LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic
Individuals Not Ideologies
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Archive of "Police State" Category
Chinese Electronic Espionage Leads To UK Office of Cyber Security…
The Times Online reported in January that the UK’s MI5 was battling devious Chinese attempts to entrap UK businessmen, with electronic bugging devices….and sexual “honey traps”. (Not as imaginative as the CIA’s “acoustic kitty,“ but probably more effective):
“A leaked MI5 document says that undercover intelligence officers from the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of Public Security have also approached UK businessmen at trade fairs and exhibitions with the offer of “gifts” and “lavish hospitality”.
The gifts — cameras and memory sticks — have been found to contain electronic Trojan bugs which provide the Chinese with remote access to users’ computers.
MI5 says the Chinese government “represents one of the most significant espionage threats to the UK” because of its use of these methods, as well as widespread electronic hacking.
Written by MI5’s Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, the 14-page “restricted” report describes how China has attacked UK defence, energy, communications and manufacturing companies in a concerted hacking campaign.
It claims China has also gone much further, targeting the computer networks and email accounts of public relations companies and international law firms. “Any UK company might be at risk if it holds information which would benefit the Chinese,” the report says.
The explicit nature of the MI5 warning is likely to strain diplomatic ties between London and Beijing. Relations between the two countries were damaged last month after China’s decision to execute a mentally ill British man for alleged drug trafficking.
Earlier this month the United States demanded that China investigate a sophisticated hacking attack on Google and a further 30 American companies from Chinese soil.
China has occasionally attempted sexual entrapment to target senior British political figures. Two years ago an aide to Gordon Brown had his BlackBerry phone stolen after being picked up by a Chinese woman who had approached him in a Shanghai hotel disco.”
So now you know better than to fraternize too cozily at a Chinese trade event.
The 14-page “restricted” report by MI5 Director General, Jonathan Evans, lists attacks on UK defense, energy, communications and manufacturing companies and is the latest and most explicit warning from UK authorities on Chinese espionage. It was sent to hundreds of business leaders in 2009.
Evans’ lobbying led to the creation of the Office of Cyber Security (due to open in March 2010).
The UK only follows the US on this. As far back as June 2009, Barack Obama announced the need for a new official position to oversee cybersecurity in the US, a move applauded by some in the IT community, like McAfee’s Director of Threat Intelligence, Phyllis Schneck, but criticized by others, like Wayne Crews, VP at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who argued that attempts to collectivize and centralize information technology risks were liable to crowd out private enterprise solutions.
The Cat They Sent Out Into The Cold…
The more you dig into the history of the CIA’s covert programs, the more it resembles not so much a fast-paced who-dunnit as a low-rent why-ever-did-they-do-it. Only it wasn’t low rent. A hefty wad of tax-payer money subsidized such expensive follies as Project Acoustic Kitty, in which the agency’s whizzes tried to turn man’s favorite feline into a wired-up bot that would snoop on conversations in back-alleys:
“Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer, told The Telegraph that Project Acoustic Kitty was a gruesome creation. He said: “They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that.”
Mr Marchetti said that the first live trial was an expensive disaster. The technology is thought to have cost more than £10 million. He said: “They took it out to a park and put him out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over. There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead.”
The document, which was one of 40 to be declassified from the CIA’s closely guarded Science and Technology Directorate - where spying techniques are refined - is still partly censored. This implies that the CIA was embarrassed about disclosing all the details of Acoustic Kitty, which took five years to design.
Dr Richelson, who is the a senior fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington, said of the document: “I’m not sure for how long after the operation the cat would have survived even if it hadn’t been run over.”
From “CIA Recruited Cat To Bug Russians,” The Telegraph, November, 2001
Soviet Spy On Post-Cold War Russian Spying
Soviet agent turned American double agent, Sergei Tretyakov, is interviewed about post Cold War espionage on the Leonard Lopate Show.
Lew Rockwell On The Climatista Totalitarians
Lew Rockwell in The Misesean Vision:
“Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind’s use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were pretty fired up by the notion. So were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied because they had long ago conceded that there are some public goods that the market can’t handle; surely the weather is one of them.
“Enough years go by and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world, every last one of them a huckster of some sort only pretending to represent their nations, gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and plan its weather down to precise temperatures half a century from now.
“In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle than this!
“I don’t know if it is tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to an end with the politicians racing home to deal with snowstorms and record cold temperatures.”
KGB Operations Against The US
Last week, I blogged Douglas Valentine on the secret history of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, a long history that involved revolutions, coups, torture, assassinations, and subversion. Today, the CIA is probably far larger than any other spy agency, but until 1991, the Soviet Union’s KGB was a good match. The excerpt that follows is from a face-off between former CIA counter-intelligence chief Paul J. Redmond and former major-general of the Soviet KGB, Oleg Danilov Kalugin, and was hosted by the University of Delaware on March 12, 2003.
(Note: The KGB was disbanded in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has been replaced by the Russia security force, the FSB).
“We conducted a clandestine war with assassination if necessary,” he [Kalugin] said. “Our mission was to do everything we could to have a war without the fighting. This was seen as amoral in America, but it was our ideology.”
Kalugin infiltrated the United States as a journalist, attending Columbia University in New York City as a Fulbright Scholar in 1958. From 1965-70, he served as deputy resident and acting chief of the residency at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., quickly becoming the youngest general in the history of the KGB. Eventually, he became the head of worldwide foreign counterintelligence, serving at the center of some of the most important espionage cases, including the Walker spy ring.
Finding that the KGB’s internal functions had little to do with the security of the state and everything to do with keeping corrupt Communist Party officials in power, Kalugin retired from the KGB in 1990 and became a public critic of the communist system. He currently teaches at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.
Kalugin said one of his most effective spying techniques was pitting American citizens against their own government.
“We appealed to pacifists and told them, ‘You cannot have peace unless you stop the internal situation of the U.S.,’” he said. “We got environmentalists and told them, ‘Capitalists spend any amount of money even if it does destroy your precious nature.’ Well, at the time, the Soviet Union was the most polluted country in the world,” he joked.
Kalugin listed several astonishing facts from a classified KGB report, proving just how much the organization is committed to counterintelligence. He said that in 1981 the KGB reported that they had funded or supported 70 books, 66 feature and documentary films, more than 100 television stations, 4,865 articles in magazines or newspapers, 300 conferences or exhibitions and 170,000 lectures around the world.
“Friendship, companionship—that is fine,” Kalugin said, “but national interests remain. Counterintelligence will never cease to exist. The U.S. remains priority number one.”
Executive Order 12425: Interpol Brings Global Police State to US
John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute (via Lew Rockwell) sounds the alarm over executive order 12425, which places the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) beyond the reach of domestic laws, freedom of information act requests and constitutional checks.
“It’s hard to know exactly what the fallout from this executive order will be, but the ramifications for the American people could be ominous. For instance, if Interpol engages in illegal and/or unconstitutional activities against American citizens, it will be impossible for U.S. citizens to obtain information – via subpoena or other commonly used legal methods – regarding its records or activities.
Former Spy Bosses, Goldman Exec Behind Full-Body Scanner
I blogged earlier about the full-body scanner.
It turns out that one of the scanner’s strongest advocate, Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security Czar, stands to gain by the sale of the scanner, via his security consulting outfit, Chertoff Group.
Its 8 members include 3 former senior executives from Homeland Security, 2 from the CIA, 3 from the NSA, 1 from FEMA, and 1 from Goldman Sachs. (more…)
Fed-State Partnership Parallels Nazi Gleichschaltung
Will Grigg (in an LRC blog post) describes another crucial step in the centralizing and totalizing of federal government power in the incipient Fourth Reich of America:
“Yesterday (January 11), Barack Obama added another critical element to the architecture of wartime presidential dictatorship by signing an executive order establishing a “Council of Governors” for the supposed purpose of strengthening federal-state “partnership” in military and homeland security affairs.
The Mental Gulag Is Here (Update)
Mind-reading passengers for terrorist potential - (note, potential) i.e. “thought crimes” - is here, folks, and seriously being batted about by Homeland Security:
“The aim of one company that blends high technology and behavioral psychology is hinted at in its name, WeCU — as in “We See You.”
The system that Israeli-based WeCU Technologies has devised and is testing in Israel projects images onto airport screens, such as symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would-be terrorist would recognize, said company CEO Ehud Givon.Doug Valentine: CIA Killings Spell Defeat In Afghanistan (Updated)
Update (January 12): In response to criticism (in the Comments) by a US military historian, I’ve posted a review of Avatar here at MBP, on January 11.
Update (January 12): Since this piece is so topical and sensitive, I´m taking the liberty of adding links to it, so that readers can do further reading on their own.Original Post:
“Douglas Valentine, author of the recently released account of the DEA, “The Strength of the Pack,” contributes this piece to The Mind Body Politic:
Disrupting the Accommodation: The CIA Killings Spell Defeat In Afghanistan
Why?
“Why?” The grieving family members ask. “Why did the terrorists kill our loved ones?” (more…)
Swine-Flu Vaccine Facts That Should Frighten You
One of the best read articles in 2009 on Lew Rockwell was one by Bill Sardi on eighteen reasons you shouldn´t take the swine flu vaccine. Here´s an excerpt, but it´s worth reading the whole piece.
“4. The vaccines will be produced by no less than four different manufacturers, possibly with different additives (called adjuvants) and manufacturing methods. The two flu inoculations may be derived from a multi-dose vial and in a crisis, and in short supply, it will be diluted to provide more doses and then adjuvants must be added to trigger a stronger immune response. Adjuvants are added to vaccines to boost production of antibodies but may trigger autoimmune reactions. Some adjuvants are mercury (thimerosal), aluminum and squalene. Would you permit your children to be injected with lead? Lead is very harmful to the brain. Then why would you sign a consent form for your kids to be injected with mercury, which is even more brain-toxic than lead? Injecting mercury may fry the brains of American kids.
American Pot Described By Chinese Kettle
Veteran investigative journalist David Lindorff in 2005 on the Chinese turning the tables on the US on human rights:
” The New York Times was almost apoplectic Sunday over a human rights “report card” issued by China’s Foreign Affairs Department on the United States. That report, a response to the annual report on China’s human rights situation issued by the U.S. State Department, called attention to a number of areas where the U.S. is in violation of universally accepted norms of behavior.
Having lived for two years in China–a fascist-style military dictatorship where the law is simply another tool of repression for those in authority, and where people are routinely locked up, tortured, deprived of their livelihood and even their lives for such transgressions as posting comments on a website, protesting a corrupt boss or conducting prayer services in a private home, and a place where perceptions of America can be pretty bizarre–I was expecting something comic after reading in the Times that the report on the U.S. “approaches caricature.”
In fact, putting aside whom it was doing the talking, the report was pretty damned accurate, and devastating.
American society is characterized by rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people’s rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee of the right to life, liberty and security, the Chinese report said, noting that in addition to the threats from uniformed law enforcement, some 31,000 Americans were killed by firearms last year. The report also noted America’s record two million prison inmates, and the fact that three times that many are on parole or probation.
Caricature? Hardly. The number of people being jailed in the U.S. is a national scandal, particularly considering the percentage who are black and Latino, and the fact that most are there for non-violent offenses. And no surprise there: Nearly every time I am on the road and see a car pulled over by a trooper, I discover that the driver is black. Unless blacks are uniquely prone to speeding, there is an epidemic of racial profiling, and it’s not limited to highways.
American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractice is common, the report continues, noting that elections in the U.S. are “in fact a contest of money.” Really. Can anyone honestly call this a caricature? I remember when I was teaching a group of journalism graduate students in Shanghai, I received my mail ballot from home, which at the time was a small town in upstate New York. I was happy to receive it because I wanted to show it to my class, where the students were anxious to see first-hand how American democracy works. Imagine my chagrin when I opened the envelope and saw that the ballot was composed entirely of single candidates for each post. Republicans so dominated the upstate region that no one bothered to run against them for any town or county post! “These look just like our ballots!” the students said in amazement. Nor in our current red state/blue state polity, are things much different across most of the country, where campaign funding laws, or the lack thereof, make incumbency virtually a guarantee of re-election.
In the area of economic rights, the Chinese report said poverty, hunger and homelessness “haunt the world’s richest country.” Here I’d have to disagree. While the figure they used (from the U.S. Census Bureau—36 million living in poverty—is correct, it is hardly a condition that “haunts” the majority living above the poverty line, since our derelict corporate media don’t cover the poverty beat, and our economically segregated communities make it easy for people to ignore the suffering in the midst of plenty. Still, noting that a sixth of the nation lives in poverty is no caricature. It’s a fact.
Racial discrimination? The report says it permeates every aspect of society, while the new post 9-11 homeland security regulations especially target ethnic minorities, foreigners and immigrants. Does anyone want to challenge the accuracy of that depiction?
As for the rights of women and children, the report called attention to the deplorable rate of rapes and sexual abuse, with some 400,000 children forced into prostitution and sexual abuse. This ugly reality, while also true for China, cannot be brushed aside here.
Finally the Chinese report addressed the abuse of foreigners by U.S. authorities, noting the scandalous violations of the rights of prisoners of war, the history of invasions and unprovoked military assaults on other nations, and the estimated 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq.
For my part, I was surprised the Chinese report didn’t go further, to mention the failure of the U.S. to abide by international law in allowing foreigners arrested on serious criminal charges in the U.S., including murder, to contact their embassies, the shameful inadequacy of funding for schools in poor communities, the dumping of toxic waste and the siting of pollution-causing power plants in low-income communities, and the theft of private property through improper use of imminent [sic] domain and draconian drug laws, the unconscionably high percentage of minorities on American death rows, as well as other abuses.
China is one of the world’s prime human rights offenders, but that ugly reality should not prevent us from looking honestly into the mirror that it has held up to our own society and government.
If anything is a caricature, it is the article on the Chinese report, in which The Times appears as a caricature of real independent journalism.”Doug Valentine On The Empire of The Lie
Douglas Valentine, author of several masterful books on national security and the CIA, talks to Susan Mazur about Tim Weiner´s new book on the CIA (”Legacy of Ashes”), the nexus of finance and espionage, and the propaganda campaign that lets Americans think the CIA is a force for good.
Here´s a snippet:
“Most of what Weiner writes about the CIA is already known. It’s a history book with a bias, not an expose, at least not for the Vietnam generation. He doesn’t even really get into the current Bush administration. He gives us a predictable treatment of William Casey and the Contras, when there was an incredible revival of the CIA under Casey.”
And that´s precisely what I´d say about exposes that appear in establishment outlets, even if they seem to be literary and anti-establishment (Vanity Fair, New York Times, even, perhaps Rolling Stone, although much less so). They are less about exposing as about controlling the terms of the discourse, that is, the boundaries within which discussion can take place.
Another insight from Valentine:
“Angleton thought William Colby might be a mole. Angleton exposed the divisions within the CIA after 1966, the Colby vs. Helms factions. He also represented the literary sensibility the CIA once had, where finding secrets was like teasing the meaning out of a poem. Now we have sledgehammer spies.”
(Colby, by the way, died in a ‘boating accident’ in Maryland, on the day that a prosecutor got permission to set up a grand jury to probe the death of Frank Olson, who was involved in chemical warfare research and had been one of the subjects of the CIA´s mind control experiments. The CIA claimed Olson jumped to his death from a hotel window, although his injuries, according to the autopsy, could as well have been inflicted by a blunt instrument. I should note that at the time of his death in 1996 Colby´s name was being used on the letter head of Strategic Investments, a publication of Agora Inc. (co-owned by my co-author), according to several reports, although I can´t confirm to my satisfaction the exact status of that association. Several unconfirmed reports also link Colby to knowledge about the death (or killing, according to some) of White House deputy counsel, Vincent Foster, a preoccupation at the time, of Agora co-founder James Davidson)
More from Douglas Valentine:
“The CIA gets oodles of money from the arms business. Most of their income comes from criminal activity.
The Russian Mafia operates with a sort of impunity. And so does the Israeli Mafia. And one of the reasons they have this sort of impunity is that they’re sharing their profits with the CIA.
And I think a lot of CIA money is capital investments. They’re like movie producers. They want to overthrow the Iraqi government, they go to companies like Halliburton and others who are going to profit from the overthrow of Iraq. And like the executive producers of some movie, they get them to ante-up some cash. Telling them, don’t worry about it, the government contracts you get in return will cover your investment. Plus they have the old boy network – which now is so far flung.
Suzan Mazur: Plus some of the military contractors are organized crime and have had contracts since the 50s.
Doug Valentine: Exactly. Which bring us back to Barry Seal (Iran-Contra). Because in 1972, Barry Seal was to fly some arms and some explosives into Mexico. What the Brooklyn Drug Task Force found out is that this guy named Murray Kessler, who was involved with the Gambino family in Brooklyn, had an arms manufacturing company in New Jersey where the guns and the bombs came from.
Suzan Mazur: And some of these arms merchants also had security clearance during the McNamara and Clifford years of heading the Defense Department. They make weapons for the US government and some for whoever they feel like.
Doug Valentine: From my perspective, the spy industry and especially the arms industry, is the foundation on which the American empire is built. The United States has a military budget of I think $300 billion dollars and the CIA budget is like $50 billion – that’s a year. Together that’s bigger than the gross national product of any country in the world. And in the meantime we’re worried about 20 guys in Al-Qaeda.
[Lila: This statement is inaccurate, as both GDP and GNP in most developed countries were near or over a trillion in 2007. See current figures here. I think the author might have been misquoted on this and might have meant “many countries,” for example, in the developing world. However, projections for 2010 place US military spending in excess of 1 trillion, if all military-related expenditures are included).
Continuing with the interview:
“Suzan Mazur: Which exploits of the agency do you consider the most diabolical – aside from the fact that one of its founding fathers molested two of his own children – and a reason why the CIA should have been dismantled years ago?
Doug Valentine: Your readers don’t want to know that answer. The most dastardly thing that the CIA has done is to wage this campaign of psychological warfare against the American people. Where the American people don’t see the CIA for a bunch of basically American KGB agents who are conducting criminal activities around the world. There’s a movie called The Usual Suspects with a much feared criminal named Keyser Soze. And Keyser is talking to a cop and he says the greatest trick that the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.
And this is what people like Weiner are doing with books about the CIA that don’t explain it for what it really is. They’re part of a propaganda machine that’s making the American people see the CIA in mythological terms as good guys, crusaders, as Lawrence of Arabia – when, in fact, they’re criminals. They’re part of THE GRAND LIE.”
My Comment
The piece is long and, for an intelligence aficionado, packed with illuminating detail. Among other things, Valentine touches on James Jesus Angleton, the most compelling of the spy masters (since he was chief of counter intelligence, I should call him chief spy hunter), the extensive role of private intelligence (which I touched on in my Abu Ghraib book), as well as the manipulation of Wikipedia, which Valentine regards as considerably influenced by the CIA. This confirms my own long-standing observations about Wikipedia. On crucial topics, it stays within the bounds of debate allowed by Western establishment interests and is very far from being an objective or quasi-scholarly affair. (I use the term Western because despite a substantial component of foreigners, the predominant interests served are the interests of the state and the military-industrial and financial industries), the most influential and powerful of which are Western. I do not use the terms capitalist, because I see the establishment as essentially a technocrat or money-managing class, working against capital formation in many respects.
And a final word, from the lips of Bill Colby himself:
“The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
Was this tongue-in-cheek, or meant to be taken literally? You decide..
Facebook Charged With Violating Federal Laws
As I blogged earlier, Facebook’s policies and settings are themselves a problem, misleading users and indeed, abusers. It’s now being charged with violating federal privacy laws:
“Ten privacy organizations filed a complaint against Facebook Inc. to the Federal Trade Commission Thursday, arguing that recent changes to the social-networking company’s privacy policies and settings violate federal laws.
The complaint, spearheaded by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, was triggered by changes Facebook made in November and December. Those changes included recommending people set more of their information to be public rather than visible only to friends and treating new information, like a person’s gender and lists of friends, as “publicly available information” that Facebook may share with software developers who build services for Facebook users.
The complaint asks the FTC to investigate the practices and to require Facebook to restore previous privacy settings that allowed people to choose whether to disclose personal information.
A Facebook spokesman saidit “discussed the privacy program with many regulators, including the FTC, prior to launch and expect to continue to work with them in the future.”
The complaint is the latest sign of how privacy—or at least consumers’ perceptions about it—remains a problem for Facebook.”
Facebook´s Misleading Privacy Tools
Update: I deactivated my facebook account, following the fracas over the facebook friends page. I´m still on Twitter. I will also - probably in a few months - change the format of this blog to make some part of it private, partly to avoid plagiarism and partly for security.
According to this report, privacy advocates are outraged by Facebook´s new settings (that went into effect on Wednesday):
“The Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome development that will likely cause a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook’s users, whether intentionally or inadvertently.”
Prior to the change, Facebook users could keep everything but their names and networks private.
Maybe that throws light on this.
On inquiring, Deep Capture says the inclusion of some of the names initially was an accident and has removed them. It also point out here that the characterization of the list as hacked is libelous…
Other users might want to double-check their settings.
Government Democide: The Power That Kills…
R. J. Rummel on democide:
“This is a report of the statistical results from a project on comparative genocide and mass-murder in this century. Most probably near 170,000,000 people have been murdered in cold-blood by governments, well over three-quarters by absolutist regimes. The most such killing was done by the Soviet Union (near 62,000,000 people), the communist government of China is second (near 35,000,000), followed by Nazi Germany (almost 21,000,000), and Nationalist China (some 10,000,000). Lesser megamurderers include WWII Japan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, WWI Turkey, communist Vietnam, post-WWII Poland, Pakistan, and communist Yugoslavia. The most intense democide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where they killed over 30 percent of their subjects in less than four years. The best predictor of this killing is regime power. The more arbitrary power a regime has, the less democratic it is, the more likely it will kill its subjects or foreigners. The conclusion is that power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.“
War On Terror Monitoring Likely to Spread to Latin America
“Eric Farnsworth, Vice President of the Council of Americas, said he believes that Iran may be looking for uranium, possibly in Venezuela. But Time Magazine reported in an Oct. 8 article that “experts say it’s hardly certain Venezuela even has much, if any, uranium to provide Iran or anyone else.” Farnsworth also claimed Iran’s improved diplomatic relations with countries in Latin America is a boon for its intelligence capabilities.
Dina Siegel Vann, another “expert” who testified at the hearing, cited a U.S. State Department Terrorism report published in April that stated the Tri Border Area of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil is a hub for Hezbollah and Hamas sympathizers-something that has been widely disputed. Vann, Director of the Latino and Latin American Institute at the American Jewish Committee noted that the report also cited Bolivia as a possible site for terrorist activity.
“Concerted and decisive action is needed to closely monitor the activity of Iran and the groups it subsidizes, to correctly assess their potential for mischief, and to establish mechanisms to prevent potentially dangerous scenarios,” said Vann.
Coincidentally, these attempts to designate parts of Latin America as potential threats and conduits of terror attacks are in countries that have democratically elected left and center-left governments. And all of this comes as Washington’s controversial military base deal with Colombia awaits approval.”My Comment
We´ve been blogging for some time now that Latin America seems to be going the way of Asia as a site of resource- warfare cum terrorism-monitoring. This article signals another step in that direction.
Now, according to the electronic police state rankings of Cryptohippie for 2008 (I blogged this several months ago), Brazil is still a “green” state - that is, one in which monitoring is lagging. But articles like this suggest that it will be heading in the direction of the more advanced yellow, orange, and red states (in order of increasing surveillence).
Israeli National Airline a Front for Israeli Secret Police?
Jonathan Cook in Dissident Voice:
“South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travellers.
The move by the South African government followed an investigation by local TV showing an undercover reporter being illegally interrogated by an official with El Al, Israel’s national carrier, in a public area of Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport.
The programme also featured testimony from Jonathan Garb, a former El Al guard, who claimed that the airline company had been a front for the Shin Bet in South Africa for many years.
Of the footage of the undercover reporter’s questioning, he commented: “Here is a secret service operating above the law in South Africa. We pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We do exactly what we want. The local authorities do not know what we are doing.”
Totalitarianism: The Total Domination of Man
From “Evil: The Crime Against Humanity,” by Jerome Kohn
The “total domination of man” was radically evil, in Arendt’s eyes, not only because it was unprecedented but because it did not make sense. She asked: Why should lust for power, which from the beginning of recorded history has been considered the political and social sin par excellence, suddenly transcend all previously known limitations of self-interest and utility and attempt not simply to dominate men as they are but to change their very nature; not only to kill whoever is in the way of further power accumulation but also innocent and harmless bystanders, and this even when such murder is an obstacle, rather than an advantage, for the accumulation of power?
(see “Ideology and Propaganda”)There is no ready answer to that question. In Hitler’s case it is well known that his unrelenting dehumanization and destruction of those who presented no threat to him hindered his ability to fight effectively against his real enemies at the end of World War II. What is the point of dominating men at any cost, not as they are but in order “to change their very nature”? If it is for the sake of “the consistency of a lying world order,” as she went on to suggest, what is the point of a system that even if it succeeded in destroying the human world would not end in the creation of a “thousand-year Reich” or “Messianic Age” but only in self-destruction? Arendt, to be sure, never thought the suicidal “victory” of totalitarianism likely. That would first require global rule by one totalitarian power, and in that regard she believed that Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 was symbolically significant in spite of his pact with Stalin two years earlier and in spite of the two leaders’ mutual admiration which she emphasized. Moreover, she saw that “no system has ever been less capable [than totalitarianism] of gradually expanding its sphere of influence and holding on to its conquests.” Most important of all, because plurality is the inescapable condition of human existence–”not Man but men inhabit this planet”–Arendt increasingly came to consider farfetched the notion that a single totalitarian regime could ever destroy the entire world.”
CIT Group In Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
Big trouble ahead. Bloomberg reports:
“ CIT Group, the 101-year-old commercial lender that saw its funding dry up in the credit crunch, filed for bankruptcy in an effort to cut $10 billion in debt following a failed debt exchange and U.S. taxpayer bailout.
CIT listed $71 billion in assets and $64.9 billion in liabilities in a Chapter 11 petition yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. The Treasury Department said the government probably won’t recover much, if any, of the $2.3 billion in taxpayer money that went to CIT
More from AP:
“After struggling for months to avert bankruptcy, lender CIT Group has filed for Chapter 11 protection in an attempt to restructure its debt while trying to keep badly needed loans flowing to thousands of mid-sized and small businesses.
CIT made the filing in New York bankruptcy court Sunday, after a debt-exchange offer to bondholders failed. CIT said in a statement that its bondholders overwhelmingly opted for a prepackaged reorganization plan which will reduce total debt by $10 billion while allowing the company to continue to do business.
The Chapter 11 filing is one of the biggest in U.S. corporate history, following Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, WorldCom and General Motors. CIT’s bankruptcy filing shows $71 billion in finance and leasing assets against total debt of $64.9 billion.”
My Comment:
Uh oh. So what happened to the government’s hand out to CIT last year?
It goes kaput. That’s $2.3 billion in return for preferred shares that are now worth zip, nada, zilch. The CIT Chapter 11 also means pain for all the small businesses relying on CIT’s lending to meet pay roll and pay off bills for orders. According to the AP article, CIT is the lender for about 2000 vendors supplying some 300,000 retails stores that depend on them to meet demand during the holiday season (Halloween and Thanksgiving to Christmas and New Year).
The Bloomberg piece says that CIT funds 1 million businesses.
Following in Friday’s 200 plus point drop in the Dow, this looks grim.
I’d get out of all stock positions on the next swing up…if there is one…
UK Military Protocol for Security & Counter-Intel Ops
An important document on how the British state deals with what it perceives as security threats:
“This significant, previously unpublished document (classified “RESTRICTED”, 2389 pages), is the UK military protocol for all security and counter-intelligence operations.
The document includes instructions on dealing with leaks, investigative journalists, Parliamentarians, foreign agents, terrorists & criminals, sexual entrapments in Russia and China, diplomatic pouches, allies, classified documents & codewords, compromising radio and audio emissions, computer hackers—and many other related issues.
The document, known in the services as the “JSP 440″ (”Joint Services Protocol 440″), was referenced by the RAF Digby investigation team as the protocol justification for the monitoring of Wikileaks, as mentioned in “UK Ministry of Defence continually monitors WikiLeaks: eight reports into classified UK leaks, 29 Sep 2009.”Read more at Wikileaks on UK protocols for dealing with security threats of all kinds, from investigative journalists looking for disclosure of official documents to Chinese officials seeking “influence” (there’s an extensive section describing Chinese intelligence gathering).
Ron Paul: There Will Be Violence….
Ron Paul on Glenn Beck, via Lew Rockwell:
“I think that there will be violence,” he explained. “I hope we don’t have to go through, you know, a very violent period of time, but that’s what happens too often when the government runs out of money and runs out of wealth, the people argue over, you know, a shrinking pie and, of course, the people who have to produce are sick and tired of producing.”
Roman Polanski Arrested by Swiss at US Request..
Roman Polansky, acclaimed film director, has been living abroad for years to avoid arrest for charges stemming from ‘date rape’ of an underage girl. Now he’s been arrested by the Swiss, says an AP report this morning.
Polanksi’s horrible actions can’t be excused by his considerable talent. But, from a libertarian stance, I am not sure why the state needs to pursue him further, when the victim seems to have settled and wants the whole business over.
I say this, despite having very strong feelings about crimes of this nature, which - when the victims are not minors - are often dismissed as “consensual” - instead of what they really are - acquaintance or date rape. When you target a naive young man or woman, ply them with alcohol and slip drugs into their food, in order to make them compliant, you are raping them, as surely as if you’d knocked them over the head. [I know the victim's surname has been given every where, but on principle, I think it should not be - so I am referring to her by initial. I also removed the link to her testimony to the grand jury which I'd placed here before. I hope other writers will do the same.].
But Polanski has paid his dues and made amends to the victim to her satisfaction. Why is the state baying for blood? Ambitious judge?
Here is what the victim, now married with three children, has said about the repeated publicizing of the case.
“My views as a victim, my feelings as a victim, or my desires as a victim were never considered or even inquired into by the district attorney prior to the filing,” she said. “It is clear to me that because the district attorney’s office has been accused of wrongdoing, it has recited the lurid details of the case to distract attention from the wrongful conduct of the district attorney’s office as well as the judge who was then assigned to the case.”
There is really no “public” good being served by rehashing this business when Polanski is in his 70’s and has never offended again, when there’s been evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, and most importantly, when the victim is satisfied that justice has been done. All the rest is vanity, careerism, and titillation.
Next to the number of children whom governments and corporations routinely abuse when they starve, bomb, destroy, and impoverish whole countries, the damage Polanski did was relatively limited.
It seems as if the Swiss have become pretty compliant with demands from the US government.
What does this say about the new monetary regulatory regime, now headquartered in Switzerland?Could the government just be looking for a high-profile victim to lend legitimacy to its own intrusiveness.
“In 1977, he [Polansky] was accused of raping the teenager while photographing her during a modeling session. The girl said Polanski plied her with champagne and part of a Quaalude pill at Jack Nicholson’s house while the actor was away. She said that, despite her protests, he performed oral sex, intercourse and sodomy on her.
Polanski was allowed to plead guilty to one of six charges, unlawful sexual intercourse, and was sent to prison for 42 days of evaluation.
Lawyers agreed that would be his full sentence, but the judge tried to renege on the plea bargain. Aware the judge would sentence him to more prison time and require his voluntary deportation, Polanski fled to France.
The victim, Samantha G, who long ago identified herself publicly, has joined in Polanski’s bid for dismissal, saying she wants the case to be over. She sued Polanski and reached an undisclosed settlement.”
Robert Prechter on Closing Doors..
The July 2009 Elliot Wave Theorist by Robert Prechter has some ominous warnings.
Prechter warns that as the depression deepens, more and more avenues of escape are going to be shut off. He lists three that have become difficult:
1. You used to be able to invest in tax-free foreign annuities. Now you have to pay tax on them.
2. You could deposit your money at any Swiss bank. Now, harassment by US authorities has led many of those banks to shut the door on American depositors.
3. You could emigrate to New Zealand easily. Now, independent operators without a government license who try to help immigrants face trouble.Police Overpower “Dangerous” Double Amputee
Will Grigg at the Lew Rockwell blog:
“Responding to a domestic violence report, police in Merced, California helped child “protection” workers abduct the two-year-old daughter of 40-year-old Gregory Williams, a double amputee who is confined to a wheelchair.
Williams, a father of three who lost his legs to deep vein thrombosis six years ago and is currently unemployed, had been arguing with his wife. Rather than trying to defuse the situation, the police summoned a CPS worker who decided to seize the two-year-old, Ginni.
When Williams objected, the police placed him under arrest and attempted to force him into the familiar “prone-out” position….
This act of instinctive self-preservation was described as “resisting arrest”
So Officer John Pinnegar shoved his Portable Electro-Shock Torture device into Williams’ ribs and pulled the trigger twice.
At least one other officer, Sgt. Rodney Court, assisted the valiant Pinnegar in subduing the legless man. Hey, can’t be too careful — “officer safety” and all that. At one point Court shoved a knee into the middle of Williams’ back while Pinnegar cuffed the victim.
The double-amputee was left sitting on the pavement, handcuffed behind the back, with his pants pulled down below the waist — in broad daylight, in full view of the residents of his apartment complex.”
Government to Introduce Biometric ID in India
“While Brits are longing for less surveillance in their electronic snoop state, the government in India seems to want to take Bharat Mata farther down that road. Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of India’s tech giant, Infosys, and now the head of the Government’s Unique ID project, is proposing an
Indian biometric ID.What’s incredible is he thinks it’s feasible to extend this to the whole population. Apart from the logistics, the level of technology, and the cost (1.5 lakh crores - a number I’ll translate later), there’s the vulnerability to abuse, considerations which deterred Britain from going ahead with its own biometric ID scheme.
They don’t seem to bother Nikelani - one of “Flat Earth” globalist Tom Friedman’s favorite people. He discussed the objections in an interview with CNN-IBN’s Karan Thapar, published in the Hindu.
Here’s a short excerpt:
“Karan Thapar: You said a moment ago that you would create checks and balances. I put it to you that you can never create sufficient and the reason say is this — In the UK, in the US and in Australia, because the authorities couldn’t respond to public concerns about misuse, they have effectively put on the backburner consideration of similar schemes for those countries. Now if developed countries cannot tackle the problem of misuse, then how can India, where 35 per cent of the people are illiterate and 22 per cent live below the poverty line? How can India claim that we can tackle these problems?
Nandan Nilekani: What these developed countries have put on hold is giving national ID cards to people. But both the countries, US and UK have a number. For example in the US, you have the social security number, in the UK there is the national insurance number. They already have a numbering system, which is what we are going to propose.
Karan Thapar: Except for the fact that is is nowhere near as extensive or as complete in terms of the biometeric details as what you are proposing in India. The national insurance in Britain has been around and developing slowly but it doesn’t have any details that could lead to an invasion of privacy. It doesn’t have any details that can be misused for profiling. Yours could have both?
Nandan Nilekani: As I said, these are legitimate concerns and I think we have to address them in the public as well as in the laws and so on. But notwithstanding these concerns, the social benefit, the inclusivity that this project will provide for the 700 million people in this country who are outside the system is immense enough to justify doing this project…”
My Comment
Notice, once more, that’s it’s “social uplift” that’s the excuse for the expansion of the state, the same reasoning given for the sale of IMF gold. And as suspect in this case as it is in that. It seems as if public officials hardly get a wink of sleep cooking up schemes to help the poor.
Consider that the British biometric scheme was put on the backburner because it cost too much. The London School of Economics calculated that it would cost between 10 and 20 billion pounds, and Britian is about 1/20 the size of India. Now figure how mind-boggling the Indian scheme is likely to be be…..in every respect.
New Labor Turns Brits into Libertarians?
From The Guardian:
“A poll run by PoliticsHome this week revealed a fascinating result to the question: “Do you think in general, the state has too much or too little of a say in what people can and cannot do?” Nearly four-fifths of the sample (79%) answered that the state had too much of a say, while only 8% believe the state has too little say.
If the poll is an accurate reflection of the nation’s mood this is an important finding. For some time I have been aware of sharp change in the public’s attitudes to surveillance, as well as a general feeling that the government is too quick to seize personal data and tell people how to lead their lives.”Cops Allowed to Draw Drivers’ Blood Forcibly..
In the news:
“The nation’s highest court ruled in 1966 that police could have blood tests forcibly done on a drunk driving suspect without a warrant, as long as the draw was based on a reasonable suspicion that a suspect was intoxicated, that it was done after an arrest and carried out in a medically approved manner. The practice of cops drawing blood, implemented first in 1995 in Arizona, has also raised concerns about safety and the credibility of the evidence….”
More here at AP on another symptom of a system out of whack.
Christians Should Look Outside the Two Parties…
Greg at The Holy Cause writes this, after reviewing the GOP’s record during the Bush administration:
“Christians should be leaving the Republican Party in droves. Christians should be crawling on broken glass as penance for blindly supporting the Republican Party. Christians should be repenting in sackcloth and ashes for thinking the Republican Party was the party of God.
Instead, even as more and more crimes of the Bush administration come to light, I fear that Christians who are outraged, and rightly so, at the crimes of the Obama administration and the Democrats will look in the next election to the Republicans as their savior instead of the champions of war and torture….”
My Comment:
I agree with the post that neither party is consonant with Christian values. But I fear that the tendency to identify one’s party with “the good and the true” isn’t limited to Christians. Liberals are equally convinced of it. I also question the findings of the Pew study cited by Greg that finds that evangelicals are more likely to support torture. As I noted when I posted the study a while back, the sample size jt uses seems too small to be useful.
H1N1 Pandemic Bill in Mass. Calls for Medical Police State
H1N1 Pandemic Bill in Massachussetts introduces a Medical Police State
Fred Reed on US Government Inc.
“Americans really are good folk. The government isn’t. It’s the gravest problem we face, both internationally and domestically.
(6) The Constitution really is going away, or has gone. It never did work as well as it should have, but few things human ever do. Habeas corpus is dead, right to an attorney, congressional right to declare war – it’s not even worth listing the list……
(7) The increasing, detailed, intrusive regulation of life, the national desire for control, control, control. Everything is the business of some form of government. Want to paint your shutters? The condo association won’t let you. Let dogs in your bar? Never. Decide who to sell your house to? Racial matter. Own a dog? Shot card, pooper-scooper, leash, gotta be spayed, etc. Have a bar for men only, women only, whites or blacks only? Here come the federal marshals. What isn’t controlled by government is controlled by the crypto-vindictive mob rule of political correctness. This wasn’t always in the American character.
Add the continuing presence of police in the schools, the arrest in handcuffs of children of seven, the expulsions for drawing a picture of a soldier with a gun. Something very twisted is going on.
How much of the public knows what is happening, or even knows that something is happening? I don’t know. But I don’t think that it’s going to go away. In ten years it will be an entirely different place with the same name. Almost is now.”
Hans Hoppe on Citizens as Public Property
Lew Rockwell cites some arresting insights from Hans Hoppe on the Constitution and on the ultimate nature of democracy and the total state:
“History bears this out. Hoppe dates the onset of modern democracy to World War I and following, and he has scandalized many by calling the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany all democracies, but he means this in his special sense: the people neither own themselves nor are owned by anyone. The citizens are public property and are said to all participate in their own governance understood as an elected executive state. This was a modern form of government that displaced the old form – and it goes a long way towards explaining the advent of total war and the total state.”
The End of Locational Privacy…
Adam Cohen has a great piece at the New York Times on the end of locational privacy:
“Verizon online knows when I logged on, and New York Sports Club knows when I swiped my membership card. The M.T.A. could trace (through the MetroCard I bought with a credit card) when and where I took the subway, and The Times knows when I used my ID to enter the building. AT&T could follow me along the way through my iPhone.
There may also be videotape of my travels, given the ubiquity of surveillance cameras in New York City. There are thousands of cameras on buildings and lampposts around Manhattan, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, many near my home and office. Several may have been in a position to film dinner on Elisabeth and Dan’s roof.
A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up “locational privacy.” Even in low-tech days, our movements were not entirely private. The desk attendant at my gym might have recalled seeing me, or my colleagues might have remembered when I arrived. Now the information is collected automatically and often stored indefinitely.
Privacy advocates are rightly concerned. Corporations and the government can keep track of what political meetings people attend, what bars and clubs they go to, whose homes they visit. It is the fact that people’s locations are being recorded “pervasively, silently, and cheaply that we’re worried about,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report.
People’s cellphones and E-Z Passes are increasingly being used against them in court. If your phone is on, even if you are not on a call, you may be able to be found (and perhaps picked up) at any hour of the day or night. As disturbing as it is to have your private data breached, it is worse to think that your physical location might fall into the hands of people who mean you harm….”
My Comment
And of course, that’s what I’m liking about my stay down south. The feeling of having someone always looking over your shoulders diminishes a lot once you leave the country.
To add to Cohen’s litany of surveillance, take Google accounts. There’s an option that lets Google keep track of your web browsing, of every site you opened, and all it takes is a check against the box. Say someone hacks your Google account. Or a Google employee decides to do it as a prank or from malice. They could check that box and keep tabs on what it was you were reading and investigating.
That’s only one possibility. Obviously, someone could also hack your account and browse through it to create a fake history of what you were investigating or browsing. You could without your knowledge have been reading “jihadi” sites….or racist sites…or hate sites of some other type…or child pornography…or anything else your enemies might want to recreate you as.
People who think Google and wiki are going to bring down the establishment have got to be kidding or very naive. Google and wiki can, have, and will work with the establishment when it suits them.
Why More Swine Flu Deaths in Bangalore?
From Sify.com:
“State health commissioner P.N. Sreenivasachari told IANS: ‘It’s difficult to say why Karnataka, more precisely Bangalore, which is endowed with adequate healthcare facilities, is witnessing large number of swine flu deaths. We too are puzzled.
‘We can say the virus is already in the air and it’s time people became more aware and cautious to stop the spread of the virus. However, from the point of view of the administration, we have provided adequate healthcare facilities to treat swine flu patients,’ added Sreenivasachari.
Principal secretary (Health) I.R. Perumal said people should not get panicky.
‘People with swine flu like symptoms should immediately get themselves checked, as the city is well equipped to deal with the pandemic,’ added Perumal.
On Friday, two deaths were reported from Bangalore, one came from Bijapur.
My Comment
Why? I have no idea. More international travelers is one reason and a plausible one. But I confess I couldn’t help thinking about this piece I wrote in 2005, “Terror Hits Bangalore.”
One result of swine flu scare-mongering will be a shift of money to influenza research - hitherto absent in India. That means funding for drug trials. I wonder who the lucky drug companies are that will benefit?
The two states hit hardest are Karnataka (where Bangalore is) and Maharashtra (where Bombay is). Those are also the states that are the destinations of most foreign travelers and where India’s IT business and stock market are located. Bangalore is the home of a booming biotech business. And a locus of the anti-globalization movement as well. Just thinking out a loud…
Deaths so far are a hundred or less. That’s in a country of roughly a billion and a quarter where tens of thousands die from traffic accidents (300 a day or around 100,000 a year) and from water-borne diseases like diarrhea, typhoid, and jaundice. Hundred of farmers are committing suicide. None of that has qualified for the term pandemic….OR for the accompanying switch in research funding..
Here’s some information on malaria in India in 2008:
“While the official figures state that in 2008 India had 1.5 million malaria cases, resulting in 924 deaths, the real number of deaths is higher by several orders of magnitude.
“These numbers are a joke,” said Sunil Kaul, a doctor who works for a volunteer organization called the Ant that treats villagers. “In Assam alone we had at least 1,500 deaths last year.”
The real number of malaria-related deaths in India was closer to 40,000 in 2008, according to various non-governmental sources and some government officials who didn’t want to be named.”
Under-reporting and lack of knowledge about the disease are two of the main obstacles in retarding the spread of malaria. But interestingly, it’s also international organizations like WHO that obstruct progress in many ways:
“These problems are further complicated by foreign agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), which — under the influence of global lending agencies like the World Bank and big pharmaceutical companies — have pushed India to adopt prevention methods that don’t suit the local conditions and to initiate huge, ill-considered projects rather than targeted ones. ….”
More here at The Global Post.
Swine-Flu is a Man-Made Panic..
My new piece on swine-flu is up at Lew Rockwell.
Please note, I have it as Harold Varnus in the piece. It should be Varmus, as in my previous blog post on the subject. In my defense, I wrote it mostly in very dim light…
“The latest in the barrage of media reports on swine flu is a Bloomberg news report (August 25, 2009) that it might hospitalize 1.8 million patients in the US and over-burden hospital intensive care units.
This comes from a planning scenario released by the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology
The Bloomberg story cites some theatrical numbers:
- Half of the US population infected (that is, over 150 million people)
- 300,000 people in hospital intensive care units
- 30–90,000 people dead
- By-pass surgery emergency operations disrupted
But hidden in paragraph 5 of the Bloomberg piece is the most pertinent part:
These numbers are only “scenario projections” that were “developed from models put together for planning purposes only,” says a Centers for Disease Control spokesman.
So.
- Statistical projections.
- Projections from models of past pandemics. (And not the past, as in 1968 or 1957, but way back, as in 1918.)
- Projections developed for planning purposes only.
That’s three stages removed from anything you could call reality.
But perish this tenuous link with facts, PCAST wants Obama to rush through vaccine production so that 40 million people can be infect – er – injected by mid-September.
And who should make that decision?
A doctor? The surgeon-general? A medical team?
Why, the homeland security adviser!
That’s John Brennan, a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, deputy executive director of the CIA under George Tenet, and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (CTC) from 2004 to 2005 during the exact period when the CIA became most heavily involved in torture practices in Iraq and elsewhere.”
Note:
I wanted to state here that my social views are quite liberal, and I do not have any objection to voluntary family planning and contraception. I’m also firmly pro-choice. And in terms of the environment, I support far greater consideration by each of us, as individuals and as communities, for animal life, nature, and conservation.
But those are my personal views. Putting the legal and physical force of the corporate- state behind those preferences, in the form that Holdren apparently thinks will work, is, in my view, completely misguided.
Scientists Who Developed Vaccine Won’t Take It Themselves? (Correction added)
– Wayne Madsen on Guillain-Barre syndrome and the swine flu vaccine
My Comment:
I’m hearing that I misunderstood this and it’s the makers of the small-pox vaccine who are baulking.
I’ll try to track that down.Meanwhile, why would you trust a government that sends secretive letters to neurologists admitting fears it won’t admit to the public that’s getting the vaccinations?
Bill Lets President Seize Emergency Control of Private Cyber Networks
In the news:
“Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.”Read more here.
My Comment
Please note “behind closed doors.” This was supposed to be an ultra-transparent administration, right? To make up for the secrecy and tyranny of George Bush…..
Remember?Gore Vidal On the Bridge to Fascism
Gore Vidal on a bridge to somewhere bad :
“I went back to the lecture hall at Duke where I’d been speaking, and I chatted about the woods, about the bridge. Nobody seemed to have noticed it. I asked a politically minded professor, and he said, “Well, it’s a problem.” He said, “The government’s getting ready for something; we don’t know what it is, but something’s obviously on their minds that’s disturbing them.” And I said, “Revolution?” “Oh,” he laughed, “this is North Carolina, don’t bother about that, but whatever it is, they’re putting a lot of money into this bridge.”
A year or two later, I took the same walk again. There was a very large bridge of solid cement, and it looked entirely finished. I found another gentleman of the forest, and I said, “Well, can you find much use for this huge and expensive bridge?” He said, “It certainly was expensive, I can tell you that.” He had the happy look of someone who had benefited from the expense. We chatted about the government and what they were up to, and a certain wariness could be heard in our dialogue. We were puzzled; something unexpected had happened, something really unimaginable—a vast work had been constructed for imminent horrors, it would have seemed. I did ask here and there about it, but I was given no answer….”
Trauma and Brainwashing
Since I’ve been posting about media spin and the brainwashing of the public, here’s an enlightening post at Humble Libertarian on post-traumatic stress disorder among vets, apparently at near-epidemic levels
What has that to do with brainwashing? Everything, as the video above shows.
Early victims of US brainwashing techniques were US army personnel, as experimentation in the CIA brain-washing program, MK-Ultra shows. They still continue to be victims of it.
Also read the CIA’s notorious Kubark manual on torture - which analyzes different techniques to induce compliance in subjects.
Repeatedly traumatizing someone (and sexual humiliation and violence are the easiest avenues to do this), breaks down their sense of identity. In all but the strongest people, it produces compliance, refusal to accept reality, escapism, psychosis, and addictions of all kinds.
In the strongest, it produces resistance. Either lawless resistance to the state, which is what we call criminal, or, in rare cases, the fierce concentrated resistance of the social or political activist, the revolutionary…and even the saint…
The victims produce the fodder that the state manipulates.
The survivors become the excuse for the state to ratchet up control.
Either way, the state grows.
Flight AND Fight..
My latest piece at Lew Rockwell, answers some questions readers had asked me about leaving the US:
“My last piece, “Time to Run,” provoked a lot of reaction, almost all of it positive, but some negative.
The readers who liked it wanted advice on where to run. That’s a tall order and I’ll come back to them in another piece.
Those who didn’t like it brandished a few arguments that ought to have a stake driven right through them immediately.
Here goes, point by point.
1. Running away doesn’t help
1. Actually, running away is often the best response to a bad situation.
Speaking practically, when a dump truck turns into your drive, mows down your rhododendrons and heads toward you, do you stand your ground yelling Sicilian imprecations at the driver until he rolls over you too? Or do you leap aside nimbly, take a photo, and call a lawyer? You have as much chance getting through to the poisonous shills in DC with constitutional arguments, as you have charming a rabid pit bull with Shakespeare.
Speaking theoretically, your body and brain are hardwired to either put up or shut up, a “fight or flight” response built into the structure of the autonomic nervous system. That is the physiological term for what you think of as your “lizard brain.” Fight or flight is the either/or response that helped your ancestors survive. It’s not the best way to tackle complex problems, but when it gets down to basic survival, it’s a handy guide.
And how do you know when your survival is at stake?
Check your gut response…..”
Read the rest at Lew Rockwell.
[I will be posting reader email on my blog and will respond there, since my email is often compromised]
The Neurolinguistic Programming of Reality
“An excellent example of globalist
redefinition of a common term
is the use of the word “state” in place of “country”
. When the media and leaders
refer to a country like Iran as a “state”
this has the same or similar effect as the
British globalists referring to the United States
as “the colonies”, which is off-handed at best.
This type of redefinition of terms is
designed to belittle the conception of a
supposed and/or perceived enemy by making
them appear less important and smaller in perspective
to the aggressors. Most soldiers would be
more willing to attack a “rogue state” than an “enemy
country”. The actual usage of this type of
terminology actually creates a mass perception
that the said country has already been assimilated
into the globalist empire and is simply acting out of
turn and is deserving of punitive damage whether
compensatory or offensive or both.
However, the true modus operandi
of the globalists is essentially Hegelian
in nature. Time and time again as a
species we can observe the workings of “thesis,
antitheses and synthesis”.An excellent example would be the attacks on
the World Trade Center of 2001.
Thesis: “terrorists are a continual threat
to our liberty”. Antitheses: the
attack on the World Trade Center. Synthesis:
the Patriot Acts and Office of Homeland
Security, also known as: the loss of liberty
in the name of security…….There are many conclusions to be drawn when
looking at the cycle of empires, but one
stands clearly: ruling is a science, and it
involves coercion whether via induced
suffering, psychological
torture and/or destabilization….”— Max Mitchell, “Foundations of War:
Terminology of the New World.”88-year old Gunman In Shoot-Out Inside Holocaust Memorial Museum
“An 88-year-old gunman with a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past opened fire with a rifle inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, fatally wounding a security guard before being shot himself by other officers, authorities said.
The assailant was hospitalized in critical condition, leaving behind a sprawling investigation by federal and local law enforcement and expressions of shock from the Israeli government and a prominent Muslim organization…….
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said von Brunn’s Web site has long been listed as a hate site.”
My Comment
It’s interesting how shootings in recent years have had some connection to the Holocaust (one heroic victim at Virginia Tech was a Holocaust survivor and a Holocaust survivor fell victim to the Mumbai attacks).
Von Brunn, according to reports, thinks “Jews control the Federal Reserve” and the banking system and are basically evil. He has a long-standing relationship with Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, a white supremacist and anti-Semite.
His is also one of many people who question President Obama’s birth certificate, a group that’s apparently been christened the “birther” movement by many of our liberal-left pundits. At TPM Cafe, Joshua Marshall hastens to let us know that your ordinary, garden “birther” (I first thought they meant some kind of natural child-bearing advocate) is only a harmless wing-nut, but alas, not Von Braun.
Note:
It seems very clear from his previous arrests, writings and statements, that Von Brunn is NOT harmless. While I certainly think the federal government isn’t above milking every bit of lawless behavior to impose further controls, the fact is bigotry does increase during times of stress. And the most recent “hate crimes” legislation, does, in my estimate, try to deal with a broad range of victims - including anti-Christian bigotry in its language.
That’s a decided improvement.
I’ve been looking over some sites and postings that I’d consider antisemitic (this applies to other forms of racism or bigotry) and here are some thoughts:
1. Noting the ethnicity/religion of someone (especially if it’s germane to the story) is not racism/antisemitism/bigotry
2. Drawing an ineluctable connection between the ethnicity/religion and the behavior is racism/antisemitism/bigotry (the operative word is ineluctable).
Of course, in ordinary life, people do generalize about other races, even if it’s only in their own minds. In a stressful situation that might be understandable. (You get hit by a car and the driver, from a different race, ignores your plight and speeds off…you react by saying, “all so-and-so always act like this…”).
This sort of reaction is a momentary generalization or simplification of the kind that the brain is actually biologically prone to make (creating a binary of us versus them). The feeling crosses over and becomes racist when the reactive element in the response is deliberately cultivated and sustained through willfully ignoring all other factors, explanations, and theories.
Here’s what I mean.
It’s one thing to observe that there’s a high proportion of Jewish people working in finance and banking. There is. To deny that is to be out of touch with reality. The danger in trying to pretend this reality isn’t so deny reality is an obvious one. Uninformed people will then assume that every other part of what you’re saying is equally untrue and out of touch with reality. And they will assume every other thing they believe from appearances alone is true, even when in those cases, appearances are deceiving.
Now, if you are not a bigot, after that preliminary observation, several other things will (or should) occur to you. The first is that Jewish people are well-represented in practically all intellectually oriented professions. This itself should dilute the strength of any argument tending in an anti-Semitic direction.
Perhaps the dominance of Jewish people in banking could then be attributed to other factors - historical and cultural, rather than to “Jewishness.”
Now, I realize I am on tricky grounds here, because sensibilities have become so over wrought that any misstatement can be construed as intentionally offensive. So, let me first say, if I do make a misstep, it’s not intentional and will be glad to restate my position, if someone points out why it might be offensive.
More later..
Meanwhile, Jeremiah Wright has gotten into hot water for saying “the Jews” have kept him from Obama.
And, the thought police (in this case Newsweek) is after Oprah as well. Turns out the Queen of Talk is sympathetic to the anti-vaccine folks - the ones who think that vaccines are often about big pharma’s profts more than about your health. The article also criticized Oprah on other grounds, but methinks that’s the crux of the matter. The feds might have an interest in nixing any possible joining of forces between left-oriented alternative medicine advocates and right-oriented ones, in advance of selling swine flu vaccine to the public.
A swine flu pandemic also makes a convenient pretext to control the movement of people between countries.
Of course, it could all be coincidental, and I could just be another “wingnut” on the loose….
But so far, the wing-nuts are winning the credibility contest.
Time to Run
My latest piece, “Time to Run”, at Lew Rockwell:
“Is it time to run?
That’s what I’ve been asking myself for three years now.
Before that, I thought it was simply a matter of finding a better place to live. A place that was quieter and cheaper. Where flippers and developers hadn’t taken over the neighborhood. Somewhere safe I could park my car on the street and not worry about it.
But by the time I found it, I also found that the thieves were inside the house, not on the street. There’s really no hiding from them. And no hiding from what they can do.
Our mene, mene, tekel upharsin is on the wall.It’s time to run, not hide.
I mean that. We’re in the throes of an economic collapse of a kind last seen in the 1930s. The government is intent on grabbing control of whatever it can. American firms are dropping like flies. Unemployment is soaring. Debt is soaring. The money supply is soaring. Our foreign policy is a wreck – we have more enemies than we can count. We have a drug war on the borders, we have gang war in the ghettos, we have culture wars in the academy and media.We have criminals in government.
The future isn’t any brighter. Subprime is only the first leg down. We still have a second wave of housing trouble in store, centering around commercial real estate and option ARM loans.Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research, wrote a piece last year predicting that by 2012 there would be food riots, tax rebellion, and revolution across the country. Celente has a good track record in the forecasting business.
Experts predict a 100% rise in prices across the board. In the best-case scenario, it will happen over ten years. In the worst case, it might happen within months….”Read the rest at Lew Rockwell
Torture Pictures You Can See and Torture Pictures You Can’t…
In the news last month, was a torture tape that implicates a UAE royal sheikh (who isn’t in the government) in acts of sadism. In it a uniformed policeman watches as the victim (who shortchanged the Sheikh in a grain deal) is whipped, beaten, electrocuted, and run over by an SUV). From an ABC report on the tape:
“The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man’s mouth, as the police officers restrains the victim. Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly…..
He uses an electric cattle prod against the man’s testicles and inserts it in his anus. At another point, as the man wails in pain, the Sheikh pours lighter fluid on the man’s testicles and sets them aflame…….
The Sheikh then pulls down the pants of the victim and repeatedly strikes him with board and its protruding nail. At one point, he puts the nail next to the man’s buttocks and bangs it through the flesh.
“Where’s the salt,” asks the Sheikh as he pours a large container of salt on to the man’s bleeding wounds. The victim pleads for mercy, to no avail.
The final scene on the tape shows the Sheikh positioning his victim on the desert sand and then driving over him repeatedly. A sound of breaking bones can be heard on the tape.”
This is all pretty gruesome and horrific. The Sheikh is clearly a monster. But that torture exists in Arab countries is not new. Can there be more to explain the media highlighting of this tape? Remember, it took CBS several years before it got around to the Iraq torture story (it was first reported in the US in 2001. The CBS expose of Abu Ghraib was in 2004).
Could it have anything to do with a recent piece of legislation?
Barack Obama, is throwing his weight behind The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009, passed on June 1, 2009. What this does is make the Secretary of Defense certify whether any images of prisoner treatment between September 11, 2009 and January 22, 2009 would endanger military personnel or US citizens, and at his discretion and without any possible review, prevent their disclosure. The certification lasts for three years and can be renewed indefinitely.
Here’s Glenn Greenwald on the subject:
“For decades, we had laws in place authorizing citizens to sue their telecommunication carriers if the telecoms allowed government spying on their communications in violation of the law, but when it was revealed that the telecoms did exactly this, the Congress simply changed the law retroactively so that it no longer applied. For decades, we had laws imposing civil and criminal liability on government officials who engaged in or authorized torture, but when it was revealed that our government did that, the Congress just retroactively changed the law to protect the torturers. And now that courts have ruled that our decades-old transparency law compels disclosure of this torture evidence, the Congress is just going to retroactively change the law — again — this time to empower the President to suppress that evidence anyway.”
Greenwald acts surprised, which is a bit funny. What did he think? That Obama was going to change things?
It makes you wonder if the Abu Dhabi tape was given airtime simply to provide enough impetus (as in, See, they do it too - and so much worse ) to pass this horrible bill.
The CPJ’s Top Ten Worst Countries to Blog In
In 2008, the Committee to Protect Journalists CPJ found that bloggers and other online journalists were the largest professional group being jailed. Earlier, that honor went to print and broadcast journalists.
Here’s a quick summary of their evaluation of the worst countries in the world for bloggers:
1. Burma
Monitoring, regulation of cybercafes, blocking. At least two bloggers in prison.
2. Iran
Monitoring, harassment, detention, pending legislation advocating death penalty for promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy. One blogger died in jail in unclear circumstances
3. Syria
Filtering, blocking, harassment, self-censorship, monitoring, detention.
4. Cuba
Blocking, harassment. 21 bloggers jailed
5. Saudi Arabia
Widespread blocking, self-censorship
6. Vietnam
Monitoring, harassment.
7. Tunisia
Electronic surveillance including email monitoring, electronic sabotage, content filtering, IP submission, imprisonment of at least 2 journalists
8. China
Blocking, monitoring of email, filtering of searches, deletion of objectionable material. Has a vibrant bloggin culture but maintains world’s most comprehensive online censorship program. At least 24 bloggers in prison.
9. Turkmenistan
Blocking access to opposition sites. Monitoring of email accounts.
10. Egypt
Monitoring of sites, open-ended detention, sometimes imprisonment and even torture. But only a few sites are blocked. More than 100 journalists detained (usually for short periods).
All this seems very bad compared to what we have in the US.
Or, is it? Let’s see.
- Email monitoring Check. And note this program, ADVISE, in the works, supposedly scrapped in 2007, but status unknown is a better description. And if that’s been thought up for the citizenry at large, bloggers should expect quite a bit more attention.
- Telephone monitoring Check. Again, the general public is being monitored, not just political bloggers.
- Censorship Depends on what you define as censorship. Wiki demonstrably manipulates information in subtle and not so subtle ways. Sometimes there’s outright deletion of articles for no good reason besides content censorship. Google not only censors some material overtly, it’s been accused of manipulating the visibility of material. Facebook is reported to be impossible to leave. Finally, there’s probably far more disinformation in the US than in any other country, and it’s certainly the most sophisticated.
- Snooping The government can force ISP’s to provide information. The NSA has been engaged in massive illegal surveillance of domestic emails and communications records of ordinary citizens, not just bloggers.
- Website harassment/sabotage Check
- Controlled mainstream media Check
- Bloggers jailed Not for years. But several have been questioned, arrested, detained for short periods, or forced out of the country in order to blog more freely. One was arrested for posting financial predictions.
- Bloggers killed None that I know of, but I can think of at least two journalists (Gary Webb is the most famous) who died in mysterious circumstances. And dozens of foreign journalists (and some foreign-born US journalists) were killed outside the country by the US military during the coverage of the Iraq war, as I noted in this piece in 2006.
- Professional Sabotage Widespread
- Ruinous litigation Widespread
- Self-censorship Widespread
- Verbal and physical threats Check
Note: I’m not sure why countries like Malaysia and Morocco didn’t make this list.
Could it have something to do with encouraging foreign investments there? I notice that Malaysia has recently been taken off the list of foreign tax havens (Labuan, a small island off the Malatsian coast, is well-known as an off-shore haven). But only last year, an antigovernment blogger was jailed on sedition charges .
As for Morocco, when I was there in 2008, I was told repeatedly not to write about anything controversial (such as, Moroccan jails or torture) because it would land me in serious trouble (i.e. jail). In September 2008, Just a month before I was there, a blogger was sentenced to two years in prison for failure to show respect to the king. The Tangier-Tetuan region in the north of Morocco is the target of government investment and vast amounts of foreign real estate development and speculation. I was told by knowledgeable people that a lot of the money pouring into the luxury apartments in Tangiers was drug money….
Judge Orders Chemotherapy for 13 Yr Old over Parents’ No
In the news: a Minnesota judge has ruled that 13 year old Daniel Hauser, a cancer patient, has to undergo chemotherapy that he’s stopped in favor of American Indian medicinal therapies used by the Nemenhah Band, in which Daniel is said to be an elder. His father claims he (the father) was cured of cancer by the same methods. The teen-ager’s cancer is reported to have resumed growing after the chemotherapy was stopped.
“Daniel was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and stopped chemotherapy in February after a single treatment. He and his parents opted instead for “alternative medicines” based on their religious beliefs.
Child protection workers accused Daniel’s parents of medical neglect; but in court, his mother insisted the boy wouldn’t submit to chemotherapy for religious reasons and she said she wouldn’t comply if the court orders it.
Doctors have said Daniel’s cancer had up to a 90 percent chance of being cured with chemotherapy and radiation. Without those treatments, doctors said his chances of survival are 5 percent.”
US Ranks 6th in Private Report on Electronic Surveillance
I don’t know how accurate this report from Cryptohippie.com (hat-tip to Sunni Maravillosa) is, but I thought it was interesting.
It ranks countries as police states, based on 17 factors:
1) Daily documents 2) Border issues 3) Financial tracking 4) Gag orders 5) Anti-crypto laws 6) Constitutional protection 7) Data storage ability 8)Data retention ability 9) ISP data retention 10) Telephone data retention 11) Cell phone records 12) Medical records 13) Enforcement ability 14) Habeas Corpus 15) Police-Intel barrier 16) Covert hacking 17) Loose warrants
At the top were the communist countries: China and North Korea.
Then came the former communist countries: Belarus and Russia
Next: the UK, US, and Singapore
Please note:: I couldn’t find much about the privacy firm that created the report, Cryptohippie, and have no idea how authoritative the report is. Any further insights are welcome.
Massive Push to Criminalize Criticism of Israel (Links/Video added)
Paul Craigs Roberts writes about H. R. 1913 (“Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009”), at Counterpunch:
“It has been true for years that the most potent criticism of Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians comes from the Israeli press and Israeli peace groups. For example, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Jeff Halper of ICAHD have shown a moral conscience that apparently does not exist in the Western democracies where Israel’s crimes are covered up and even praised.
Will the American hate crime bill be applied to Haaretz and Jeff Halper? Will American commentators who say nothing themselves but simply report what Haaretz and Halper have said be arrested for “spreading hatred of Israel, an anti-semitic act”? ……….
A massive push is underway to criminalize criticism of Israel. American university professors have fallen victim to the well organized attempt to eliminate all criticism of Israel. Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at a Catholic university because of the power of the Israel Lobby. Now the Israel Lobby is after University of California (at Santa Barbara,) professor Wiliam Robinson. Robinson’s crime: his course on global affairs included some reading assignments critical of Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
The Israel Lobby apparently succeeded in convincing the Obama Justice (sic) Department that it is anti-semitic to accuse two Jewish AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, of spying. The Israel Lobby succeeded in getting their trial delayed for four years, and now Attorney General Eric Holder has dropped charges. Yet, Larry Franklin, the DOD official accused of giving secret material to Rosen and Weissman, is serving 12 years and 7 months in prison….”
My Comment (May 8, 2009):
H.R. 1913 was sponsored by Rep. John Conyers [D, MI-14] and voted on by the House on April 29, 2009 (passing 248-175 with largely Democrat support).
Complaints about the legislation have focused on several things.
- The bill’s perceived fuzziness in defining the class of protected persons (”sexual orientation”) and in defining “bodily injury.” Both could make the legislation very elastic in application
- The possibility that the legislation could be used to chill religious speech
- The possibility that pastors who preach orthodox Christian views on controversial social issues could be prosecuted if an unstable person in their congregation later commits a “hate crime”
- The granting of even more federal power to oversee, fund, direct, and intervene in local and state authorities
- The redundancy of new legislation on “hate crimes” (since there are such laws already on the books)
- The elusiveness of the notion of “hate crime” and its inherent intrusiveness, since it claim to assess the state of mind of the perpetrator and the victim and of a whole class to which the victim belongs.
Christian groups have been particularly agitated by it, believing that it principally targets fundamentalist/orthodox Christian preachers.
That may well be so, but in the context of the financial scandal and ongoing Middle Eastern policies, I’d argue that the legislation has as much to do with criticism of the US government, especially of Zionist and Middle Eastern policies. For instance, see this effort at ending protests against US aid to Israel, at Muzzlewatch.
H.R. 1913, like H. R. 1955 before it, is meant for home-grown dissidents, a.k.a., people who object to federal government policies.
Action: Please call your House or Senate representative at 1-877-851-6437 or toll 1-202-225-3121. and urge them not to vote for yet another thought crimes bill HR 1913.
Think of the two initiatives below as further context:
1. US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations, 4 Mar 2009 (see wikileaks)
2. The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (H.R. 1955/S- 1959, a bill sponsored by Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) in the 110th United States Congress. It was introduced in the House on April 19 2007, passing on Oct 23, 2007, was introduced to the Senate on August 2, 2007 as S-1959, declared dead on arrival there after a powerful grass-roots campaign against it,
but has since been referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means, April 2, 2009, according to wiki.
H.R. 1955
Guantanamo Detainees Are Not “Persons”
From Raw Story, Friday, April 24, 2009
“A Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit ruled Friday that detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not “persons” according to it’s interpretation of a statute involving religious freedom.
The ruling sprang from an appeal of Rasul v. Rumsfeld, which was thrown out in Jan. 2008. “The court affirmed the district court’s dismissal of the constitutional and international law claims, and reversed the district court’s decision that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) applied to Guantanamo detainees, dismissing those claims as well,” the Center for Constitutional Rights said….”
Greenwald Calls Out Right-Wing Amnesiacs
From Salon, the tireless Glenn Greenwald calls out the amnesiacs on the right for double standards:
“Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they’re on the train to FEMA camps. The Right’s leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: ”Here we go Again,” protesting that “this seems so nakedly ideological.” Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it’s “Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!” Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS – as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) – now considers the Constitution to be a “subversive manifesto.” Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents. Malkin’s Hot Air stomps its feet about all “the smears listed in the new DHS warning about ‘right-wing extremism.’”
Amazing chutzpah. Malkin’s, especially, considering that her magnum opus was a celebration of the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, precisely the kind of violation of liberties she’s exercised about now.
No. Libertarians have to wash their hands off the two-party system entirely and admit that both parties are too compromised by their records to pose as civil libertarians and constitutionalists at this hour. Give the mic to the people whose record holds up, please.
Or to anyone else but these folks.
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