Get ready for McCain and another four years of the neocons. According to Jason Leopold, "Timothy Griffin, a central figure in the U.S. Attorney scandal and a protégé of Republican political guru Karl Rove, reportedly has been hired to dig up dirt on likely Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama." Griffin is a seasoned dirty trickster. Only time will tell what kind of dirt he will excavate on Obama. But a few minutes with Google provides more than a clue, that is if the corporate media is in the mood to listen.
And what in particular will the filthy tricksters dredge up? Larry Sinclair. "The electrifying presidential campaign of Barack Obama faces a new challenge – a Minnesota man who claims he took cocaine in 1999 with the then-Illinois legislator and participated in homosexual acts with him," WorldNetDaily reported back in February.
The corporate media has ignored Sinclair's allegations, but that didn't stop Sinclair from making a YouTube video and filing a suit in Minnesota District Court, alleging threats and intimidation by Obama's staff. No doubt Griffin and Evil Karl are salivating as they wait out the absurd Democrat primary process as it turgidly as a soap opera crawls toward completion. It looks like the Dem superdel process will anoint Obama at Clinton's expense, not that she needs much help losing out as she keeps making boneheaded comments, most recently insinuating Obama might end up like RFK. Or maybe that should be Vince Foster.
For Griffin, the sky's the limit in sleaze, deception, and outright fascism. For instance, as Leopold notes, in addition to making sure voters were purged from the rolls, Griffin "got the U.S. Attorney job via a little known provision slipped into the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005, authorizing the Attorney General to appoint emergency U.S. Attorneys without Senate confirmation." So much for the Constitution. But then neocons prefer the concept of a "Supreme Leader," as elucidated by Bill Kristol some time ago on Faux News. Obviously, Kristol and gang stayed up too late reading On Dictatorship, the tome written by Nazi crown jurist Carl Schmitt.
Leopold does not venture a guess at the sort of Rove dirty tricks the neocons will pull out of a hat after the Dem nomination. In addition to the scorching allegations made by Sinclair, there is a regular potpourri of stuff they can utilize, including Obama's relationship with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, both having served on the "anti-poverty" group, the Woods Fund of Chicago, between 1999 and 2002, an operation funded in part by the Ford Foundation, the sort of organization favored by the CIA as a "plausible kind of funding cover," according to Frances Stonor Saunders. Call it the CIA's "left-wing" side of its legendary (and wholly bloody) covert activities
At any rate, the Bill Ayers angle may not fly, as millions of people are willing to write off the Weather Underground as ancient and irrelevant, that is if they even remember such, public amnesia and political ignorance what it is in the Land of the Plasma Screen Watchers these days. On the other hand, millions more will be turned off by allegations of coke snorting and homosexuality and may either run to McCain or sit out the election disillusioned. If you think Rove and crew will not make a big deal out of Obama's possible indiscretion, think again — we are talking about neocons here, the folks who tricked the nation into two illegal and immoral invasions and subsequent occupations, resulting in over a million dead people and misery for untold millions more, including thousands of U.S. soldiers. Outing and slamming Obama will be a piece of cake for Dirty Karl and his operatives. It doesn't even matter if the allegation is true or not. As Karl and crew know, all that matters is mention on the Borg Hive tube.
So get ready for four more years of neocon mass murder and putting the final touches on the destruction of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. "Bill Kristol [see above, prefers a dictator] thinks the anti-McCain sentiment among conservatives is exaggerated, and a simple account from the campaign trail reveals a obvious truth: lots of conservatives have supported McCain all along," writes Jennifer Rubin. Of course, they are not "conservatives," they are neocons, and there is no shortage of them crawling like cockroaches all over the McCain campaign: Robert Kagan, spook James Woolsey, neocon wunderkind Bill Kristol, Max Boot, pit bull John Bolton, AEI "fellow" and PNAC signatory Gary Schmitt, the Middle East map cut and paste artist Ralph Peters, and the senator from Tel Aviv, Joe Lieberman.
Come November, you may hear the neocons sing Leo Reisman's "Happy Days Are Here Again." It may be followed by McCain's "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran" anthem.
Howard Stern was incredulous. "It was an insurance job?" he asked when Jesse Ventura postulated that the WTC buildings were brought down because WTC 1 and 2 were "white elephants," that is to say the cost of the buildings exceeded their usefulness. "They were losing money, they had asbestos in them, and they were required by law to do over a billion dollars worth of asbestos removal."
"It was an insurance job?" asked Stern.
Ventura continued. Larry Silverstein had insured the buildings against terrorist attacks for $7 billion dollars, "of which he settled for four." Again, Stern and crew were incredulous, although Stern said he would have to read Ventura's book, Don't Start the Revolution Without Me. Jesse urged him to do so.
It may have been a near perfect crime, at least in the beginning, so perfect Allianz Group, the company that carried a significant portion of the insurance coverage on the WTC, didn't put two and two together. However, one company stockholder, publisher John Leonard, did put two and two together, suggesting demolition. Allianz, however, would have nothing of it, as the insurer relied on the official 9/11 fairy tale as an explanation. It apparently did not occur to the German company that Silverstein had over-insured the buildings.
"The WTC catastrophe was doubtless one of the biggest insurance incidents in history. A significant portion of the multi-billion dollar loss is expected to be borne by Allianz," Leonard wrote in a letter to shareholders. "Numerous observers and researchers find the WTC case very suspicious." Noting that a staggering 49.3% of respondents to a survey conducted in New York City "agreed that 'some of our leaders knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act,'" Leonard was taken aback that Allianz had not "asked whether perhaps the US Government instead of the insurers is responsible for the damages, or whether the possibility of insurance fraud has been investigated."
Allianz eventually balked at paying out and in stepped Brooklyn-Queens Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner, who threatened to punish the insurer with fines or operating restrictions if they did not cough up the cash.
"Silverstein is determined to rake in every last penny possible from 9/11 and has already secured billions from other insurers without a blink of an eye over the fact that he leased the property just six weeks before the attacks and has since been caught in an admission that he ordered at least one of the buildings, WTC 7, 'pulled' on 9/11," writes Steve Watson. It is indeed strange, Watson notes, that any "building that was not owned by Silverstein Properties that day strangely remained upright, despite being a lot closer to the two towers that collapsed onto them," leading no shortage of people to smell something rotten in Brooklyn – or rather on Manhattan.
Considering the amount of insurance fraud, corruption, and rampant malfeasance in the corporate world, the possibility that Silverstein was involved in a plot to bring down the buildings — as they were excessively expensive "white elephants," as Ventura notes – it is a possibility that cannot be discounted out of hand, although Howard Stern and his crew, like millions of other gullible Americans, are incapable of believing ruthless business interests would do such a thing.
Of course, insurance fraud alone cannot explain the events of September 11, 2001. In fact, such an event would be impossible without the complicity of government and — as Ventura recently stated on the Alex Jones Show — the government had reason enough to plan and orchestrate such an event, from scheming a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq to providing an excuse to erect a military police state at home.
Unfortunately, far too many people naively believe the government — and for that matter, ruthless business interests — would not do such a thing, and that includes Howard Stern.
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Listen to Ventura describe the WTV buildings as "white elephants."
Is it possible Michael Moore will attempt to cash in on the success of Loose Change, the most downloaded film in internet history?
According to Festival Central, Moore is working on a Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel, although the site, associated with Variety, does not go into detail about Moore's new project. "Michael Moore is making a sequel to 'Fahrenheit 9/11′ for Paramount Vantage and Overture Films, who will shop the project to international buyers when the Cannes Film Festival and market get under way today," write Pamela McClintock and Anne Thompson.
It does not seem likely Moore will rehash his last project, basically a partisan Democrat indictment of the Bush administration and the Saudis. He can go one of two ways — he can support the official fairy tale version or venture into 9/11 truth territory. The former is not likely, as Moore is on record as saying he does not "think the official investigations have told us the complete truth — they haven't even told us half the truth." He has also brought up the fact that fire fighters have told him "over the years and since Fahrenheit 9/11 that they heard these explosions — that they believe there's MUCH more to the story than we've been told." For more on this, see Aaron Dykes, Michael Moore: 9/11 Could Be Inside Job.
However, at the risk of coming off as cynical, it should be noted that by the time Moore's new 9/11 film appears next year, a Democrat will probably be in the White House. Some have speculated that the Democrats will attempt to defuse the growing 9/11 truth movement by conducting yet another investigation, this time affixing blame for the attacks, even producing a LIHOP version for mass consumption. It remains to be seen if the Democrats will venture into such turbulent waters, as the announcement of another investigation will certainly produce demands for independence and impartiality, thus making it difficult for the government to control the outcome.
On the other hand, if we are to believe Moore (see the We Are Change video above), he may cover important topics in his sequel, including the fact the government has not released numerous surveillance videos in their possession of the Pentagon attack and also the impossibility of a cave dwelling terrorist flying a large plane into the Pentagon at 500 plus miles per hour. It is curious, though, that Moore concentrates on the Pentagon at the expense of the WTC and in particular Building 7, as Building 7 is the most transparent example of an inside job.
Moore's desire to produce a Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel may also have something to do with the fact his last film, Sicko, bombed at the box office. No doubt Moore realizes 9/11 truth, despite the corporate media's orchestrated attempt to destroy it, is a hands down winner. Michael Moore may have learned the lesson provided by the various iterations of Loose Change — millions of people want the truth and they will go out of their way to find it. Let's hope, with Moore's sequel, they only have to venture to the neighborhood cinema.
The neocons who run things over at the Pentagon want you to know — the coming attack on Iran has nothing to do with nukes, as they have maintained now for years, but rather Iran's ability to protect itself.
"The Pentagon is drawing up plans for a 'surgical strike' against an alleged insurgent training camp in Iran, according to the UK Sunday Times' Michael Smith," reports John Byrne for Raw Story. "Attributing the assertion to Western intelligence officials, Smith asserts that US officials have become increasingly frustrated with Iran's Republican Guard force — an elite corps of the country's military — which the Bush Administration has designated a terrorist group. Western officials have accused Iran of helping arming rebel militias in Iraq, and have accused Iran of supplying IEDs."
Never mind over the weekend Iraq admitted they have no evidence Iran is supplying munitions to the "insurgents," actually a well-organized resistance. Our "hawks," i.e., neocon psychopaths who hate Iran and love Israel, know most of you cannot remember important events from day to day, especially when key events are buried on the Agence France Presse website.
Everything is going as planned, although the neocons thought they would have flattened Iran and killed untold numbers of toddlers and grandmothers by now.
Back in October of last year, Seymour Hersh, writing for the New Yorker, said the Pentagon neocons had drawn up plans to bomb Iran and shift emphasis from Iran's illusory nuclear weapon program to the Revolutionary Guard. Earlier, in September, the Senate approved a resolution urging the Bush administration to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization. Not surprisingly, Joe Lieberman, the senator from Tel Aviv, sponsored this non-binding resolution along with neocon faithful, Jon Kyl. Now that all the pieces are in order, the attack on the Revolutionary Guard may commence. No doubt the neocons are pleased by the fact the Revolutionary Guard is situated in Tehran, along with a few million civilians.
Smith was the first to reveal the Downing Street Minutes, an account of a secret 2002 meeting between Bush Administration officials and British intelligence surrounding Iraq, in which MI6 director Richard Dearlove remarked that facts around Iraq were being "fixed" around a policy for war.
"US commanders are increasingly concerned by Iranian interference in Iraq and are determined that recent successes by joint Iraqi and US forces in the southern port city of Basra should not be reversed by the Quds Force," Smith writes."'If the situation in Basra goes back to what it was like before, America is likely to blame Iran and carry out a surgical strike on a militant training camp across the border in Khuzestan,'" he quotes a defense official as saying.
Count on the "situation in Basra" (Shi'ites openly challenging U.S. occupiers) to worsen, same as the situation has steadily grown worse across the entire country, never mind all the fluff emanating from the neocons about the wonderful success of the "surge," actually an excuse to put more occupation troops in Iraq.
American officials are opposed to any attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, Smith says. They believe, however, that an attack on a militant camp could send a message to the Republican Guard.
Indeed, it will send a message — and an Iranian "surge" all their own into southern Iraq. If there was not an excuse to aid and abet the Shi'a militias in Iraq before, there most certainly will be after the neocons cross over Iran's border and bomb the Iranian military encamped in downtown Tehran.
CBS News reported last week about a potential strike on Iran.
"Targets would include everything from the plants where weapons are made to the headquarters of the organization known as the Quds Force which directs operations in Iraq," they wrote.
Targets will also include water treatment plants, sewage facilities, schools, hospitals, mosques — you name it — same target list as was used in Iraq.
If an attack happens it will be on a training camp to send a clear message to Iran not to interfere," one intelligence officer said.
It will likely also send a "clear message" Iran may commence with slinging Sunburn missiles at U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf. Not only warships but oil tankers as well, thus toppling world oil markets into a severe crisis.
But then this is the sort of dastardly scenario the neocons have entertained for some time. Don't pay too much attention to the arguments that the neocons are cloistered eggheads, consumed by insane hubris, and have little idea of what they are doing. In order to defeat "Islamofascism," the neocons need to draft millions of bullet stoppers and nothing will work toward that objective better than crippling the world's petroleum-based economy.
In The Nation, former 60s radical Tom Hayden — in an essay called "Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream" — hammers Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, for attacking Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, for his association with former Weather Underground member William Ayers. "Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties," Hayden writes. "She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an 'unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.' She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970…
I bet that drives "conservatives" nuts, especially the ones who spent the last twenty years listening to Rush Limbaugh, a master of the false left-right paradigm.
But things are never what they seem, especially in politics. The corporate media would have us believe the Clintons were 60s leftists. In fact, according to Roger Morris, author of Partners in Power who worked at the White House in both the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the Clintons were CIA operatives plotting against the antiwar and cultural movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.
According to the book, the bearded, dishevelled Rhodes scholar was recruited by the CIA while at Oxford — along with several other young Americans with political aspirations — to keep tabs on fellow students involved in protest activities against the Vietnam War. Morris says that the young Clinton indulged in some low-level spying in Norway in 1969, visiting the Oslo Peace Institute and submitting a CIA informant's report on American peace activists who had taken refuge in Scandinavia to avoid the draft. "An officer in the CIA station in Stockholm confirmed that," said Morris.
Makes sense. Do you think the Bilderbergers would endorse a 60s radical with "political aspirations" for the presidency, as they did with Bill in 1991? Of course not. However, it can be argued both Bill and Hillary are Marxists, although not the sort conforming to the Hollywood version of what a Marxist is.
In fact, Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution were financed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a large stockholder in the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Bank, and a financial associate of the Guggenheims and the Morgans. Congressional testimony has revealed that Rockefeller sent large sums of money to Lenin and Trotsky so they might instigate the Communist Revolution of 1905. Communism was a near perfect control system that appealed greatly to Rockefeller and the Rothschilds.
Hayden continues:
Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others 'tolerated communists'. Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates.
All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?
Tom's missing the point here — Hillary was simply an effective CIA operative, same as her husband. "Even Hillary Clinton was a Cold Warrior of sorts. Described in Morris's book as 'a closet Contra supporter', she quietly aided Contra fund-raising in Little Rock," writes the Telegraph. "She also used her influence in US liberal circles to undercut the legitimacy of peace activists and pro-Sandinista church groups opposed to President Reagan's policies in Central America." Others describe the young Hillary as a Goldwater supporter, although this is a bit of embroidery as well.
"The point is not that Bill and Hillary Clinton are Right-wingers in disguise — although Morris demolishes the pretense that they were progressive reformers in Arkansas. It is that they have no conviction, no ideology, no guiding purpose. Driven by raw ambition, they will make any compromise necessary to advance their interests."
Obviously, Hillary is not a "right-winger in disguise," whatever that means exactly, although it should be obvious she is a self-seeker with "no conviction, no ideology, no guiding purpose" beyond getting into the White House so she can serve her masters.
Tom Hayden, it would seem, took a wrong turn and got lost somewhere between 1968 and 2008. He is now unable to see Hillary for what she is — a servant of the very ruling elite he has presumably spent most of his life fighting against.
Not that we should hold it against him. Millions of so-called leftists of that tainted era suffer from the very same inability to see the forest for the trees.
Rush Limbaugh's handlers are having themselves a little joke with Operation Chaos. Limbaugh has launched his version of Operation Chaos to mess with the Democrats in true Karl Rove fashion. There is of course an older version of Operation Chaos. It was devised by the CIA.
Donald J. Myers writes for the Tampa Tribune: "Prior to the Texas and Ohio primary elections, Rush Limbaugh implemented his 'operation chaos.' The purpose of this was to have Republicans vote in Democratic primaries for Sen. Hillary Clinton in order to keep her in the race and continue the fight between her and Sen. Barack Obama."
On the surface, this appears to be an attempt to have the two Democrats self destruct and thus hand the election to McCain, who is run by the same neocons who ran Bush for the last seven plus years. In fact, Limbaugh does not support McCain, he supports Hillary, same as Rupert Murdoch, who hosted fundraisers for the "liberal" Clinton. Murdoch and Limbaugh are supposed "conservatives," so on the surface it seems rather strange they would come out in Hillary's corner.
But then Hillary is the candidate of choice for the Bilderbergers, same as Bill Clinton was their candidate. Of course, it does not matter if Hillary, Obama, or McCain "win" the "election" come November, as turned upside down they are virtually identical — controlled by the bankers and beholden to multinational corporations. Even so, the insiders and the ruling elite are fond of running one minion against another. Our rulers call this "democracy." It is nothing of the sort, even in the technical sense — democracy is essentially mob rule — and the mob is not allowed to do much except spectate and push the mandated button on a Diebold machine when the time comes.
As for the other Operation Chaos — it was a domestic snoop and neutralize project conducted by the CIA with the help of the FBI and the NSA. Call it a collaborative project. "CHAOS project amassed thousands of files on Americans, indexed hundreds of thousands of Americans into its computer records, and disseminated thousands of reports about Americans to the FBI and other government offices. Some of the information concerned the domestic activity of those Americans," noted the Church committee in 1976. The most notable targets were Americans involved in the antiwar movement in the late 60s and early 70s, a big thorn in the side of Nixon and the establishment.
Now Limbaugh's version of Operation Chaos is calling for a riot at the upcoming Democrat Convention in Denver this summer. Sort of makes you think about the 1968 Democrat convention in Chicago that resulted in a police riot against antiwar demonstrators. At the time, the CIA's Operation Chaos was in full swing. No doubt no shortage of government provocateurs were working the crowd and enraging the police, sort of like the "anarchists" in Ottawa last year going up against Sûreté du Québec officers in full riot garb. As it turns out, the "anarchists" were cops, as their combat boots revealed when compared with the boots worn by the riot cops who pretended to arrest them.
No doubt Limbaugh is aware of Recreate 68, described as a "band of loons, freaks and frauds planning… to recreate the chaos that surrounded the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago when the Dem delegates gather this August in Denver, Colorado." Lisa Richards, writing for Human Events, warns us that the Recreate 68 "activists" are "like jihadists" who are "insane hemp-wearing, pot smoking, commune-type militant[s] who most likely studied loading and firing under Angela Davis at UC Berkley." In other words, stereotypical Marxist "leftists," followers of the false right-left paradigm and readers of little red books.
Maybe. But more likely most of are dupes and useful idiots stage managed by skilled agents provocateurs. Recreate 68, with its call to confront both the "party machines" and the cops, is a COINTELPRO scheme designed to make all who disagree with a hundred years of war look like "jihadists" and "loons." If this transparent COINTELPRO operation manages to unleash a significant amount of violence in Denver, our rulers and their minions will be free to crack down even more on dissent. After all, they have not spent the last few years erecting a high-tech police state apparatus for nothing.
Rush Limbaugh, long an operative, is simply doing his part.
A gaggle of neocons are targeting Ron Paul and a handful of Democrats who are opposed to "a White House-backed surveillance bill," that is to say they oppose the destruction of the Fourth Amendment.
Defense of Democracies is running ads in Ron Paul's district as well as in those of the Democrats. "The organization is urging the House to pass a Bush-approved update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that would provide legal immunity to phone companies that may have violated the law in facilitating the warrantless wiretapping of Americans after 9/11," reports Nick Juliano for Raw Story.
Defense of Democracies is running ads in a dozen districts across the country, targeting 11 Democrats and Paul who voted for an alternative FISA bill that passed the House last month.
"This refusal to oppose the bogus House bill ensures that vital intelligence is being lost and that America's intelligence community does not have the tools needed to detect and prevent terrorist attacks," the group's president Clifford May, said in a news release posted to its Web site.
The group claims to be bipartisan, but its earlier effort caused several Democrats to jump ship, and May told the Washington Post he has discussed conservatives' lagging fundraising efforts with former Bush strategist Karl Rove.
In fact, the so-called Defense of Democracies gang consists of the same old neocons and their fellow travelers, including former CIA boss James Woolsey, faux conservative Newt Gingrich, and key neocons such as the unabashed Israel partisan Joe Lieberman, Frank Gaffney, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, and others not so obviously neocon, such as Steve Forbes and Louis J. Freeh.
All of these people are enemies of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Immediate arrest and perp walk in orange jumpsuits is most definitely in order.
"The Defense of Democracies ad also claims that vital intelligence was lost because of the delay in passing a new law, citing claims from administration officials," writes Juliano. "The Los Angeles Times reported the administration backtracked from this claim soon after it was made."
Of course they backtracked — because there are no al-Qaeda terrorists in the United States and the neocon plan to conduct massive snooping is not aimed at al-Qaeda but rather all opposition to a century or more of war, torture, sadism, and misery.
In short, the necons are monitoring blond hair and blue eye al-Qaeda members, numbering in the millions, who want to bring the troops home now and put an end to bombing small defenseless countries. Naturally, for the neocons, anybody who opposes their diabolical plan is with al-Qaeda. In fact, al-Qaeda is nothing more than shorthand for those who stand in their way.
The so-called FISA bill, itself a violation of the Fourth Amendment, is simply one of several tools the neocons use to go after the opposition. As we have known for some time now, the neocons habitually use the FBI, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency to do their dirty work. For the FBI, it is the issuance of "national Security letters" as a pretext to snoop, while for the Pentagon it is the Counterintelligence Field Activity office, said to now be defunct.
Sure, and I have an ice sculpture for sale in the Mojave desert. Military intelligence never closes down successful operations, and the CIFA is swimmingly successful. In December, 2005, NBC reported it had "obtained a secret Pentagon database that indicates the U.S. military is collecting information on American peace activists and monitoring protests against the Iraq war."
A document stamped "secret" reports, "We have noted increased communication between protest groups using the Internet," but not a "significant connection" between incidents, such as "recurring instigators" or "vehicle descriptions," which suggests the Pentagon has been monitoring e-mail and tracking anti-war activists by the cars they drive. The document is 400 pages long and lists 1,500 "suspicious incidents across the country over a 10-month period," including "four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including one in Hollywood." Other groups targeted included The Truth Project, a Quaker group in Lake Worth, Fla., concerned about military recruitment in high schools, and a group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, protesting recruiters on campus.
All al-Qaeda, if we use neocon shorthand.
Christopher Plye, a former Army intelligence officer who exposed Pentagon infiltration of the anti-war and civil rights movements during the Vietnam War, told NBC, "This is the J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner. They're collecting everything."
James Risen, New York Times scribe, was allowed to reveal the severity of NSA snooping back in 2006. "For the first time since the Watergate-era abuses, the NSA is spying on Americans again, and on a large scale," Risen writes in his book, State of War. "The Bush administration has swept aside nearly 30 years of rules and regulations and has secretly brought the NSA back into the business of domestic espionage."
Espionage? More like trashing the Fourth Amendment.
It would be espionage if Quakers and antiwar students were covertly working for al-Qaeda and selling out their country. Instead they are exercising their right to petition the government, or that should be former right.
But then, again, al-Qaeda is shorthand for anybody who dares oppose the neocons. Increasingly, this massive demographic includes not only Quakers and antiwar activists but people — like Ron Paul — who demand the restoration of a constitutionally limited republic. Ditto folks who understand 9/11 was an inside job and demand a new investigation. All are al-Qaeda. All will face the "J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner."
The so-called Foundation for Defense of Democracies is simply another neocon contrivance cut out of the same cloth that brought us the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, the Hudson Institute, the Committee on the Present Danger, and Freedom House — all premier neocon criminal organizations dedicated to endless fear, mass murder, rendition, internment camps, and human suffering on a near-Nazi scale.
Multinational corporate telecom monster AT&T wants you to know the internet as we know it will be dead in a mere three years.
"Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded," reports Andrew Donoghue for CNet News. "The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today," he said. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."
If you believe this I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn. But then the telecom multinats will say and do whatever is required in order to sell their vision of the future — a centralized, gated, pay-per-view, and censored internet, a model based on television, the medium with hundreds of channels and nothing on.
Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. "We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010," he said.
In other words, in order to avoid this supposed physical capacity, Mr. Cicconi wants the government — i.e., you and me, the perpetually fleeced commoners — to pay for a new infrastructure, one with controls built-in, as behemoth corporations never pay for infrastructure if they can avoid it. And thanks to no shortage of corporate "lobbyists" prowling about the whorehouse on the Potomac, you can bet your bottom dollar they won't. Of course, Cicconi does not say you and I will pay for the new Borg internet. But then he does not have to. Corporate socialism is rife these days.
"As our titanic democracy is sinking and the band of trivia and denial plays on, each Internet connection can function as an intellectual life preserver," writes Mark Klempner. "The net has also proved invaluable as a way for concerned citizens to offer support to each other, and to act together for political and social change."
It is precisely this organizational and political aspect of the internet our rulers loathe and fear, thus the pell mell rush to defang the medium under a Chicken Little mantra — the bandwidth sky is falling and we have to do something about it. Or rather massive corporations sucking up government contracts have to do something about it.
Mr. Cicconi and AT&T are serving notice: we have three years to get our act together.
It's like something dreamed up by East Germany's Stasi.
In Florida, Sheriff Sgt. Ken Sonier "watches those who don't want to be seen," according to News-Press. Of course, in a healthy, non-brainwashed society most us would not take kindly to being watched, no matter the reason, but in the post-9/11 world far too many of us have bought into the idea we are somehow obliged to surrender our privacy in order to combat the terrorists, never mind we don't have a good idea who the terrorists are. Fox News now tells us they have blond hair and blue eyes.
Sonier and the Lee County cops are busy installing "custom-made cameras" in fire hydrants, on exit signs in apartment buildings, and metal underneath cars. "Citizens don't know what we do," bragged Lee County Sheriff Lt. Gary Desrosiers of the Technical Investigations Unit. "And that's a good thing." It was presumably a good thing in East Germany, too, or so the fascist control freaks who once ran that country no doubt believed.
"The annual budget for the TIU is about $10 million, but that includes salaries and maintenance on all the department's cell phones, laptops and equipment. Most of the equipment purchased is with federal grants." More specifically, Department of Homeland Security grants.
"In Cape Coral, police accepted a $50,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase a Video Detective. It is capable of recording audio, video and stills from blocks away and can clean up images and sound recordings turned in as evidence. Now grainy footage of a bank robbery suspect becomes as clear as a yearbook photo."
Bank robbery? More likely the technology will be used to monitor average citizens and catch them in the act of minor misdemeanors — littering, parking violations, drinking in public, smoking marijuana on the street corner, etc. It will be used as a revenue generator and a more effective way to get people in the system, herd them into the prison-industrial complex.
But it's not all Stasi-style covert snooping. It's also the psychological factor of living in a world based on Orwell's dystopian novel. "Like security cameras in a bank, some systems are meant to be noticed. The sheriff's office purchased two alert systems to startle vandals."
In addition to acclimating folks to living in a militarized police state, such in-your-face systems are put in place to get the great unwashed used to being watched, same way Winston Smith was watched.
"One has flashing lights and the other has a loudspeaker and flashing lights and it takes their picture," Sonier said. "It's triggered by motion. A voice comes over the speakers and says something like, 'Your picture has been taken. Leave the premises now.' Their faces are like a deer in the headlights."
In other words, the state will now bark orders at subjects. Middlesbrough and other British cities have similar systems, as do the cops in Baltimore. It's all about making sure you understand you're being watched. It's all part of the control panopticon.
"One side effect of the Iraq war is military tools and tactics — sensors that can track gunfire, retina eye scans - are being even further fine-tuned. Still local law enforcement say some of it isn't likely to hit the streets of Lee County for another decade, at least."
Side effect? No, this technology is designed and manufactured with the "civilian" market in mind. And if the stuff is too pricey for cash-strapped middle America police departments, no doubt the Ministry of Homeland Security will come to the rescue with grants and hand-outs.
Our rulers have put the control grid on the fast track, so it will not be a decade or more before we are so inundated with snoop technology there will be no going back.
