Poastocracy

John Carter | Postcards From Barsoom

 

Trust The Plan/Always Chimp: a new kind of 'community relations service'

Whenever there's a horrific interracial attack of the black-on-racist variety, there's a familiar script that we've all gotten so used to that it has become a kind of liturgy. It goes something like this: a multiple felon, frequently let out early on parole, breaks into a pretty young blonde college student's house, rapes her, strangles her to death, mutilates her body, and is found wandering outside with his shirt soaked in her blood, shouting "I just wanted to kill that white bitch!" In the atrocity's aftermath, the girl's bereaved father holds a press conference. Looking dolefully into the camera, he intones, "In this time of loss for our family, please do not use our grief to turn this into a racial issue. This horrible tragedy is an isolated incident, committed by a troubled young man with mental health issues. As Christians we are called upon by God to forgive, and we hope that he gets the help he needs. Don't look back in anger."

This script is so familiar that it has engendered a pervasive background of frustrated despair throughout that subset of the population that has retained some modicum of sane instinct in the face of postmodern antinaturalism. What is wrong with white men? Have they all been castrated? Are they just golden retrievers, with their instincts for self-preservation and familial loyalty completely bred out by a thousand years of living in a high trust society? Have they been MKULTRAed so deeply that they can't see what's happening even when it comes for their own children? It's all over, man, there's no saving these people, they deserve everything that's coming for them, etcetera, etcetera. The responses from the online right to the don't-make-this-about-race liturgy have become as familiar as the liturgy itself, almost a part of the performance.

As it turns out, like everything in the false and homosexual manufactured consensus of the hyperreal television age, none of that is true. The statements of those families are not organic, and they never were.

Title X of the 1964 Civil Rights Act created a secretive government agency that you've never heard of: the Community Relations Service. The explicit goal of the CRS was to further the political aims of the Civil Rights movement. It played an active role in stage-managing demonstrations and riots, and it worked to actively prevent whites from fighting back against those riots, for instance by leaning on the media to downplay the damage to life and property while deflecting attention from the role played by Civil Rights leaders in inciting violence. You can read a summary of the CRS's activities here.

The most repugnant aspect of the CRS's secretive mission has been to intervene in cases of incendiary interracial crime by pressuring the victims and their families to stick to the this-isn't-about-race script. Exactly how they apply pressure isn't known. It's likely that the 'conciliators' of the CRS would start out by speaking in the priestly grammar of concern and compassion: we're just there to help, to advise, tragedies such as those that befell your child are just the kind of thing that racist white supremacists seize upon in order to drive a wedge into Our Community, let us help you navigate the bewildering media environment in this difficult time. Such soft-spoken manipulation works very well on a lot of people, particularly those in a state of emotional shock from the sudden eruption of horror into their peaceful, ordinary lives. Of course it won't work on everyone: some will want blood. Those who don't cooperate might be warned that if they say anything prejudicial to the media, this might be interpreted as jury tampering, possibly leading to the murderer being let off and getting whoever spoke out of turn hauled into court themselves for interfering with judicial proceedings. And we wouldn't want anything like that to happen, would we? Why, you still have two younger children ... think of the consequences for your career if people started calling you racist, how would you support them? ... and if you went to jail for obstructing justice, they might end up in the foster care system ... not to worry, though, there are plenty of available foster families, now that the gay community is allowed to adopt...

That's all speculation, of course. The truth is we have no real idea of what methods conciliators apply to ensure that families follow the script. Not one family has ever said anything about what the conciliators said to them behind closed doors, and the CRS themselves certainly aren't telling. They don't have to. The CRS is specifically exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, records kept by conciliators are destroyed, and conciliators can invoke FBI-style confidentially privileges both in court and in front of Congress. All we really know for sure is that essentially no one has ever gone off script, and that no one has ever so much as talked about the CRA. We can only surmise that families have never said anything because their arms have been twisted into signing NDAs.

Given the secrecy, how do we know any of this? Awareness of the CRS and its activities began to slowly leak into the public consciousness just a couple of years ago. In 2023 William Wheelwright and Raw Egg Nationalist started talking about it, although this seems to have gotten lost in the general noise of the discourse. The CRS surfaced again in June when the Academic Agent Neema Parvini came across a book written by CRS agents Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, in which they spill the beans by way of bragging. Parvini made a video reporting on the book, which got the attention of Auron MacIntyre, and between the two of them they generated enough publicity to precipitate an online chimpout as everyone discovered that the government had set up a secret X-files of Black Crime.

And now, several months later, the CRS is gone. Defunded. Kaput. 

 

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1968: The Birth of New Conformism

"... the movement that emerged in response to postwar conformism was to realise a new form of conformism. In the period between 1970 and 1990, most of the ideas associated with the countercultural movement became absorbed by mainstream society. The 1960s obsession with individual self-fulfilment and emotional and personal issues was thoroughly written into society’s cultural script.

***

Frank Furedi
Spiked

From the standpoint of history, 1968 represents a brief interregnum. It did mark the end of the apathetic era of the 1950s. But it also foreshadowed the era of depoliticised conformism that kicked in in the early 1970s.

To understand the meaning of 1968, one has to understand that, during the late 1940s and 1950s, Western societies were haunted by the legacy of the interwar era – an era in which the social structure, and the largely liberal values on which it was purportedly based, were called into question. Such was the postwar fear of drawing attention to what amounted to a crisis of legitimacy that critical thought was banished to the margins of intellectual life. The marginalisation of critique and dissent was aided by the postwar boom, which served to distract society from the political impasse prevailing over public life. The Cold War was useful in this respect. It reinforced the mood of political passivity, channeling the public’s attention towards uniting against an external enemy.

But suddenly, out of nowhere, the 1960s countercultural movement appeared on the scene. To many at the time, it seemed as if the world had been turned upside down. As the head of the conservative Adenauer Foundation in West Germany put it, ‘The revolt of 1968 destroyed more values than did the Third Reich’. The 1960s countercultural movement succeeded in forcing significant sections of society to question the values that underpinned their daily existence.

The highpoint of the countercultural moment was the revolt of French students in May 1968. Their revolt, which helped mobilise French workers and precipitated a general strike, appeared to many as the precursor of an era of radicalism. With good reason: in the months after May, student protests proliferated, the civil-rights movement grew further, and mass demonstrations against the war in South-East Asia continued to dominate the headlines. Yet, in spite of what appeared to be a building momentum, the radical moment soon passed away. By the early 1970s, the counterculture had become de-radicalised, and it gradually entered the mainstream in the form of youth culture.

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Visualizing The Worrying Decline Of Freedom Around The World

Zero Hedge

 

The 20th century was a bull market for literacy, freedom, prosperity, health, and technology.

As a result of these gains, wealth has increased exponentially, and world poverty is now at all-time lows. Life expectancy continues to improve in most countries, global literacy is near 90%, and there are well over 100 democracies throughout the planet.

But, as VisualCapitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, not every positive trend can keep going forever. Sometimes things regress temporarily, only to be corrected later on. Other times things change more fundamentally – and that regression can be the beginning of a newer, long-term reality.

The Decline of Freedom: An 11-Year Trend

According to the Freedom in the World 2017 Report, which scores countries annually on various levels of freedom, there have been recent setbacks in political rights and civil liberties in a number of “Free” countries. These newest declines are partially the result of populist and nationalist forces making significant gains in democratic states.

But Freedom House, the international watchdog organization that produces the annual report, says that this is not an isolated occurrence. In fact, based on their data and methodology, freedom has actually declined on a global basis for the last 11 years.

Here are the aggregate gains and declines in freedom for each year – you can see that declines have been outweighing gains since 2006.

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Your right to record the police is at risk

Privacy SOS

 

In 2011, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that we have the right to record the police in the public performance of their duties. But what does the right to record the police mean if you cannot exercise it? Not much.

Our society entrusts the police with unusual and extreme powers: the ability to use violence and to deprive us of our liberty primary among them. Recording the police is a tool we can use to make sure officers don’t abuse those powers, and with which to hold them accountable if and when they do. Five years ago, the First Circuit held that this right is protected by the First Amendment. Chilling videos depicting police killing people across the country, released over the past few years with alarming frequency, underscore the importance of securing this right.

Here in Massachusetts, our right to record is at risk.

Under the statute, known as Section 99, someone convicted of secretly recording another person faces up to five years in prison. The law also makes it a crime to “permit[],” “participate[] in a conspiracy to commit,” or be “an accessory to a person who commits” a secret recording. Despite the fact that recording the police performing their duties in public is protected First Amendment activity, however, the statute contains no exception for this behavior.

In 2011, the First Circuit ruled in Glik that recording the police in the public performance of their duties is First Amendment protected activity. The court’s ruling did not distinguish between overt and secret recordings. But some people fear recording the police openly—in other words, they cannot exercise their right to record unless they do so secretly. The fear of arrest and prosecution under Section 99 prevents individuals from secretly exercising their constitutional right to record the police.

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'Black Lives Matter' Organizer "Triggered" By White People, Demands Money For Being A "Fat, Black Bitch"

Paul Joseph Watson
Zero Hedge

According to ‘Black Lives Matter’ organizer Ashleigh Shackelford, white people aren’t welcome at Black Lives Matter rallies and instead should just hand over “reparations” to black people so that they can purchase new cellphones and laptops.

In an article for ‘Wear Your Voice’, an “intersectional feminist media” outlet, Shackelford says that she finds the presence of white people at Black Lives Matter rallies “triggering,” and that black people are “frightened” by whites, adding that their roles should be confined to acting as human “buffers against the police”.

“Why are you going to a protest when you’re the oppressor?” asks Shackelford, adding, “WHITE PEOPLE ARE KILLING US. So when I see white people show up to rally excited and smiling, ready to march like it’s a hobby — I’m disgusted and absolutely fucking livid….I’m ready to fight.”

Decrying the fact that white people are promoting a message of love and unity in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Shackelford complains that, “White people are 400 years too fucking late for a round of applause for a damn tweet with a hashtag, or for showing up to a damn rally.”

She then pushes the demented dogma that white people living today owe blacks “reparations” for slavery (only 1.4 percent of white Americans owned black slaves at the height of slavery).

“Nothing you have is yours. Let me be clear: Nothing you have is yours. Also, Let me be see through: Reparations are not donations, because we are not your charity, tax write off, or good deed for the day. You are living off of stolen resources, stolen land, exploited labor, appropriated culture and the murder of our people. Nothing you have is yours,” writes Shackelford.

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Israel Is Blocking Access to Its Archives: “Israel Concealing Vital Records to Prevent Darkest Periods in its History from Coming to Light”

Jonathan Cook
Global Research

Israel is concealing vital records to prevent darkest periods in its history from coming to light, academics say 

Israel is locking away millions of official documents to prevent the darkest episodes in its history from coming to light, civil rights activists and academics have warned as the country’s state archives move online.

They claim government officials are concealing vital records needed for historical research, often in violation of Israeli law, in an effort to avoid damaging Israel’s image.

The Israeli army has long claimed to be the “most moral” in the world.

Accusations of increased secrecy come as Israel marks this week the 49th anniversary of the 1967 war, when it seized and occupied Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Golan Heights.

Many of the records to which access is being denied refer to that war and the first years of Israel’s military rule over Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

Menachem Klein, a politics professor at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv, said researchers needed such documents to gain a clearer picture of events half a century ago, the goals of policymakers, and human rights abuses. “We have gradually been able to expose some of what happened in 1948 [the war that established Israel], but there is still very little available to help us understand the 1967 war,” he told Al-Jazeera.

As part of its commemorations this week, the state archives published testimony by military commanders from 1967. However, local media noted that whole pages had been censored on “security grounds”.

Nonetheless, some of the declassified material was revealing. Uzi Narkiss, who headed the army’s central command at the time, suggested that he and other commanders hoped to ethnically cleanse most of the territories under cover of fighting. He told fellow officers: “Within 72 hours we’ll drive out all the Arabs from the West Bank.”

The campaign to open up Israel’s archives is being led by the Akevot Institute, a group of Israeli human rights activists, lawyers and researchers trying to document the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a new report, Point of Access, they note that only 1 percent of 400 million pages of documents have been made public.

Most of the files should have been accessible after 15 years, with the most top-secret documents locked away for up to 70 years. In many cases, Akevot says, the classified status of documents has expired, but they have still not been made public. Reasons for denial of access are rarely given.

In other instances, documents that were already declassified – some of them decades ago – have been re-sealed and are now unavailable.

Despite the mounting secrecy, historic war crimes are still coming to light.

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“I’m Dead, I’m Dead” Unnerving Video Shows Cops Taser Handcuffed Man Until He Dies

Comment: Yet, more police state abuse by psychopaths on the job. See more archived examples at Police State USA.

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Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project

Coweta County, GA — American police have once against demonstrated that their agenda is not to protect and serve, but to dominate and control by any means necessary. On November 20th, sheriff deputies in Coweta County, Georgia were summoned to help subdue a man having a psychotic breakdown and ended up tasing him to death. 

After months of keeping the video from the body cameras on the police officers under wraps, it was finally released on Friday to the NY Times.

Thirty-two-year-old Chase Sherman, together with his fiancée, Patti Galloway and his parents, Kevin and Mary Ann Sherman, were returning from a vacation. During a layover at the Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta, Chase started having hallucinations and acting agitated. According to his father, he “got nervous … about planes crashing, and he just didn’t feel comfortable on a plane. … He thought nobody recognized him. I said, ‘Chase, we’re fine. We’re going to get a car and drive home.’ He didn’t know where he was at.” So they rented a car to drive the rest of the way to their home in Florida.

Chase’s fiancée told his parents that he may have smoked “Spice”—also known as “synthetic marijuana”—before they had left on the five-day trip, which may have been the cause of the episode.

Chase’s father described what happened next:

“We got him in the car and we took off on I-85. Chase’s fiancée was driving and Chase was lying in the back with me. He had his head on my lap. He acted like he didn’t know where we were going. And then he jumped up and started a disturbance in the car.”

They pulled over, and Chase’s mother dialed 9-1-1, but the father told her to hang up, thinking things were under control. After driving again for a few more minutes, Chase “got more violent,” and they pulled over again and his mother again called 9-1-1.

“We were fighting, screaming, trying to calm him down. It was pretty horrendous in the car,” his father said.  “His fiancée jumped back to try to calm him down and she actually got bit. My wife told me just to hit him or something to try to get her arm loose. He let loose of the arm and the officers showed up.”

When the three deputies arrived, “they reached across me trying to get the handcuffs on him. I got out of the car and they told me to go back by the ambulance.” Deputies then instructed everyone else to exit the vehicle. During the ensuing struggle, Chase was tased repeatedly. “More officers kept coming and we think they kept tasing him,” Chase’s father said. “They were treating him like a rabid dog.”

The newly released body camera footage proves all the parents’ allegations to be entirely true.

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The full letter written by the FBI to Martin Luther King has been revealed

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg

Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of my personal heroes. Not just because of his outsized contribution to the civil rights movement, but because of his leadership capabilities and emphasis on non-violent civil disobedience.

It also goes without saying, that this wasn't just a great orator with enlightened tactics, he was also a highly intelligent man with a strong sense of history.

This is on full display in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which I highlighted in the piece: Martin Luther King: "Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was Legal."

Here are some of his timeless words.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice.

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?

Naturally, a man that utters such words and who also has a considerable following would not appeal to the thug in charge of the FBI at the time, J. Edgar Hoover. So what did Mr. Hoover do? He sent a letter to Dr. King, pretending to be a black person and implied that he should kill himself. None of this is news, but until the New York Times released it yesterday, copies of this letter had always been partly redacted. We now have the uncensored version. Here it is: 

© National Archives, College Park, Maryland

You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I. (One person’s name has been obscured because The Times could not verify or disprove the claims about her.) 

Now ask yourself a question. Is the FBI any more ethical today than it was back then? I would argue certainly not. After all, it had a file on on tech prodigy Aaron Swartz, who was driven to suicide by the feds. Now imagine what the FBI could do to political dissidents in a world in which they have a backdoor into all your electronic devices, which is precisely what it wants.

So the next time you think to yourself "so what, I have nothing to hide," think again. You don't know what the future holds, do you really want the status quo to have everything you've ever done or said accessible in an electronic file on you? What about the threat this poses to other people who put themselves in the arena of fighting for social change? Do you want the FBI to be able to do to them what they did to MLK but 10x worse? Think deeply about that.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger 

San Francisco police beat up and detain Good Samaritans who call 911 and perform first aid on accident victim

Boing Boing

Peretz Partensky and her his friend had just had a dinner at a restaurant in San Francisco's SOMA district when they happened on an injured woman who had fallen off her bicycle. They called 911 and performed first aid while they waited for emergency services. When the police got there, they beat up Partensky's friend and detained him, and when Partensky objected, they cuffed, brutalized and arrested him. Injured and in an holding cell, she asked to see a doctor, and the SFPD deputies on duty at the jail stripped him naked and threw him in solitary confinement and marked him as a candidate for psychiatric evaluation. 

Partensky complained to the SF Office of Citizen Complaints, documenting him plight in eye-watering detail (Partensky works for a company that supplies software to the restaurant on whose doorstep the entire incident took place, and they were happy to hand him CCTV footage of the incident). The entire procedure then went dark, because in San Francisco, you aren't allowed to know what happens to police officers who beat you up, thanks to the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights. 

One of the officers who harassed, beat, and wrongfully arrested Partensky, Paramjit Kaur, is already the subject of a civil rights suit. The other SFPD personnel who attacked and arrested the Good Samaritans are Officers Gerrans and Andreott. 

For Partensky, the take-away message is clear: if you see someone who needs medical assistance, don't call 911, because the police might come and beat you up. Instead, help that person get to the hospital in a taxi. 

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'It's torture': Pirate Bay co-founder kept in solitary awaiting hacking trial

Critics decry U.S. police drone plans

Reuters

U.S. civil rights groups are raising the alarm about plans by the Houston and Miami police forces to add unmanned aerial drones to their crime-fighting arsenals. But law enforcement officials say the drones will help in the hunt for criminals and missing persons.  Video

FBI tracking videotapers as terrorists?

 

 

Video provided by the United States Humane Society shows a Chino, Calif., slaughterhouse worker prodding a downer cow with a forklift, an act that helped spur an overhaul of the state's animal welfare laws. Animal rights groups are under attack for using such images as part of their investigations into alleged animal abuse. New documents suggest that some such investigations may violate animal enterprise terrorism laws. (AP/Humane Society of the United States)

LA Times

The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has recommended for many years that animal activists who carry out undercover investigations on farms could be prosecuted as domestic terrorists. New documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by activist Ryan Shapiro show the FBI advising that activists – including Shapiro – who walked onto a farm, videotaped animals there and “rescued” an animal had violated terrorism statutes. 

The documents ... were issued by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in 2003 in response to an article in an animal rights publication in which Shapiro and two other activists (whose names were redacted from the document), openly claimed responsibility for shooting video and taking animals from a farm. The FBI notes discuss the videotaping, illegal entry and the removal of animals, then concludes with “there is a reasonable indication that [Subject 1] and other members of the [redacted] have violated the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, 18 USC Section 43 (a).” 

The penalties for such a conviction can include terrorism enhancements which can add decades to a sentence. “It’s simply outrageous to consider civil disobedience as terrorism,” Shapiro [said]. “Civil disobedience is not terrorism. It has a long and proud place in our nation’s history, from Martin Luther King to Occupy Wall Street, and the [Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act] takes that kind of advocacy that we celebrate from the civil rights movement and turns it into a terrorist event.”

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FBI's definition ensnares TSA agents as serial rapists

Natural News

The definition of "rape" was expanded this week by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Criminal Justice Advisory Policy Board, following a barrage of emails from feminist activists who demanded change. The old definition was too narrow, many women argued, and needed to be updated. For one thing, it didn't cover rape by women against women, or men against men, and we've all seen just how much of that goes on these days thanks to organizations like Penn State and the Catholic Church.

So in October, the FBI's UCR subcommittee Advisory Policy Board voted to recommend the definition be expanded. The new definition of rape, which looks set to be "officially" adopted by the FBI in 2012, is as follows:

"Rape" is: ...penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."

Here's the kicker in all this: According to this definition of rape, the federal government's TSA agents are serial rapists.

That's because, in the course of carrying out their lewd, improper and entirely illegal strip-searches and "enhanced pat-downs," they are engaged in precisely the acts covered in the FBI's definition of rape. Namely, entering the vagina and anus with their fingers without consent of the victim.

This means the next time you are fingered by a TSA agent in an airport you should seriously call the FBI and report a sex crime. In fact, it is illegal for you to not report a sex offender committing a crime of which you are directly aware. Failure to do so could make you an accomplice in that person's next sex crime, legally speaking.

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88 Year Old Woman Violated At Kennedy Airport

And the TSA fun and games continue...

WSVN

With age come such things as catheters, colostomy bags and adult diapers. Now add another indignity to getting old -- having to drop your pants and show these things to a complete stranger.

 

Two women in their 80s put the Transportation Security Administration on the defensive this week by going public about their embarrassment during screenings in a private room at Kennedy Airport. One claimed she was forced to lower her pants and underwear in front of an agent so that her back brace could be inspected. Another said agents made her pull down her waistband to show her colostomy bag.

While not confirming some of the details, the TSA said a preliminary review shows officers followed the agency's procedures in both cases. But experts said the potential for such searches will increase as the U.S. population ages and receives prosthetics and other medical devices, some of which cannot go through screening machines.

"You have pacemakers, you have artificial hips, you have artificial knees," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. "As we get older and we keep ourselves together, it's going to take more and more surgery. There's going to be more and more medical improvements, but that can create what appears to be a security issue."

Prosthetic devices can set off metal detectors, and certain devices such as catheters and bags are visible on body scanners, making those passengers candidates for more thorough inspections. Metal detectors and wands can disrupt some devices such as implanted defibrillators, so those passengers must ask for pat-downs instead.

Ruth Sherman, 88, of Sunrise, Fla., said she was mortified when inspectors pulled her aside and asked about the bulge in her pants as she arrived for a flight to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Nov. 28.

"I said, `I have a bag here,"' she said on Monday, pointing to the bulge, which is bigger or smaller depending on what she eats. "They didn't understand."

She said they escorted her to another room where two female agents "made me lower my sweatpants, and I was really very humiliated." She said she stood with her arms and legs outstretched, warning the agents not to touch her colostomy bag. Touching the bag can cause pain, she said.

"It's degrading. It's like someone raped you," Sherman said. "They didn't know how to handle a human being."

Read more (video in link)

The New National Defense Authorization Act Is Ridiculously Scary

 

AP

Business Insider

Fellow entrepreneurs, Americans, anyone who still cares about this country at all – this is a must read. 

By the end of next week, the US government very likely will have the power to lock up US citizens for life at Guantanamo Bay or other military prisons -- without charge and without trial. 

This means that, in the near future, a controversial Twitter post, attending a peaceful protest, or publishing an anti-Congress critique or anti-TSA rant on Google+ could land you "indefinite detention" for life, in the wording of the bill. No access to a lawyer, no access to trial.

Yes, you read that right. This would target American citizens, on American soil. Military personnel would be able to come into your house like something out of a Tom Clancy novel and chopper your innocent self down to Guantanamo Bay for life.

Details: There is a scary provision in the National Defense Authorization Act (fiscal year 2012) which is typically passed by Congress each and every year to continue funding our military operations around the world.

This provision is not a mistake or error; it has vocal backing from some of the most powerful Senators in Washington, including Sen. John McCain and Sen. Carl Levin.

The imminent passage of this bill containing the provision, which appears VERY likely at this point, would put our civil rights on par with countries like Saudi Arabia and China. 

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20 Examples of the Obama Administration Assault on Domestic Civil Liberties

 

Dees Illustration

 Activist Post

The Obama administration has affirmed, continued and expanded almost all of the draconian domestic civil liberties intrusions pioneered under the Bush administration. Here are twenty examples of serious assaults on the domestic rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, the right to privacy, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and freedom of conscience that have occurred since the Obama administration has assumed power. Consider these and then decide if there is any fundamental difference between the Bush presidency and the Obama presidency in the area of domestic civil liberties.

Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire. In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year. These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

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The entire United States is now a war zone: S.1867 passes the Senate with massive support

This marks the death knell for American society at large. It represents an attack on freedom everywhere. For this to occur so blatently in a so called emblem of western world democracy proves beyond doubt that ordinary people all over America have had war declared apon them. The Bill of Rights is in tatters. It's that simple. If there was ever a shred of democracy remaining after the assassination of Kennedy and the subsequent event of September 11, this marks a third phase of a descent into full blown fascism. 

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Activist Post

This is one of the most tragic events I have written about since establishing End the Lie over eight months ago: the horrendous bill that would turn all of America into a battlefield and subject American citizens to indefinite military detention without charge or trial has passed the Senate.

To make matters even worse, only seven of our so-called representatives voted against the bill, proving once and for all (if anyone had any doubt remaining) that our government does not work for us in any way, shape, or form.

S.1867, or the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the fiscal year of 2012, passed with a resounding 93-7 vote.

That’s right, 93 of our Senators voted to literally eviscerate what little rights were still protected after the PATRIOT Act was hastily pushed in the wake of the tragic events of September 11^th, 2001.

The NDAA cuts Pentagon spending by $43 billion from last year’s budget, a number so insignificant when compared to the $662 billion still (officially) allocated, it is almost laughable.

The bill also contained an amendment which enacts strict new sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank and any entities that do business with it, a move which will likely have brutal repercussions for the Iranian people – just like the sanctions on Iraq did.

Not a single Senator voted against this amendment, which was voted on soon before the entirety of S.1867 was passed, despite the hollow threats of a veto from the Obama White House.

Based simply on historical precedent, I trust Obama’s promises as much as I trust the homeless man who told me he was John F. Kennedy.

I wish that I could believe that the Obama administration would strike down this horrific bill but I would be quite ignorant and naïve if I did so.

Furthermore, the White House’s official statement doesn’t even say that they will veto the bill. In fact, it says, “the President’s senior advisers [will] recommend a veto.”

As Glenn Greenwald points out, the objection isn’t even about opposing the detention of accused terrorists without a trial, instead it is the contention that, “whether an accused Terrorist is put in military detention rather than civilian custody is for the President alone to decide.”

Obama’s opposition has nothing to do with the rule of law or protecting Americans, in fact, Senator Levin disclosed and Dave Kopel reported that, “it was the Obama administration which told Congress to remove the language in the original bill which exempted American citizens and lawful residents from the detention power”.

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Military Industrial Complex: Full Fruition

 

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disclose.tv

Dissident Voice

Kathleen Wallace Peine

This week Congress is expected to vote on a bill advanced by John McCain and Carl Levin, a Republican and Democrat who united to bring us the foundation needed to propel us fully into a militarized nightmare state similar to what we have been exporting these last few years. It is the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act.

In case you haven’t heard the details (which is likely if you have spent much time watching traditional news), the bill essentially labels every spot on this earth as a battlefield, including the United States. It’s a telling moment when they concede, or, in fact, advance a never ending war, and its present under each rock, according to these lawmakers. It’s certainly the stuff of 1984 (we’ve always been at war with Eastasia). From this notion springs the advancement of military tribunals dealing with all citizens of the globe (once again, Americans included) without the bother of transparency. Detention and disappearance could be the order of the day.

The secretive nature and broad sweeps have already been used on those they deem foreign enemy combatants around the world. As if by fascist playbook, this sort of thing is trial ballooned on “the other” and then brought home for the enjoyment of those who didn’t complain the first time around.

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What Country Do We Want to Keep?

 

Consortium News

On Nov. 21, former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake was honored for his courage in blowing the whistle on the U.S. government’s abuse of its secrecy powers. In his acceptance speech, Drake explained the larger and more frightening context – the loss of American liberty.

Presented this 21^st day of November 2011 in Washington, DC, by admirers of the example set by former CIA analyst, Sam Adams (who exposed the intentional undercounting of Viet Cong and other forces fighting U.S. troops during the Vietnam War), the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence Award for 2011 to Thomas Drake:

As a senior official at the National Security Agency Thomas Drake witnessed not only widespread waste, fraud and abuse, but also gross violations of our Fourth Amendment rights.

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Tuesday, May 17, 2011 Congress Proposes Bill to Allow Worldwide War ... Including INSIDE the U.S.

via Washington's Blog

Americans who have been paying attention are outraged that Bush lied us into Iraq by making up false claims about weapons of mass destruction and pretending that Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11.

Many are disgusted that Obama got us into a war in Libya without Congressional authorization.

But as the ACLU noted yesterday, Congress is going even further ... proposing handing permanent, world-wide war-making powers to the president - including the ability to make war within the United States:

A hugely important provision for Congress to authorize a new worldwide war has been tucked away inside the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill was marked up by members of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) last Wednesday that poured into Thursday morning (2:45 a.m. to be exact).
A couple of minutes past midnight, Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) offered an amendment to strike Sec. 1034 — the new authorization for worldwide war provision — from the NDAA. Visibly angry that such a large sweeping provision had not yet had any public hearing whatsoever, he vigorously characterized it as a very broad declaration of war.
Rep. Garamendi was very concerned by the limitless geographic boundaries of the provision. Essentially, it would enable the U.S. to use military force anywhere in the world (including within the U.S.) in search of terrorists.
***
While a new authorization for worldwide war has had its first public debate, it unfortunately only lasted a hair over 10 minutes and occurred after midnight.
Though it is a very troubling expansion of war authority, it has been lingering for more than three years as a “sleeper provision,” and it is finally getting the attention of some members of Congress. We hope that further debate in Congress in the weeks ahead will allow for a more in-depth examination of unchecked authority to wage worldwide war, and what the outcomes of such a provision will yield.

As I noted in 2008:

An article in the Army Times reveals that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team will be redeployed from Iraq to domestic operations within the United States.
The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with "civil unrest" and "crowd control".
The soldiers are learning to use so-called "nonlethal weapons" designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.
This violates posse comitatus and the Constitution. But, hey, we're in a "national emergency", so who cares, right?

(We're still in a declared state of national emergency).

I noted a couple of months later:

Everyone knows that deploying 20,000 troops on U.S. soil violates Posse Comitatus and the Constitution.
And everyone understands that staging troops within the U.S. to "help out with civil unrest and crowd control" increases the danger of overt martial law.
But no one is asking an obvious question: Does the government's own excuse for deploying the troops make any sense?

Other Encroachments On Civil Rights Under Obama

As bad as Bush was, the truth is that, in many ways, freedom and constitutional rights are under attack even more than during the Bush years.

For example:

Obama has presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history -- even more so than Nixon.

As Marjorie Cohen - professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild - writes at the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy:

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is facing court-martial for leaking military reports and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico brig in Virginia. Each night, he is forced to strip naked and sleep in a gown made of coarse material. He has been made to stand naked in the morning as other inmates walked by and looked. As journalist Lance Tapley documents in his chapter on torture in the supermax prisons in The United States and Torture, solitary confinement can lead to hallucinations and suicide; it is considered to be torture. Manning's forced nudity amounts to humiliating and degrading treatment, in violation of U.S. and international law.
Nevertheless, President Barack Obama defended Manning's treatment, saying, "I've actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures . . . are appropriate. They assured me they are." Obama's deference is reminiscent of President George W. Bush, who asked "the most senior legal officers in the U.S. government" to review the interrogation techniques. "They assured me they did not constitute torture," Bush said.
***
After State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley criticized Manning's conditions of confinement, the White House forced him to resign. Crowley had said the restrictions were "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid." It appears that Washington is more intent on sending a message to would-be whistleblowers than on upholding the laws that prohibit torture and abuse.
***
Torture is commonplace in countries strongly allied with the United States. Vice President Omar Suleiman, Egypt's intelligence chief, was the lynchpin for Egyptian torture when the CIA sent prisoners to Egypt in its extraordinary rendition program. A former CIA agent observed, "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear - never to see them again - you send them to Egypt." In her chapter in The United States and Torture, New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer cites Egypt as the most common destination for suspects rendered by the United States.

As I pointed out in March:

Former constitutional law teacher Glenn Greenwald says that - in his defense of state secrecy, illegal spying, preventative detention, harassment of whistleblowers and other issues of civil liberties - Obama is even worse than Bush.
Indeed, Obama has authorized "targeted assassinations" against U.S. citizens. Even Bush didn't openly do something so abhorrent to the rule of law.
Obama is trying to expand spying well beyond the Bush administration's programs. Indeed, the Obama administration is arguing that citizens should never be able to sue the government for illegal spying.
Obama's indefinite detention policy is an Orwellian nightmare, which will create more terrorists.

Furthermore - as hard as it is for Democrats to believe - the disinformation and propaganda campaigns launched by Bush have only increased under Obama. See this and this.

And as I pointed out last year:

According to Department of Defense training manuals, protest is considered "low-level terrorism". And see this, this and this.
An FBI memo also labels peace protesters as "terrorists".
***
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." The FBI appears to be objecting to the use of cameras to document unlawful behavior by law enforcement itself.
The Internet has been labeled as a breeding ground for terrorists, with anyone who questions the government's versions of history being especially equated with terrorists.
Government agencies such as FEMA are allegedly teaching that the Founding Fathers should be considered terrorists.
The government is also using anti-terrorism laws to keep people from learning what pollutants are in their own community. See this, this, this and this.
Claims of "national security" are also used to keep basic financial information - such as who got bailout money - secret. That might not bode for particularly warm and friendly treatment for someone persistently demanding the release of such information.
The state of Missouri tried to label as terrorists current Congressman Ron Paul and his supporters, former Congressman Bob Barr, libertarians in general, anyone who holds gold, and a host of other people.
And according to a law school professor and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, pursuant to the Military Commissions Act:

Anyone who ... speaks out against the government's policies could be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.

Obama has refused to reverse these practices.