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect the American people from the federal government, not a particular department of the federal government.

Another Billionaire, Marco Ceglie, told the Times, “It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old males asking, ‘First name, last name?’ …. Some people didn’t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn’t want to make a big stink because we didn’t want to look paranoid."

The Ningbo Municipal Intermediate Court has sentenced freelance writer Li Hong (whose real name is Zhang Jianhong) to six years imprisonment for "inciting subversion against the state." China's state-run Xinhua News Agency released news of this case on the day he was sentenced, March 19. Li's wife, a cousin, and a friend were present in the courtroom during sentencing. The entire session lasted only 20 minutes. Li and his defense attorney, Li Jianqiang, were not given any opportunity to respond to the sentence, but Li indicated that he was going to appeal.

The government is doing everything it can to prevent the American people from learning what the U.S. military did to Padilla during his three years of pre-trial confinement. In fact, U.S. officials are doing the same thing with respect to “enemy combatants” that the CIA has been holding for years in its secret overseas prisons. They say the prisoners should not be permitted to reveal what the CIA has done to them because to do so would threaten “national security.” Meanwhile, the American people are walking through all this with an ambivalent numbness. Frightened after 9/11 over the prospect that “the terrorists” were coming to get them, many Americans were either silent or supportive when U.S. officials assumed the most powerful dictatorial tool possible — the power to arbitrarily take people into custody, torture them, and even execute them after a kangaroo proceeding. What never occurred to many Americans was that the military would have the authority to exercise this dictatorial power on them.

The reports don’t tell us what the cops knew nor how much they shared. We’ll assume very little. Let’s say they told the TSA only that Tom, an associate of the guy "detained," was still aboard the flight and so was his unspecified contraband. The TSA’s drama queens figure another 9/11 is imminent every time a pilot sneezes or passengers whisper. The mysterious "contraband" must have jangled all their alarms. At the very least, we might expect them to divert the flight for an emergency landing. Perhaps they’d even notify the White House so it could authorize fighter jets to shoot down – sorry, protect the flight. The TSA did neither. Instead, it ordered "authorities" in San Juan to search not just Tom but everyone aboard once the flight landed.

About 100 opposition legislators – almost 1/4 of Egypt's parliament – have walked out in protest over Pres. Hosni Mubarak's proposed constitutional amendments. Mubarak says the “anti-terror” measures are to stress citizenship over religion or ethnicity. But rights groups call the proposals, giving security forces power to detain suspects and restrict public meetings, the "greatest erosion of the people's rights in 26 years" for allowing surveillance of private communications and the presidential bypass of ordinary courts for accused terrorists.

But Gonzales is not just a self-serving political hack. He’s also an ideological hack. Like Cheney, he’s done everything within his power, and a lot of things outside it, to further the agenda of the imperial Presidency, whether that included Bush’s right to violate the “quaint” Geneva Conventions, or to engage in “extraordinary renditions,” or to illegally wiretap U.S. citizens.

John McKay says White House didn't like his handling of disputed election.

What explains Bush-Cheney invulnerability to accountability? Perhaps the answer is that Bush has desensitized us. Like kids desensitized to violence by violent video games and movies and pornography addicts desensitized to sex, we have become desensitized by the avalanche of Bush-Cheney crimes, lies, and disdain for Congress, courts, and public opinion. Our elected representatives, if not the American people, now regard as normal such heinous actions as war crimes, the rape of the Constitution, self-serving use of government office, and the constant stream of lies and propaganda from the highest offices of the executive branch.

Let’s examine this “Islamo-fascism” rationale for a conservative foreign policy and determine whether it is worth abandoning liberty for, whether it misdiagnoses the root causes of anger and hatred toward the United States, and whether it actually is just an excuse to continue the big-government policy in foreign affairs long favored by conservatives.

I have also said that the prescription for the black body politic is radical surgery. So, too, now, I believe, is the case with the American body politic. The extreme corruption of our political system by the greedy, unseen hand that comfortably operates in the backrooms of power is turning our heroes into caricatures of themselves. Why can't we know the truth about 9/11 and this war on terror? Why can't we immediately repeal the Secret Evidence Law, the Patriot Act, and the Military Tribunals Act? Why can't we get back that 2.3 trillion dollars Rumsfeld admits is missing and use it to fully fund education and health care and infrastructure?

Given the seriousness of Ms. Edmonds’ reports and in the best interests of the security of the country, it is incumbent upon the Congress to exercise its oversight responsibilities and authority as representatives of the people of the United States, therefore: We, the undersigned, now call upon the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in Congress to hold public hearings into the case of FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, and the erroneous use of the State Secrets Privilege to shut down all court proceedings in her case.

No previous American law has been as subversive as the Military Commissions Act of 2006

Far from being an individual tragedy, the death of Ivan Safronov will be seen by many as part of a grim trend. The Kommersant reporter is at least the 20th Russian journalist to die in suspicious circumstances since 2000, when Vladimir Putin assumed the Russian presidency. Shot, stabbed or poisoned, the journalists have two things in common: no one has been convicted, or in most cases even arrested, after their deaths. And all of them had angered powerful vested interests which appear to suffer little restraint in dealing with their enemies.

This week saw the mysterious death of yet another journalist in Moscow. This time it was Kommersant columnist Ivan Safronov, a former colonel who wrote about Russia's ever-murky military affairs, as the Moscow Times reports. Safronov, who occasionally ran afoul of the "security organs" when digging up dirt on Russia's military-industrial complex (much akin to its American counterpart centered in the north Virginia badlands formerly known as Hell's Bottom but now called the Pentagon), apparently committed suicide by jumping out of a fifth-floor window, head first, with his hat and coat on. And if you believe that "official" explanation, we have some beachfront property in Nizhny Novgorod we'd like to sell you.

It might be tempting for people to avoid confronting these critical issues head-on by convincing themselves that there really isn’t any great danger to the American people by this post–9/11 assumption of omnipotent military power over the citizenry. There is no need to overreact to the assumption of such power, people might think. Let’s just wait and see how things develop. If it looks like the power is being abused, we can then do something about it. There are big problems, however, with that wait-and-see attitude. One problem is that if circumstances present themselves in which the military is rounding up American “terrorists” and torturing and executing them, the environment of crisis and fear will inevitably silence the populace. In other words, it will be too late to protest because it will be too dangerous to protest. Another problem is that by the time any protests proved to be effective, lots of Americans will have already been tortured and executed.

If we were to attempt a genuine discussion of the Bush regime, one might formulate the main issues as these: Is the regime legitimate? After all, it took office by what millions recognize was a stolen election enabled by a corrupt Supreme Court and the president's brother's political machine in Florida.

Let me emphasize something important here, especially for libertarians, who have long committed their lives to the achievement of a free society: There is no way — none — to reconcile the assumption of this power with a free society. In fact, it is the most powerful government power of all — the ultimate power that can ever be wielded by a tyrannical government. No infringement on economic liberty — hyperinflation, confiscatory taxation, oppressive regulation, or the like — can compare in significance with the omnipotent power of a government official to arbitrarily pick up anyone he wants for any reason he wants and incarcerate him, torture him, and execute him.

Let me repeat: the Military Commissions Act destroys the ultimate foundation of liberty, and it transforms the great evil of torture into a State-sanctioned means for treating those designated as enemies of the State by the executive and those who do his bidding, on any basis they choose or on no basis at all.

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Tuesday that evidence will remain sealed in the class-action lawsuit accusing AT&T of collaborating with the government to illegally spy on Americans’ communications.

The explicit aim of these terrorists was to provoke the state, not to fight it. They wanted the police state to fight. Not to fight the feeble force the RAF represented in her wildest days, but to crack down on the average man. The RAF intended to create a brutish police state in order to force the German public to revolt and follow their lead into a socialist revolution, where the RAF leaders would be able to lead the German people into a socialist terror state the way Lavrentii Beriia and Joseph Stalin would have approved of – with the RAF terrorists as benevolent dictators and leaders. They were denounced as Anarchists, fighting the state, but in reality, they were serving as excuses to create a police state Heinrich Himmler would have been proud of. With the RAF as an excuse, laws could be passed, which would have caused the press to cry bloody murder and which would have made many – classical – liberals piss blood. Instead, they all fell in line and applauded to laws which would have been blatantly unconstitutional, if the Grundgesetz, which had been in a bad constitution already, had not been altered in time in order to give these laws a "constitutional" foundation.

The Omar case teaches a different lesson. It teaches that the rule of law -- even in times of war -- strengthens national security without handicapping the military. It teaches James Madison's understanding in Federalist 48: "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others."

Another example: the latest version of the USA PATRIOT Act permits lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice to wiretap business executives in the name of “investigating” antitrust accusations. Since any firm is vulnerable at any time to antitrust “violations,” given the broad nature of antitrust law, it is safe to say that any executive at any time can assume that his telephone may be tapped, in the name of the “war on terrorism.”

Whatever you may think of 9/11, and the extent of involvement of Bush&Co., it's crystal-clear that the events of that tragic day were and continue to be used as an excuse for a wide variety of immoral and illegal actions by the CheneyBush Administration. The radical agenda that was barely on the public's horizon five years ago has since become all too evident, both domestically and in terms of foreign/military policy, which is why so many traditional conservatives are abandoning the extremism of the Republican Party.

One group, aside from dark-skinned people and Muslims, targeted by the internal checkpoints, are students and other young people. Persons under 18 cannot cross a U.S. border alone, unless they are with a guardian and have notarized letters from a parent, as well as a passport issued in their own name. Persons between 18 and 21 may be questioned about their intention to engage in behavior (sex or drinking or marijuana use) strongly penalized in the U.S., but either decriminalized or lightly punished in Canada. Up until three years ago, unaccompanied persons over 16 were seldom checked--and longer ago, even younger persons could travel alone or with a non-parental adult. Student groups, including bus tour groups, now report very close scrutiny from the U.S. Exit police. Some bus companies now refuse to take groups of students under 21 across U.S. borders because of hassles they face. Gone are the days when an 18 or over driver could skit across from Burlington to Montreal with a car-full of late-teens hoping to taste the more liberal morals up north.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.) That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.

The regulation of the personal habit of smoking, including new legislative moves in San Francisco to ban cigarettes in private homes, and its enforcement by an eager cadre of state snoops and snitches, represents nothing more than a move on behalf of big brother towards the complete subjugation and shackling of the individual. To this end, smoking is healthier than fascism.

National Security Letters have their origin in the 1970s as exceptions to laws that bar companies from divulging their customers' data. After 9/11 and the passage of the USA Patriot Act, their use greatly expanded. These letters — which government agencies can use to demand or request information about people's phone, credit and banking records — have a number of troubling features. Chief among them are that they can be issued without judicial review and that their recipients are subject to a gag order.

Under the claim that terrorism is a ubiquitous threat, the military has embroidered an unwarranted and dangerously expansive view of its own authority. The New York Times found that administrative subpoenas known as national security letters, which are issued internally with no court review, have been used since 9/11 to collect financial information in up to 500 investigations. Which means that thousands of such letters have probably been issued for personal banking and credit data. The military says all this is okay because the letters it issues are noncompulsory. You know, all those banks volunteered their customers' private information.

The ultimate goal of the paramilitary assault teams, many of whose numbers across the country will be boosted when troops arrive back from Iraq, is mass gun confiscation on the scale that we saw during Hurricane Katrina, where everyone from 80-year-old grandmothers to rich mansion owners in the dry areas had their weapons seized. Soldiers in Iraq have been trained to carry out door to door raids and have been utilized for this function thousands of times. Alex Jones has attended numerous military urban warfare training drills across the U.S. where role players were used to simulate arresting American citizens, confiscating their weapons, and taking them to internment camps. Actors scream out that they have constitutional rights as they are handcuffed and hauled off to the detainment facility.

So what kind of "threats" does the military consider worthy of investigating? How about the Quakers or the Rhode Island Community Coalition for Peace? A new report by the American Civil Liberties Union documents nearly 200 incidents where the Pentagon accumulated and maintained in its "threat" database the activities of peace groups in the United States. The Defense Department has said it was a mistake to keep tabs on the plans of nonviolent protesters. Still, the ACLU had to sue to compel the department to disclose the extent of what it had done.

Gonzales is about as serious about protecting the U.S. Bill of Rights as the Soviets of the old USSR were about protecting the rights of citizens there. No, scratch that. Gonzales is worse than the Soviets and the Chinese. The Chinese and the Soviets at least said the rights existed, even if they regularly violated them. Gonzales denies their existence. Moreover, agents of the Soviet state bear less moral culpability because they feared for their own lives and safety if they didn’t violate the rights of citizens. Gonzales has no such pressure on him to violate our rights.

Journalists possess the same instincts as claims adjusters and Broeckers writes early in the book about the visceral gnawing that disturbed him about the official account being disseminated through the mainstream media about 9/11. What makes Broeckers' work so unique is that it is presented in diary form. He explains that his work initially appeared on the German website telepolis. The reader therefore observes the author's mind at work at various stages of analysis, from his initial gnawing of intellectual discomfort to the conclusions he draws at the end of the work as he stresses the necessity for ongoing investigation of an ongoing tragedy begging for some kind of ultimate resolution.

Citizens often mistakenly believe that because the grand jury meets at the courthouse it is under the judiciary or because the grand jury meets with a prosecutor it is under the executive branch. It is actually an independent institution adopted by the founders to protect the individual from prosecutorial misconduct. In the early 20th century a grand jury used their power to investigate and indict the mayor of Minneapolis and force the police chief to resign. Under the leadership of foreman Hovey C. Clarke, the Minneapolis grand jurors paid private detectives out of their own pockets to investigate corrupt officials. When the county prosecutor refused to do his duty, Clarke dismissed him and took over the role of prosecutor. Much has changed in last 100 years.

“This is the most dangerous legislation ever to come before Congress,” warns Rev. Ted Pike. “It leads directly to an end of free speech. Once free speech is gone, there is little to prevent the loss of all our other freedoms. The new Democrat-controlled Congress has all the votes it needs to quickly run this Orwellian bill through committee in the House and Senate and pass it.”

Over objections from all 50 governors, Congress in October changed the 200-year-old Insurrection Act to empower the hand of the president in future stateside emergencies. In a letter to Congress, the governors called the change "a dramatic expansion of federal authority during natural disasters that could cause confusion in the command-and-control of the National Guard and interfere with states' ability to respond to natural disasters within their borders."

"As a result of these orders, any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," Gonzales wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. "Accordingly, under these circumstances, the President has determined not to reauthorize the Terrorist Surveillance Program when the current authorization expires," the attorney general wrote.

“We want to determine whether he understands the inherent limits that make an unelected judiciary inferior to Congress or the president in making policy judgments,” Gonzales says in the prepared speech. “That, for example, a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national security interests of our country.”

The closest analogy in the human world for what the Bush administration has become is probably something like a tremendously huge infant. Like an infant, the Bush administration can’t be reasoned with and seems out of touch with what is going on in the big picture. And like a tremendously huge infant, the Bush administration is possessed of an enormous amount of destructive potential. And as it slowly dawns on people that there’s this incredibly huge infant running amok among us, people are bewildered because we’ve never experienced anything like this before in our lives and have nothing to compare it to in our imaginations. And so it seems impossible and crazy. And we don’t quite know what to make of it all.

The family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent man who was gunned down by British police in the wake of the London bombings, has today accused the BBC of aiding a cover up after plans to film a politically sensitive docu-drama about his murder were unceremoniously dropped. The filiming of a docu-drama about the 7/7 London bombers has also been suddenly abandoned.

America’s wars have created hysteria that endanger our freedom. Abraham Lincoln shut down the freedom of the press and arrested editors and state legislators. Woodrow Wilson arrested war critics. Franklin Roosevelt interred American citizens of Japanese descent. George W. Bush has destroyed most of the Bill of Rights. In 2006 Congress appropriated funds for building concentration camps in the US.

There's an aspiring totalitarianism in Britain which is brilliantly disguised. It's disguised because the would-be dictators - and there are many of them - all pretend to be more tolerant than thou. They hide alongside the anti-racists, the anti-homophobes and anti-sexists. But what they are really against is something very different. They - call them secular fundamentalists - are anti-God, and what they really want is the eradication of religion, and all believers, from the face of the earth.

Powerful, potentially planet-altering trends like this do not occur in a vacuum. The rise of Energo-fascism can be traced to two overarching phenomena: an imminent collision between energy demand and energy supplies, and the historic migration of the center of gravity of planetary energy output from the global north to the global south.

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn't really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

The Bush Administration, having trouble winning its detainee cases in court, is now trying to tar and feather the lawyers for the detainees. And it is asking corporate America to boycott law firms that defend the detainees.

"The endless Iraq war is decreasingly about Iraq and increasingly about the U.S. Constitution. ... [Bush's decision to escalate the war] is based on his flawed and dangerous theory of the "unitary presidency," a theory under which, once war is declared, the president as commander in chief can ignore constitutional checks and balances, disregard the bill of rights, suspend accountability, and concentrate dictatorial power in his own hands." --Former Senator and Presidential candidate Gary Hart, HuffingtonPost, 1/9/07

"Do you believe as Commander in Chief you have the authority to put the troops in there no matter what the Congress wants to do," 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley asks Bush in the short clip uploaded to the CBS News web site Friday night. "I think I've got, in this situation, I do, yeah," Bush said.

I've gotten lots of reports from right-wing sources about detention centers being set up on remote military bases. I can never tell what to believe and what not to believe from such sources, so I don't post much of it. Here we have an official document, from an Army website, describing the establishment and management of such centers, apparently on a wide-scale basis.

While the HR 1 bill contains some welcome provisions, including a redress of grievance process for passengers unfairly delayed or refused boarding for flights and a re-commitment to the Geneva conventions, it's largely a nightmare for opponents of big government in that it vastly increases funding and scope for Homeland Security, FEMA and further federalizes law enforcement.

Suspicions will undoubtedly be cast as to whether the facility in Tyler is part of a wider agenda to set up a network of internment camps that will be used to forcibly detain American citizens under emergency provisions. The pretext for this was set in the summer of 2004, when thousands of protesters in New York for the Republican National Convention were forcibly detained, some for over 24 hours, without charge in an asbestos infested disused bus facility known as Pier 57, or "Guantanamo on the Hudson" as other labeled it.

Noted author Webster Tarpley will be making a special presentation examining the current political party realignment currently taking place in America and whether this transition will take us toward a new progressive phase or a more fascist and draconian society. Mr. Tarpley will also address the war and impending collapse of US forces in Iraq, the dollar collapse, the mounting evidence of 9-11 crimes, and the dangers of another "terrorist" attack.

I am usually opposed to civil disobedience, and have in the past inveighed – I believe that's the proper word – against it. Yet we no longer have much choice. The U.S. cannot pursue the course it's on much longer without some pretty awful consequences, the least of which would be a complete meltdown in Iraq and the regionalization of the war. The domestic consequences of this war – and of the so-called war on terrorism – are bearing down with such weight on the already fragile structure of our constitutional form of government, that we are in danger of being crushed, along with the hopeful vision of the Founders. We must act, just as Cindy Sheehan and her brave cohorts did recently when they interrupted the Democratic self-love-fest and refocused attention on the most important issue of them all: the war. And, no, hearings conducted by John Murtha don't fit the bill: if they won't cut off the funding for the war, then it's time they were cut off from their pleasant lives and illusions of impregnable insularity. Radical measures are called for. The time for talk is over: you can't reason with these people, and I've given up trying. The time for action is now. Not inchoate rage, or violence, but focused anger, aimed with laser-like intensity at the root and source of all our problems – the seat of the Empire.

A 12-year-old special education student in Montour County was charged with disorderly conduct after authorities said she deliberately wet her pants at school.

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned. The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

Targeting young children for the words they say and the behavior they exhibit is a reflection of a control freak society gone overboard. In a recent article we highlighted several cases where kindergarten kids as young as five were having sexual harassment "offences" placed on file for pinching another child's bottom.

"It will be a miracle if there isn't a terror attack over the holidays in London," a senior American law enforcement official told ABCNews.com on December 21st. By that logic, the fact that a terror attack did not happen proves one of two things - that miracles really do happen in the modern world or governments are lying to us about terrorism in order to scare populations into accepting the deliberately engineered drift towards authoritarianism. Which do you think it is?

What I hope has been gained in the dark hours of 2006 was an understanding of the preciousness of liberty and our democratic institutions. At the beginning of the year, I was astonished how little MPs understood about so many measures passed by their own house. Knowledge of the Inquiries Act or the Civil Contingencies Act, both of which reduce parliamentary scrutiny, was hard to come by. No more than one in 10 MPs could have told you how, using the Courts Act together with the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act, the government swept away a 400-year-old common law, which guaranteed that an Englishman's home was his castle and that no bailiff could break in to collect civil debts. That kind of ignorance among legislators is not nearly so common now. Labour MPs are beginning to see that many of the laws passed in the last nine years persecute those who are least able to defend themselves, the very people that Labour has traditionally championed.

It seems Gallagher, the 6th most listened-to radio talk show host in the United States, currently tied with Neal Boortz, who tells his listeners Rep. Cynthia McKinney “looks like a ghetto slut,” at about 3,750,000 listeners, is clueless when it comes to natural rights, George Mason’s 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, the 1689 English Bill of Rights, and the bedrock philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment, all increasingly under attack. Gallagher, and no shortage of other “conservatives,” in essence authoritarian thugs, including Newt Gingrich, who has called for the First Amendment be struck, lest the “terrorists” use the internet and attack us, are routinely provided with substantial airtime to push their fascistic ideas, especially over at the unitary decider network, Fox News, where the Führer Principle (Führerprinzip) is on display 24/7.

Francis A Boyle says 9/11 was allowed to happen, war on terror is facilitating the downfall of The Republic, concentration camps are in place and US citizens are the targets.

Logic aside, he has offered at least one example of how he would apply his new set of speech standards. He believes that the six Muslim scholars who were removed from a plane in Minneapolis last month for such suspicious behavior as praying in the airport "should have been arrested and prosecuted for pretending to be terrorists." That ridiculous assertion could only have thrilled the leadership of Al Qaeda. Nothing they can ever put on a Web site or videotape will be nearly as effective in encouraging young Muslims to hate America and reject freedom as Mr. Gingrich's cloddish demagogy.

The camps housed more than 120,000 Japanese-American U.S. citizens and residents under an executive order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, when the country still was in shock over the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, there were fears that Japanese-Americans were loyal to Japan, and Roosevelt's order prohibited such people from living on the West Coast in a position possibly to help an invasion force.

Nothing emphasizes the decline of America into an authoritarian police state more than the treatment of children as possible enemies, deviants or criminals. A few cases, involving very young children, have caught our attention this month that indicate in the current climate any sniff of power is corrupting absolutely those who believe they have it.

So we have a government that will have the right to strip American people of their citizenship, we have current internment camps being restored and pristine new ones being built, and we have a lapdog media not questioning this but instead asserting that anyone who does question it should be thrown into the camps. What was that about Hitler again?

Flux was not arrested, nor did he receive a receipt for seized property. Without any warning, he was jumped by two police officers, one of whom is an NYPD captain, and knocked down onto the asphalt of 39th Street. A police officer then snatched the camera out of Flux's hands. As Flux attempted to protect himself and his equipment from being trampled and beaten, the cop with the camera conferred with another officer and scurried back into the building to hide the camera.

“This provision was drafted without consultation or input from governors,” said the Aug. 6 letter signed by every member of the National Governors Association, “and represents an unprecedented shift in authority from governors . . .to the federal government.” “We urge you,” they said, “to drop provisions that would usurp governors’ authority over the National Guard during emergencies from the conference agreement on the National Defense Authorization Act.”

Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's death robbed his victims and their families of the chance to obtain full justice. But they can still pursue the full truth. And the U.S. government can help. In 1999, the Clinton administration took a major step in the right direction by declassifying more than 16,000 secret government documents related to Chile. At the time, Pinochet was under British custody, pending a Spanish extradition request. Although the Brits eventually released him on medical grounds, their arrest of the ironclad dictator had cracked his armor, and human-rights activists pushed harder than ever to end his impunity.

Innocent men such as Mahar Arar, from Canada, and Khaled el-Masri, from Germany, were lucky to be released from this archipelago of secret prisons, but have had no apology or compensation, nor seen any hint of charges being brought against those responsible for their kidnapping and torture. But, like Pinochet's victims, they will not give up the fight for justice. Few tears were shed at news of Pinochet's death, which came, aptly enough, on International Human Rights Day. But the near unanimous condemnation of his US-sponsored crimes loses its moral weight if not accompanied by an equally vociferous denunciation of the similar abuses being perpetrated today.

The MCA is “enabling act” legislation that preserves the appearance of law while empowering the commander in chief to do as he pleases. Bush’s torture policies may signal that he accepts the dicta of Richard Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” But the firewall of high approval ratings that buttressed Bush when the first Abu Ghraib photos leaked is gone. The media is exasperated with the administration’s penchant for secrecy. Much of Bush’s conservative intellectual bodyguard has given up the fight. It remains to be seen how much dunking, thumping, and cold water the Bush team can survive.

The rules state that the detainees will have the right to cross-examine witnesses, but that can be hard when the government doesn't bother to call any witnesses. Not a single government witness was brought forth in any of the hearings the researchers reviewed. Instead, in over half the cases, the U.S. government relied solely on classified evidence that was presumed to be valid. It was evidence that the detainee never got to see or rebut. And even when the government relied on unclassified evidence, the detainees were largely barred from seeing it. In 96 percent of cases, the detainee, who had no lawyer, had to present a defense without hearing any facts upon which his enemy combatant designation was based, beyond a conclusory summary. These men must have thought they were in Stalin's Russia or Mao's re-education camps rather than an American judicial proceeding. Defending yourself without being allowed to see the evidence against you is a neat trick.

Pinochet took power on Sept. 11, 1973, demanding an unconditional surrender from President Salvador Allende as warplanes bombed the presidential palace in downtown Santiago. Instead, Allende committed suicide with a submachine gun he had received as a gift from Fidel Castro. As the mustachioed Pinochet crushed dissent during his 1973-90 rule, he left little doubt about who was in charge. "Not a leaf moves in this country if I'm not moving it," he once said.

What we are therefore seeing today, then, is not the enactment of law to protect us. On the contrary, at face value, the state is manipulating and abusing the process of law in order to systematically erode, deface and ultimately eliminate the rule of law entirely. And in its place, what is being established is the ability of the state to consolidate policies of social control, to control and intervene in the life of the public at will, with impunity, and without accountability. For now, we can call this process, a process of totalization.

One of the last acts of Congress was to send President Bush a bill that establishes a $38 million program of National Park Service grants to preserve Japanese POW internment camps in Hawaii, California, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho. Is this really in the name of historical interest or does it dovetail with programs on the books to intern hundreds of thousands of dissidents in a time of crisis?

Gingrich's latest attempt to chill dissent in America relies on fraudulent claims and biased sources to present an argument that terrorists are hiding behind the First Amendment in order to recruit for jihad. It echoes similar rhetoric contained in the White House's own strategy document for "winning the war on terror," which identifies conspiracy theorists as terrorist wellsprings.

We regularly highlight Google's damaging role in aiding the march towards a big brother society, but the admission that Google were planning on teaming up with the U.S. government to use microphones in the computers of an estimated 150 million-plus Internet active Americans to spy on their lifestyle choices and build psychological profiles which will be used for surveillance and minority report style invasive advertising and data mining, astounded even us.

The excuse for this heinous treatment of a U.S. citizen is the same as that given for an entire orgy of despicable treatment of prisoners held in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and a gulag archipelago of secret military facilities around the world: Our enemies, all linked through sophistry to the 9/11 terror attacks, are so vile and dangerous that the limitations on government power enshrined in our guiding documents and political culture no longer apply. Once the Twin Towers were knocked down, supposedly, we could no longer afford to be “nice guys”—as if the rule of law is an indulgence of only the most secure nations. By that standard, any tyrant can justify the cruelest of actions by citing enemies, real or imagined, be it King George III blockading Boston Harbor to teach the rebellious colonists a lesson or Saddam Hussein killing Kurdish villagers after an assassination attempt on his life. The very uniqueness of our national experiment was the checks and balances put upon the government to prevent such convenient rationalizations for abuse of the individual. The Founding Fathers won a war, but their true contribution to human history was to tackle head-on the reality that humans and their institutions can so easily become that which they despise.

This is the "Director's Final Cut" authorized version of Aaron Russo's documentary, America: Freedom To Fascism (AFTF). It is being uploaded to Google Video for the first time during the evening of October 19-20th, 2006. Aaron has listened to everyone's feedback - volunteers, students, lovers of freedom & liberty, young and old alike - and, true to his word, he is putting this up "for free" on Google Video knowing that the hour has come for Americans to either be awakened to restore the Republic or be swept aside by the dark global forces of fascism that seeks to enslave mankind.

I suspect history will judge this as one of the great (non-)events of the American experience, and one of the great (non-)turning points of the last two centuries, equally significant, though far less prominent, than many actual events and actual turning points. What happened and why, is, therefore, a question of no small importance to ponder. Why did the Cheney/Rove juggernaut travel half-way down the road to American fascism, only to pull up short? Why, in short, did they flinch?

Another good story from Raw Story. Its not directly related to what happened on 9/11, but it is certainly intertwined, as false flag attacks are carried out partly as an excuse to clamp down on civil liberties.

Speaking at an award dinner billed as a tribute to crusaders for the First Amendment, Mr. Gingrich, who is considering a run for the White House in 2008, painted an ominous picture of the dangers facing America. "This is a serious, long-term war," the former speaker said, according an audio excerpt of his remarks made available yesterday by his office. "Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people."

Should Brits be a little concerned that a branch of their police is wearing insignia that wouldn't look out of place in 1930's Nazi Germany? Allied to the fascist policies that have all but ended every fundamental freedom in the country under the stewardship of Tony Blair, it seems this is just the natural progression for the proto-dictatorship, where you are completely free so long as you don't exercise any of your freedoms.

As documented by Reporters Without Borders and by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Asne) in letters to Colin Powell and Tom Ridge, cases such as mine are part of a systemic policy of harassing media representatives from 27 friendly countries whose citizens - not journalists! - can travel to the US without a visa, for 90 days. According to Asne, this policy "could lead to a degradation of the atmosphere of mutual trust that has traditionally been extended professional journalists in these nations". Asne requested that the state department put pressure on customs and immigration to "repair the injustice that has been visited upon our colleagues". Someone must have listened, because the press office at the department of homeland security recently issued a memo announcing that, although the I-visa is still needed (and I've just received mine), new guidelines now give the "Port Directors leeway when it comes to allowing journalists to enter the US who are clearly no threat to our security". Well, fine, but doesn't that imply some journalists are a threat? Maybe we are. During my surreal interlude at LAX, I told the officer taking my fingerprints that I would be writing about it all. "No doubt," he snorted. "And anything you'll write won't be the truth."

See, central planners in the government know better than you do what are good uses of your time. It's communism lite. It's the two-years-of-your-life plan. Big Brother will tell you what types of work are worthy and unworthy. Want to work in a hospital for little or no pay? OK! Want to work at your uncle's hardware store for a fair wage instead? Or at your dad's veterinary clinic? Not OK.

The actions of this veterans organization have not gone unnoticed at the Pentagon. A previously secret intelligence report calls the group a "threat to military installations." The report lists the group's upcoming events and warns that while it's a "peaceful organization," "there is potential that future protests could become violent." "As to attacking any base or anything else, that is ridiculous," says Veterans for Peace group member Ron Dexter. "We support the troops one hundred percent."

American liberties are the result of an 800-year struggle by the English people to make law a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of government. For centuries English-speaking peoples have understood that governments cannot be trusted with unaccountable power. If the Founding Fathers believed it was necessary to tie down a very weak and limited central government with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, these protections are certainly more necessary now that our government has grown in size, scope, and power beyond the imagination of the Founding Fathers. But, alas, "law-and-order conservatives" have been brainwashed for decades that civil liberties are unnecessary interferences with the ability of police to protect us from criminals. Americans have forgot that we need protection from government more than we need protection from criminals. Once we cut down civil liberty so that police may better pursue criminals and terrorists, where do we stand when government turns on us?

Just when you thought the Orwellian Big Brother society couldn't possibly accelerate further, it gets even worse. A move is afoot to force 245 million drivers in America to have alcohol breathalyzers fitted in their vehicles, ignition interlocks that prevent the vehicle from being started by an inebriant.

A horror video that wouldn't look out of place in Maoist China or Nazi Germany shows a student being repeatedly shot with a stun gun by UCLA police for the crime of not showing his ID. As similar cases begin to pile up how long will it be before Americans are routinely tortured for noncompliance and refusing to have their 4th amendment violated?

The majority of what I outlined is already being implemented at major transport and police hubs in the US and Britain. When the technology to automate these measures is more widely used, its cost will drop and in turn spread like wildfire outside of the major cities and into local communities - unless we scream bloody murder and stop it before it makes it out of the airport terminal and onto our street corners and we all end up being categorized as suspects along with the "nuzzling terrorists".

This denial of reality by Mr. Hayden is a pristine example of doublespeak -- as when White House press secretary Tony Snow said on Oct. 27: "We don't torture, we don't condone torture, we don't do torture." We have heard the same indignant protestations from President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney (who acknowledges wryly that he has been described as "the vice president for torture" as he dismissed such nonsense). With regard to future likelihood of torture, the Republican-controlled Congress -- in passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- has given the president considerable leeway in deciding what forms of interrogation are not war crimes under our War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions.

Ron Paul's comments echo those of Former World Bank Vice President, Chief Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, who two weeks ago predicted a global economic crash within 24 months - unless the current downturn is successfully managed. Asked if the situation was being properly handled Stiglitz emphatically responded "no," and also drew ominous parallels to the development of the NAFTA Superhighway and the North American Union.

These charges potentially eviscerate the primary function of journalism—to gather and publicize information of public concern—particularly where the most vulnerable information to the public . . . is what the government wants to conceal. —Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, with which this Voice columnist is affiliated.

Tonight I stood in the cold evening displaying a sign on a public sidewalk which stated "Real Christians Don't Choose War" in front of my school, Colorado Christian University. On the other side of the parking lot in front oft he North entrance stood my wife and another friend Eliott Nesch with similar signs. Elliot preached on the corner about the injustice of war. Six o'clock was nearing so I handed off my signs and headed inside to class. A still tension filled the air. I sat in my seat and watched as two administrators pulled my instructor from the classroom. Moments later they walked back in, stood in front of my seat and told me to gather my supplies and leave the classroom. Silence. The introductions continued and the instructor skipped over me and pretended an injustice was not occurring before her eyes.

We'll be cleaning up Bush's mess long after his scheduled abdication on January 20, 2009. But the trillions of dollars in national debt he has run up and his two losing wars will drain our economy for decades to come. We've provoked a new generation of terrorists. Yet even more damaging and nearly impossible to unravel will be the threats to Americans posed by the neofascist national security apparatus the Bushists will leave behind--unless they use it to remain in power.

Also remember that the worst depredations of the first Bush Administration, the Reagan Administration and the Nixon Administration were all carried out with strong Democratic majorities in Congress (except for a brief period of Republican Senate control in the Reagan years). Even in "normal" times (if we have ever known such a thing), even with the opposition party in control of Congress, there is virtually no end to the mischief that the executive branch can get up to. Nixon and Reagan waged whole covert wars, killing hundreds of thousands of people, without the approval or input of Congress. If anyone thinks the horrors of the Bush Imperium are somehow at an end – or will even be seriously impaired – by the results of yesterday's election, they have a harsh and bitter awakening to come.

The 10 year-old Steiner Ranch Elementary student-- in Leander I.S.D. near Austin, Texas-- says that he was browsing such sites during his Computer Lab class period when a fellow student informed on him-- as though he were doing something wrong... The student was sent to the Principal's office to face disciplinary measures. Steiner Ranch Elementary Assistant Principal Amy Moore was reportedly surprised that the school's IP filters hadn't blocked the sites.

So, what do you think? Have things gone too far? If so, then we might as well all just stay home and watch TV today, because voting is pointless. If not, then we all need to get up and go vote like we never have voted before. Ok, say you think we should vote ... then for whom? For anybody except an incumbent, that's who. If it comes to choosing between a Republican non-incumbent and a Democrat non-incumbent, choose the Democrat simply to make a statement about what these reprehensible hypocrites and parasites have done to our beloved America. If everybody simply voted against incumbency, then the results would be too overwhelming for even those standing ready to rig the close contests. Even so, it will make little difference, I suppose. Only those carefully vetted and ready to take a turn at the trough are allowed onto the ballots.

Current practices already represent a severe restriction on the right to travel. The "no-fly list" dates back to 1990, but Patriot Act I created a new agency, the Transportation Security Administration, that was charged with creating and maintaining a list of people who were not allowed to board airplanes. The list was reported to have contained around 1,000 names by the end of 2001 of people strictly forbidden to fly plus a second longer list of "selectees" who were to be called out of line and subjected to closer searches and intense questioning before they were allowed to board. Many American politcal activists reported that they were on the "selectee" list. These lists of names were provided to airlines who were charged with the task of separating out listed passengers and notifying authorities. In December, 2005, a Swedish airline leaked that the list had grown from 1,000 to over 80,000. The new procedure will completely eliminate the opportunity for the public to find out how many people are on the list. No airline or cruise company will ever receive a "no-fly" or "selectee" list. Instead of providing a passenger manifest after departure as now required by the Customs and Border Patrol, airlines, cruise lines and other public carriers will have to provide a provisional pasenger list prior to departure. This list will be checked against a Homeland Security list of citizens approved for international travel, and the carrier will be ordered not to board those who are not approved.

The Bush Junta has quietly "tooled up" to utilize the U.S. military in engaging American dissidents after the next big crisis, with a frightening and overlooked piece of legislation that was passed alongside the Military Commissions Act, which greases the skids for armed confrontation and abolishes posse comitatus.

From time to time, certain people in the U.S. also find themselves tossed into special kinds of detention facilities. For example, during the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, protesters (and also bystanders) swept up in indiscriminate mass arrests or illegal acts of preemptive incarceration were temporarily locked up in "Marine and Aviation Pier 57," a filthy facility of razor-wire topped chain-link cages that was soon dubbed "Guantanamo on the Hudson." While being imprisoned in New York City's own Gitmo didn't begin to compare to being tossed in the real McCoy or any other secret offshore site, there was one striking similarity. U.S. intelligence officials estimated that 70-90% of prisoners detained in Iraq "had been arrested by mistake." That was also 2004. The next year, it was revealed that, of the large majority of RNC arrest cases that had run their course, 91% of the arrests were dismissed or ended in acquittals. On the American prison planet, not only has the principle of habeas corpus been formally abolished and torture proudly added to the mix, but that crucial tenet of the legal system, the presumption of innocence, has been cast aside. Whether at home or abroad, the solution for U.S. security forces is a simple one, identify the likely suspects, conduct sweeps, and preemptively lock them up.

We will continue to see armed men terrorize our children, aim guns at their head and indoctrinate them to accept living under tyranny unless parents and teacher organizations band together to file huge lawsuits against those responsible and we vehemently denounce the insidious Sovietization of the public school system.

The new program is simply another wing of the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence, publicly announced after 9/11 but simply the latest incarnation of a PR brainwashing scam that spans back decades. The OSI exploited legal loopholes by planting its propaganda in foreign newspapers that would later be picked up by U.S. newswires. In today's environment even that seems quaint, with the Pentagon openly and proudly shouting from the rooftops that they will knowingly violate the law to indoctrinate the American people.

The concept of habeas corpus actually dates back about 700 years, to the 14th Century. Seriously. And now, this concept has been eliminated. The judge is no longer needed, as today's note from the Bush-Cheney administration reminds us. So under this new law, people can be held for years -- for life, forever -- without a trial. Today they use this law to deny any shred of due process to prisoners on Guantanamo. But the law could be used against anyone. I weep for what's left of America. And really, I don't know what is left, except a pretty flag that once stood for something.

President Bush seized this unprecedented power on the very same day that he signed the equally odious Military Commissions Act of 2006. In a sense, the two laws complement one another. One allows for torture and detention abroad, while the other seeks to enforce acquiescence at home, preparing to order the military onto the streets of America. Remember, the term for putting an area under military law enforcement control is precise; the term is "martial law."

Besides objecting to Congress's list of qualifications for FEMA's director, the White House also claimed the right to edit or withhold reports to Congress by a watchdog agency within the Department of Homeland Security that is responsible for protecting Americans' personal privacy.

Ordinary people in Syria are hunkering down, and probably rightly so, said Omar Amiralay, a well-known Syrian filmmaker whose documentaries are quietly critical of Assad's one-family rule. "If democracy brings such chaos in the region, and especially the destruction of society, as it did in Iraq and in Lebanon, it's absolutely normal, and I think it's absolutely a wise position from the people to be afraid to imagine how it would be in Syria," Amiralay said. "I think that people at the end said, 'Well, it is better to keep this government. We know them, and we don't want to go to this civil war, and to live this apocalyptic image of change, with civil war and sectarianism and blood.' "

Mueller points out that not only have there been no terrorist incidents here in the past five years, but there were none in the five years before 9/11. Mueller asks: "If it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could be so easily exploited?" He also bolsters Dreyfuss's conclusion that the Bush administration can't take credit for the fact that we haven't been attacked again. He says, "the government's protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that explanation seems far-fetched."

A coordinated effort to downplay the implications of the fact that the bill affects American citizens, in the face of extensive coverage on the part of Keith Olbermann, is underway in an attempt to offset the possible repeal of this draconian legislation.

In our current climate of Orange and Red Alerts, paranoia, "You're either with Us or with the terrorists" rhetoric, and the indictments of journalists and lawyers for so-called treasonous behavior, it is not too far a stretch to imagine that American citizens who dare to speak out against the Bush regime could be labelled as "enemy combatants." If habeas corpus can be tossed aside, can free speech be far behind? These are questions we need to start asking ourselves.

On the night of June 30 and Sunday July 1, 1934, Hitler ordered potential political rivals in the Sturmabteilung massacred. Stalin had his Great Purge and “river of blood,” culminating in the assassination of Trotsky. Invariably, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, unable to withstand even minor disagreement, take out not only the opposition, but allies who may, however tenuously, become the opposition of tomorrow. Bill O’Reilly should take note.

“Given the power granted to the office of the presidency and the unaccountability of the intelligence agencies, widespread illegal domestic operations are certain. We as a people should remember history and not repeat it,” writes Verne Lyon, a former CIA undercover operative.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 sets standards for interrogating suspects, but through a complex set of rules that human rights groups say could allow harsh techniques bordering on torture, such as sleep deprivation and induced hypothermia. With Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales looking on, Bush is to sign the bill which was negotiated in September after senior Republicans rebelled against the president's plan and forced concessions from him.

The arrogance of the Neo-Cons has led many to fear that HR 6166 is being maintained in a holding position in anticipation of a major event that will give the Bush administration carte blanche to expand its provisions and sharpen its focus to further target American citizens.

The official story of 9/11 is on artificial life support. The only thing keeping it alive is the the illusion that those who question it and are demanding the truth are in the minority. The latest scientific poll could be the final nail in the coffin of the official MSM propelled 9/11 propaganda.

In legalese resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein’s penal code, the Iraqi government has criminalized criticism and even ridicule of the government or any of its officials. Ridiculing is defined as exposing corruption or questioning the actions of government officials. Iraq's new government considers itself to be so democratic that dissent is unnecessary - so they've outlawed it!

Just as no single rollback led marked the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, no event is individually responsible for America's shocking five-year transformation from beacon of freedom to autocratic torture state. It wasn't just letting Bush get away with his 2000 coup d'état. It wasn't just us standing by as he deliberately allowed his family friend Osama bin Laden to escape, or as he invaded Afghanistan, or as he built the concentration camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere, or even Iraq. It was all of those things collectively. The Military Commissions Act signals that our traditional system of beliefs and government has irrevocably devolved into moral bankruptcy. Memo to Senator McCain: You don't negotiate with terrorists, and you don't compromise with torturers.

For six years, the American public was carefully and skillfully distracted by bogus fears and overblown villains foisted on the nation by neocons and empire seekers. They were so expertly manipulated that they failed to be terrified of the criminal power brokers and the complicit media they should have feared the most.

While the names and crimes of the detainees are classified to protect the interests of national security, a clue as to some of their identities could be gleaned by means of a stroll though major government offices around the country. Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices, for example, failed to show up for work, as did approximately 220 congressmen, 52 senators and a number of governors and presiding justices of district and appellate courts. The vast majority of absentees, coincidentally, were Republicans, in particular those congressional Republicans who had voted for the impeachment of former president Bill Clinton.

Americans might feel comforted by the fact that the president and the Congress limited the removal of habeas corpus to foreign citizens and did not apply it to Americans. If so, they know little about the history of government oppression. Once people accede to the cancellation of judicial protections for “other people” — a grave wrong in and of itself — it is just a matter of time before the cancellation is extended to include them. After all, American officials would argue at the height of a new crisis, what is the difference between a foreign terrorist and an American terrorist? Shouldn’t they be treated the same? Aren’t they equally dangerous? Of course the suspension of habeas corpus should be extended to American terrorists, the argument would go. After all, aren’t American terrorists also traitors?

Bush’s postsigning statement declared that he would interpret many sections of the new law “in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.” In plain English, this means that many of the limits that Congress imposed on Bush’s power — and that he accepted when he took the money Congress appropriated — are null and void. Why? Because the president says so.

Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of Bush's "unlawful enemy combatants." Americans are certain to be among them.

That headline -- America cancelled -- sounds like hyperbole, like crazy talk, like tinfoil hat time. But it is absolutely 100% true: The White House can declare any U.S. citizen an enemy combatant. And they can hold any enemy combatant indefinitely, without trial, without any court oversight, indefinitely.

It is said we can do the same, we can change things with five or six percent. Of course, this is delusional nonsense, for as Pogo said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” It is not the British redcoats knocking down our doors, seizing our liberty, our birthright, but our neighbors. It is not a rapacious king stealing our wealth, but “duly elected officials,” fellow countrymen all who are selling us down the river toward fascism and the new feudalism. If the Brits had electronic eavesdropping, cellphones and computers and the ability to monitor them, if they employed the NSA, and spooks in the CIA, FBI, and the DIA, they may have stood a chance, even with twenty or thirty percent or more opposed to them. If the Brits had converted the colonies into a massive Panopticon, conveying a “sentiment of an invisible omniscience,” they may have stood a chance. If they managed to plug the vast majority of their subjects into the electronic Borg Hive of television and corporatized media, thus mesmerizing and brainwashing them en masse, the Fourth of July would be simply another day in the seventh month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar.

One of the measure's worst aspects is that it hands the president the discretion to interpret the Geneva Conventions relative to prisoner treatment. By preventing the courts from ruling on cases involving breaches of Common Article 3 of the Conventions, Congress is effectively giving the president unilateral authority over interrogations beyond some explicitly prohibited acts.

Finally, the Folly of the Foley pervert scandal indicates danger immediately ahead. Between now and the midterm election a mere month away, the neocon Republicans may pull a bloody rabbit out of their hat, lest they go down in flames to the neocon Democrats. Is it possible the Bush neocons will adjust the schedule and shift their shock and awe campaign against Iran into high gear? In order to be effective, such may necessitate a “homegrown” terrorist attack, complete with an exercise of the newly spawned detainee bill and the disappearance of malcontents into the nightmarish maw of Ministry of Homeland Security “detention camps,” freshly constructed by Halliburton-KBR.

This is basically a mandate for the government to snatch your kid - all for the horribly abusive act of arriving 5 minutes late to pick them up from a mandatory extra curricular class that you have been given just 24 hours notice of.

The disgraceful Military Commissions Act and the building of domestic internment camps are yet more examples of blowback from the administration's so-called war on terror, and we ignore these increasing assaults on our civil liberties at our own peril.

"It is startling enough that such things could be said out loud by any President at any time in this nation's history," Olbermann said. "Rhetorically, it is about an inch short of Mr. Bush accusing Democratic leaders, Democrats, the majority of Americans who disagree with his policies, of treason."

And so – even after the Iraq war, and the destruction of New Orleans, and the spying and torture scandals, and the vote fraud, and 9/11 and all of the other false flag attacks carried out by by the government over the years - I am willing to pledge my allegiance to the United States of America. Because - as sick and twisted and amoral as she may have become in recent years - I still hold out hope that we may again decide to get back to the great work at hand, the “grand experiment” of self-government and democracy.

Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on Bush's list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies could be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.

The received wisdom informs us that the American public has tired of George Bush and his use of lies and other deceptions to fashion a war-crazed police-state. According to this view, voters will go to the polls this November and exchange a sufficient number of Republican scoundrels for Democratic ones to deprive Bush of a GOP-controlled Congress. Then, we are further led to believe, the sociopathic madness that has metastasized from inside the “beltway” will have come to an end, and – like members of any lynch mob who later reflect on their deed – most Americans will rediscover their lost sense of sanity and decency. I accept none of this foolish thinking. I see no evidence that any greater number of Americans are critical of Mr. Bush’s appetites for tyranny or unprovoked wars than existed at the time of his Afghan/Iraqi attacks. This is not to suggest that many Americans are pleased with Mr. Bush’s performance. Public opinion polls reflect a growing dissatisfaction with his handling of the presidency. But their displeasure does not rise to the level of a moral condemnation of his actions.

What was the passage of the original Patriot Act if not the first shots fired in the half-decade long war against our rights and liberties and freedoms? Make no mistake, for the last five years we have been shocked and awed into remaining passive and acquiescent automatons as the fascists in power eradicate – slowly but surely – what was once a plethora of enumerated and implied rights, freedoms and liberties. A government concerned with preserving freedoms and liberties would not try to eradicate them under the rubric of fighting terrorism. A government wanting to protect our way of life would not try its hardest to destroy it as well.

Forget, for the moment, that the proposed “compromise” torture legislation effectively abrogates the Geneva Conventions. Forget that it effectively licenses torture in the name of every American. Focus instead on the fact that it “vests in the administration the singularly most tyrannical power that exists – namely, the power unilaterally to decree someone guilty of a crime and to condemn the accused to eternal imprisonment without having even to charge him with a crime, let alone defend the validity of those accusations.”

Congress has now granted the president the powers of a dictator. The rest of the story of our slide into absolutism is merely a matter of filling in the details.

Just as it is hard to fully comprehend the grief of a beloved friend or relative killed needlessly in an accident, it is excruciatingly painful to try to come to terms with the pernicious betrayal of our Constitution and liberty that occurred in the Senate on Thursday, September 28.

So, let's say the nightmare came true, and out of fear, we all shut up--all us Democrats, all us dissenters, all us Bush-haters, all us upholders of the Constitution, all us liberals and secular humanists? What if all journalists and all bloggers and even Keith Olberman and the generals at the Pentagon, starting right now, gave Bush a free pass? Here is what would happen. His policies in Iraq would still fail. His attack on Iran would still be a disaster. His War on Terror would still be a bust. And everyone knows it.

We need to be afraid of our own representatives of both parties and their willingness to dismantle democracy as they jockey for political edge and stretch for a few more votes in a moral vacuum. We need to be afraid of the economic fallout that might occur if tens of thousands of American immigrants, in this country legally, start to leave out of the fear that they can now be arrested with no evidence and held by a jailer who, accountable to no one, can throw away the key. We need to be afraid that some day soon, any American who speaks out could hear that late-night knock on the door emblematic of every totalitarian state where people are forced to lower their voices to a whisper. Far-fetched, you say? After Thursday's vote in the U.S. Senate, I’m not so sure.

By writing this essay, I could be deemed an "enemy combatant." It's that simple, and very soon, it will be the law. I always laughed when people told me to be careful. I'm not laughing anymore. In case I disappear, remember this. America is an idea, a dream, and that is all. We have borders and armies and citizens and commerce and industry, but all this merely makes us like every other nation on this Earth. What separates us is the idea, the simple idea, that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are our organizing principles. We can think as we please, speak as we please, write as we please, worship as we please, go where we please. We are protected from the kinds of tyranny that inspired our creation as a nation in the first place.

The Times has taken a good, strong first step; now they need to march forward boldly and tell the rest of the truth. Bush's "War on Terror" is coming to the Homeland, and its target is the American people. Bush and his handlers want to destroy the ability of anyone to oppose their hard-right – and overwhelmingly unpopular – agenda. It's the only way the Faction can maintain its domination – and avoid prosecution for its many crimes. They're fighting for their freedom – so they'll take ours. They're fighting for their lives – so they'll take ours. Next time, the NYT should put a piece like this on the front page – and end it with a call for mass marches in the street, exhorting the American people to rally for their liberty and bring down the bloodstained tyrants who have usurped the Republic and dishonored our name.

Most people in this country may not realize the difference. Most may not understand that the world they live in changed in a deep and serious manner yesterday, and they no longer possess the rights that were written into law by James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and the authors of the Bill of Rights. Avedon Carol had it right when she published yesterday a list of the Bill of Rights with all of them crossed out except the third one, because we have not yet been told to quarter foreign or domestic troops in our spare bedrooms.

In a 253 to 168 “party-line” vote, the congress repealed habeas corpus and approved the torturing of prisoners in American custody. It is breathtaking assault on human rights and personal liberty and puts the United States well-outside the community of civilized nations. It will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether to strike down this "affront to democracy" or let the law stand as is. If the bill passes the Senate, the administration will be able to arrest whomever it chooses and lock them up indefinitely without due process. Suspects in Bush’s war on terror will no longer have the right to challenge the terms of their detention or to even know why they have been incarcerated.

Although the Iraq War has cost about 2,700 American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars from the Treasury, the war has created great business opportunities for well-connected corporations such as Halliburton and Bechtel, which have registered substantial profits from the occupation and “rebuilding” of Iraq. Also, although U.S. intelligence agencies now agree that the terrorist threat has ballooned due to the Iraq War, the Bush administration has found the conflict useful in simultaneously expanding its powers, abrogating constitutional rights and justifying more government secrecy. Those trends seem likely to continue – and even accelerate – as the “war on terror” remains a powerful excuse for transforming the United States from a historically free and open society to a frightened nation where citizens eagerly trade their constitutional rights for government promises of more security.

In the same way that cops often make the best criminals with many believing that many who joined the police would have just as comfortably have signed up with the mafia (and some did both) -- many of the professional anti-communists were just as authoritarian and dogmatic in their instincts.

Anyone wonder who would incarcerate citizens under Patriot Act legislation? I have read of bills coming before both the House and Senate which would allow the National Guard to serve as a domestic police force. Here they are.

Just as a person must be willing to seek help in order to receive it in the context of therapy (it is quite difficult to force someone to change, absent interrogation tactics used at Guantanamo Bay), the government must be willing to release vital information in order to earn the trust of those who refuse to accept their baseless assertions. The alternative theories flourish because they can neither be proven nor denied. There may be a mountain of circumstantial evidence (enough, for example, to convince this therapist of government complicity on 9/11), but as long as key information (documents, videos, witness testimony, etc.) remains classified, there is no definitive proof.

A document cited by President Bush in his recent speech at the Capital Hilton Hotel on how to 'win the war on terror' cites conspiracies as one of the wellsprings of terrorism and threatens to "address" and "diminish" the problems they are causing the government in fulfilling their agenda.

I watch as everything I was educated to believe in crumbles around me. I watch as there are secret detentions, extraordinary renditions, secret trials, disappeared, people held with no charges and no evidence, searched without judicial review and without their knowledge, a homeland security office that last spoke of round ups of "disgruntled" and people from 33 nationalities. At the same time, our unused military bases are being turned into concentration camps. And, this is just the start, the time before the sunset provisions of the Patriot Act or being eliminated either through the Hatch bill or by the Domestic Security Act... I watch and I am afraid...

For their part, the German people quickly accepted the new order of things. Keep in mind that the average non-Jewish German was pretty much unaffected by the new laws and decrees. As long as a German citizen kept his head down, worked hard, took care of his family, sent his children to the public schools and the Hitler Youth organization, and, most important, didn’t involve himself in political dissent against the government, a visit by the Gestapo was very unlikely.

On May 21, 1999, reacting to some satirical criticism of him, Bush snapped: "There ought to be limits to freedom."

Repression doesn't just happen. It has to be organized, arranged, justified and marketed to a willing populace. In other words, it takes a team.

Over the last few months a series of revelations have confirmed what should have been obvious a long time ago: the Bush administration and the movement it leads have been engaged in an authoritarian project, an effort to remove all the checks and balances that have heretofore constrained the executive branch.

Witness the comments from Ann Coulter that Rep. John Murtha, a decorated 37-year Marine combat veteran, should be “fragged” for his public (and highly qualified) opposition to the Great Decider's war in Iraq. Witness as well the diseased musings of Ann Coulter wannabe Melanie Morgan (a radio talk show host and occasional guest on cable television) about putting various journalists to death for the supposed crime of publicizing the Bush regime's misdeeds: “[T]he best solution that I can think of to deal with any newspaper editor, whether it's from the NY Times, LAT, WaPo, or the Wall Street Journal who is responsible for leaking national security classified information, is to be locked in a steel cage with the family members of slain troop members who would happily deliver the ultimate punishment of death.”