The House votes on another amendment to FISA tomorrow (Thursday)

Contact info for your Congressman/woman here; while better than the Senate version, this bill still provides for "basket warrants" which is why the ACLU does NOT endorse this bill.

ATT and NSA whistleblower Mark Klein interview excoriating Congress here

NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data

By SIOBHAN GORMAN
March 10, 2008; Page A1

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

[I was mistaken about the date of the decision in Ex Parte Milligan which is one of the cases where it was found that Lincoln exceeded his presidential authority in wartime just as Bush is doing now. I stopped at a public library and was trying to do this post on the fly and ran out of time trying to get all my thoughts together, which is hard with people talking and kids running around. Sorry :-( ]

Update below on the duplicity of Leahy

Tomorrow (Feb. 12) This year is the 142nd anniversary in the decision of Ex Parte Millgan in which it was found by Justice David Davis that:

The nation…has no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln; and if this [broad power of martial law] be conceded, the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate.

This Congress is giving power to Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law.

Russ Feingold's speech from today (with video)

The telephone companies and the government have been operating under this simple framework for 30 years. The companies have experienced, highly trained, and highly compensated lawyers who know this law inside and out.

In view of this history, it is inconceivable that any telephone companies that allegedly cooperated with the administration's warrantless wiretapping program did not know what their obligations were. And it is just as implausible that those companies believed they were entitled to simply assume the lawfulness of a government request for assistance. This whole effort to obtain retroactive immunity is based on an assumption that doesn't hold water.

[Why their fear-mongering is unfounded (pdf file)]

The End of Privacy

Posted on Jan 24, 2008

By Elliot Cohen

Amid the controversy brewing in the Senate over Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reform, the Bush administration appears to have changed its strategy and is devising a bold new plan that would strip away FISA protections in favor of a system of wholesale government monitoring of every American’s Internet activities. Now the national director of intelligence is predicting a disastrous cyber-terrorist attack on the U.S. if this scheme isn’t instituted.

[Related: 14 points of Fascism ...]

QinetiQ Goes Kinetic: Top Rumsfeld Aide Wins Contracts From Spy Office He Set Up

by Tim Shorrock , Special to CorpWatch
January 15th, 2008

A Pentagon office that claims to monitor terrorist threats to U.S. military bases in North America -- and was once reprimanded by the U.S. Congress for spying on antiwar activists -- has just awarded a multi-million dollar contract to a company that employs one of Donald Rumsfeld’s former aides. That aide, Stephen Cambone, helped create the very office that issued the contract.

On January 7, QinetiQ (pronounced “kinetic”) North America (QNA), a major British-owned defense and intelligence contractor based in McLean, Virginia, announced that its Mission Solutions Group, formerly Analex Corporation, had just signed a five-year, $30 million contract to provide a range of unspecified “security services” to the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, known as CIFA.

UPDATE: Elizabeth Kucinich will join us at 9:00 AM for the Walk Around the Capitol. Click here fof details.

ONE YEAR TO GO, BUT

END IT NOW!

RALLY

THE END OF AN ERROR

Sunday, Jan. 20th 1:00 - 3:00 PM
Corner of 16th St. & Broadway
(Near Tower Theatre and R5 Records)

George “Dubya” Bush will be out of office in ONE more year: 01-20-09
(Unless we can IMPEACH him before that!)

A full day of events are scheduled. Click here to see the full schedule.

Please do not park in the Tower Theatre or R5 Records parking lots. There is plenty of street parking available.
After the rally, please patronize the local area businesses: R5 Records, The Avid Reader, Tower Theatre, & Tower Café, etc…

This is a non-partisan event, all are welcome!
Time: Sunday, January 20, 2008 - 12:00pm PST

Elizabeth Glaser speech to 1992 Democratic National Convention Address delivered 14 July 1992, New York, NY. She criticized the federal government's under-funding of AIDS research and its lack of initiative in tackling the AIDS crisis.

Greg Palast is a New York Times-bestselling author and a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation as well as the British newspaper The Observer. He reads from his book "Armed Madhouse". Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf? Including Marines in a tube, learning to speak Terrorist, Bush’s Khan job, national Security Document 199-I and Osama’s Mission Accomplished. [What are you afraid of? Our Fear Salesman-in-Chief has something for everyone.]

Harry Belafonte at Riverside Church in the "€˜Final Hour"€™.

Robert Scheer and James Harris speak with Chris Hedges, the veteran journalist and author of the new book "€œAmerican Fascists",€ about the threat of the radical Christian movement.

Great Speeches and Interviews aired 12/9/2007 on Access Sacramento

Creeping Fascism: History's Lessons
By Ray McGovern | December 27, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

Goebbels Would be Proud

Click


Song by Tupac Shakur

Painting (according to the link?) by banksy

Bethlehem 2007 A.D.

By Michael Finkel

Photographs by Christopher Anderson

The birthplace of Jesus is today one of the most contentious places on Earth. Israelis fear Bethlehem's radicalized residents, who seethe at the concrete wall that surrounds them.

This is not how Mary and Joseph came into Bethlehem, but this is how you enter now. You wait at the wall. It's a daunting concrete barricade, three stories high, thorned with razor wire. Standing beside it, you feel as if you're at the base of a dam. Israeli soldiers armed with assault rifles examine your papers. They search your vehicle. No Israeli civilian, by military order, is allowed in. And few Bethlehem residents are permitted out — the reason the wall exists here, according to the Israeli government, is to keep terrorists away from Jerusalem.

Bethlehem and Jerusalem are only six miles apart (ten kilometers), though in the compressed and fractious geography of the region, this places them in different realms. It can take a month for a postcard to go from one city to the other. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, on land taken by Israel during the Six Day War of 1967. It's a Palestinian city; the majority of its 35,000 residents are Muslim. In 1900, more than 90 percent of the city was Christian. Today Bethlehem is only about one-third Christian, and this proportion is steadily shrinking as Christians leave for Europe or the Americas. At least a dozen suicide bombers have come from the city and surrounding district. The truth is that Bethlehem, the "little town" venerated during Christmas, is one of the most contentious places on Earth.

Can you imagine the misapplications of this?

Freedom is slavery, Blackwhite, Doubleplusungood

A new initiative by the Department of Homeland security will allow you (yes, You!) to combat terrorism from the comfort of your own La-Z-Boy. How, you might ask, you fine fine patriot, you? Well, it's kinda like a cross between the Neighborhood Watch and the Gestapo.

The Neighborhood Network Watch is intended to be a voluntary program that allows people to monitor network traffic on wireless networks and analyze it using a package of applications provided to the volunteers by the DHS, according to a video now posted on YouTube. Basically you grab the wireless traffic being broadcast all around you and then compare the words contained in that traffic against a list of keywords contained in the somewhat infamous Echelon word list which has been "updated to deal with the current, pressing threats from around the world." You know, words like "democrat", "free speech", and "sexy naked women". Depending on how many hits the traffic that any given volunteer grabs gets against that list, the network and area around it is given a rating similar to the ultra-effective rainbow of terror developed way back at the begining of this decade by our very first Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge. It even uses the same colors, how convenient!

Optical illusions are used to trick the mind in fun but harmless ways

Propaganda is also used to trick the mind as well, but it has a much more malicious reasons, which are to control people through fear by using a very powerful but seemingly innocuous methods

And perspective is everything

With all that in mind, the timing on this is very interesting

Bomb Wearing “Homegrown Terrorist” is to S. 1959 as the Anthrax Attacks is to the Patriot Act

Posted by willyloman on November 30, 2007

by Scott Creighton

In the vein of the anthrax attacks that helped pass the Patriot Act, when they were being held up, now, the S 1959 “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007″, is JUST BY CHANCE, getting the same kind of LUCKY support while it languishes in the Senate and while people like me and many others question it’s constitutionality!

That’s right, a “homegrown terrorist” has strapped what he said was a bomb to his chest and decided to go to a Hillary Campaign headquarters in Rochester, New Hampshire.

I've just recently read about Presidential Airways at wired.com and thought that'll make a nice short little blog in itself, but, since posting to this website is all voluntary and only done in our spare time, I completely forgot all about it because I just didn't have the time until I ran across the following ... and had to make time

Ever see this plane??? ... Hold that thought

So, last week I'm reading thinkprogress.org and run across the story below and of course have to read it.

Pentagon Issues Blackwater New $92 Million Contract

[Scroll down to the third paragraph. I'm going to emphasize a few things]

Presidential Airways, Inc., an aviation Worldwide Services company (d/b/a Blackwater Aviation), Moyock, N.C., is being awarded an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) type contract for $92,000,000.00. The contractor is to provide all fixed-wing aircraft, personnel, equipment, tools, material, maintenance and supervision necessary to perform passenger, cargo and combi Short Take-Off and Landing air transportation services between locations in the Area of Responsibility of Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. This contract was competitively procured and two timely offers were received. The performance period is from 1 Oct. 2007 to 30 September 2011.

Well, well, well, Presidential Airways, we meet again. Whooda thunk it? Do you know what an IDIQ contract is? IDIQ stands for Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity, which means they get their $92 million contract no matter what; they could make 1,000 flights for the DoD or they could only be obligated for one flight and they would still get the $92 million of your tax payer supported money.

Nancy Pelosi admits she's useless when it comes to Iraq ... and is contemptuous about it

BLITZER: But you could in the House of Representatives use your power of the purse, the money, to stop funding the war if you really wanted to.

PELOSI: I wish the speaker had all the power you just describe. I certainly could do that. That doesn't bar the minority from bringing up a funding resolution. They have their parliamentary prerogative as well.

So, is she admitting that every penny that goes to fund the occupation is at the prerogative of Dinos, such as herself, Rahm Emanuel and Harry Reid?

BLITZER: So, are you telling your angry base out there in the Democratic Party that wants to see this war over with, wants to see the U.S. troops home, that you, as speaker, there's nothing you can do, you have to just throw your hands up and say...

CIA "Rendition" Plane brought down in Mexico with FOUR TONS of Cocaine on board

U.S. authorities are assisting the Mexican government in the investigation of an American business jet that crashed near Cancun this week with four tons of cocaine on board, officials said Thursday.

One of the men listed as the registered owners of the plane, Joao Luiz Malago, said in a telephone interview from Brazil that his Florida-based company sold the aircraft for $2 million on Sept. 16 to a Lakeland, Fla., man and his partner, who Malago believed was from Miami.

Malago said he feared the man was dead because he hasn’t been picking up the phone.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico had no information on any American citizens being killed or arrested in connection with the aircraft, a 1975 model Gulfstream II.

“We’re in the process of a judicial investigation that the Mexican government is conducting and we are providing information,” said an embassy official, who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record. “Part of that investigation is to find out more about where this plane came from and who had it before.”

Some news reports have linked the plane to the transport of terrorist suspects to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but those reports cite logs that indicate only that the plane flew twice between Washington, D.C., and Guantanamo and once between Oxford, Conn., and Guantanamo. No terrorist suspects are known to have been transferred to Guantanamo directly from the United States.

When America Went Fascist
By Chris Rowthorn | Created Sep 25 2007 - 9:48am

"Fascism: a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator"
-- The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000

It is a truism in the blogosphere that one more terrorist attack will turn America into a fascist state. People speculate about what fascism in America will look like, or how they might fight it. Others boast that they plan to flee the country ahead of the coming fascist takeover of the United States. One cannot read these posts without a sense of bitter irony, because one thing is clear to those who are watching carefully:

The United States of America is already a fascist state.

The United States turned fascist on December 11, 2000. On that day, the Supreme Court essentially appointed George W. Bush president of the United States, stopping the recount of Florida votes, and, hence, the democratic process. The justices of the court then slipped away by night, ashamed of their role in murdering America's great experiment in democratic rule.

The Supreme Court decision of December 11, 2000 is the modern American equivalent to German President Hindenburg's swearing in of Hitler as chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. By swearing in Hitler as chancellor, Hindenburg set in motion a process which led to the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. In the case of the Nazis, the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933 was the catalyst they needed to cement their grip on power. In the case of Bush and his backers, the tragedy of September 11, 2001 was the catalyst they needed to complete their full takeover of the American government.

"Would you like another cup of coffee, sir?" said the waitress as she walked by.

"No, no thank you," replied Jem as he sat in the old fashioned diner he and his parents went to when they needed to get out of the house and just have a piece of pie and see old friends

He looked furtively at his watch and thought, "Where is he? Where is George?" He again looked down, this time at his new screenplay, the one that is going to get him out of this too long of a slump and maybe then he can buy his house back that he had to sell because of his lean times. He was just asking himself if he remembered to put money in the parking meter when he heard a voice calling his name from across the diner.

"Jem, you son of a gun, this better be good. I was on my way to my house in Italy when I got your message."

"Oh, it is," said Jem, in his best fake confident voice, because he knew this might be the last shot.

George looked at him with a twinkle in his eye, "I believe you." He caught the waitress' eye and said, "I'll take a cup a joe and a piece of apple pie, please." He looked back at Jem and said "whaddaya have there for me?" As he picked up the script and looked at it, which said "Nukes at Midnight". Alright Jem give me the final scene.

Jem starts, "That's just a working title. Anyway it's a thriller. Sort of Seven Days in May meets Broken Arrow meets Dr. Strangelove meets Operation Northwoods that's set in .."

The Threat of U.S. Fascism: An Historical Precedent
by Alan Nasser | on CommonDreams.org

Perhaps the most alarming slice of twentieth-century U.S. history is virtually unknown to the general public, including most scholars of American history. One hopes that a recent BBC documentary titled The Plot Against America and an article of the same name by Columbia Law School professor and longtime human rights activist Scott Horton, on the website of Harper’s magazine, will sound an alert.

In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to conduct an investigation of a possible planned coup intended to topple the administration of president Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace it with a government modelled on the policies of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The shocking results of the investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives. While the coup attempt was reported at the time in a few newspapers, including The New York Times, the story disappeared from public memory shortly after the Congressional findings were made available to president Roosevelt. It was the recent release from the Archives of the Congressional report that prompted the BBC and Horton commentaries.