Media Matters has a piece on a Fox News item where one of their journalists is put through waterboarding ‘to see what it is like’.

Of course, it is a total sham and pure propaganda.

This journalist is in TOTAL CONTROL of the process; when he says ‘stop’ they stop immediately. This is nothing like real torture, where you have NO CONTROL AT ALL and you are AT THE MERCY of the interrogator.

An eternity ago we wrote about a Channel 4 documentary where people were put through ‘The Gitmo experience™’ as an experiment:

Monday, February 28, 2005

On Channel 4’s programme about Guantanamo, an Oxford student who volunteered to be tortured was shaved bald, stripped naked, and forced to listen to…

THROBBING GRISTLE: ‘SUBHUMAN’

and…that was the point at which he broke.

This total moron (and another one who bottle out) thought that Guantanamo was needed ‘to catch the bad guys’. After 40 hours and TG, he totally changed his mind. What a stupid idiot.

Will somebody please PLEASE wake me up!

THAT is the story that everyone needs to see, not some pathetic fake, Torture Feelgood™ ‘demonstration’ designed to pull the wool over your eyes.

You can watch the whole series for yourself to see what we are talking about, and what a sham that Fox News item is.

Fox News transmitting a deception…quelle suprise!

Remember when we tore apart the essay by Naomi Wolf?

Well, now it seems that she has finally woken up to why the Founding Fathers put the Second Amendment into the American Constitution.

In a very recent talk, she correctly identifies Blackwater as a fascist tool and a predictable stage of one of the ten steps that all dictators use to take power, and the reason why everyone needs to have guns.

Better late than never Naomi.

The question is Naomi, what are you going to do about it? Are you now going to dump the Cintons? are you going to finally admit that there is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans?

This video shows that she is highly intelligent, able to think, insightful, and yet, she is still inside the box. She is still inside the Matrix. She, thanks to being more awake, has been able to predict everything that Lord Bush and the Murder Inc. Cabal have been doing by comparing what they do with the methods of previous, by her own words, fascist dictators (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin). What is missing is how she (we) are going to stop it. She says, “we are all going to rise up and stop it…right?”.

Well, I hope that you have been going down to the shooting range Naomi, because that is what it might take in the end.

Lets see what she concludes.

She says if enough people rise up and push back in a weakened democracy, the trend to fascism, can be reversed. To do this, she and some ‘political leaders’ have started The American Freedom Campaign to restore democracy in time to save us. They are 5,000,000 strong and hope for 20,000,000.

She says that the need for a national uprising to restore democracy is absolutely urgent in the face of the violence, the tasering, pepper spraying and the violence of Blackwater.

Her answer to “them ratcheting up the violence and oppression”:

We need to prosecute for treason.

She says that the founders intended ordinary Americans to take care of this problem themselves, and that they should not depend on a professional class of pundits or scholars or lawyers to do this task for them.

She will not say the words. She will not face the final thought.

She says, “assume the patriot’s task and lead the fight to restore democracy”.

Please Naomi…

SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT! SAY IT!

Let me help you:

GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!! GUNS!!

When blackwater come to your town to bully you just like the blackshirts did, “believing in your power” will not stop them, only GUNS will stop them.

Do you REALLY THINK that Darth Vader will simply lie down and allow himself to be arrested for TREASON? Go back to your history Naomi; would Hitler just give up? Mussolini?, Stalin?

Stop kidding yourself, get down to the firing range and tell your 5,000,000 friends to do the same. If you are going to storm the Bastille you had better be armed, able and willing to shoot and kill.

Better yet, tell those 5,000,000 to donate twenty dollars each to Ron Paul’s campaign, THEN you might have a chance at avoiding to have to learn how to shoot.

What is most astonishing about Naomi, is that america has gone so far down the road to tyranny that even people like her are starting to wake up and get very frightened, and I feel that she wanted to say ‘Guns’ but was too frightened!, after all, she threw away a book she was carrying rather than have it seen by TSA staff…the end of america indeed.

Thanks to Among These for it.

The first BLOGDIAL post where one of the tags is a joke referring to the content of a post.

Doctor pleads guilty in fingerprint case

HARRISBURG, Pa. – A plastic surgeon who replaced the fingerprints of an alleged drug dealer with skin from the bottom of his feet pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal charge of harboring and concealing a fugitive.

Dr. Jose L. Covarrubias, a U.S. citizen who lived in the border town of Nogales, Ariz., and practiced medicine in neighboring Nogales, Mexico, faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced Feb. 11.

A plea agreement requires Covarrubias, 49, to cooperate with prosecutors in their investigation of a Harrisburg-based drug ring. All other charges were dismissed.

The charges stemmed from surgery Covarrubias performed on co-defendant Marc George, 42, of Jamaica. The doctor replaced George’s fingerprints with skin from his feet to help him avoid apprehension, authorities said.

George, accused of being a drug and cash courier, paid the doctor about $20,000 to replace his fingerprints with skin from his feet to help him avoid apprehension, authorities said. He was still limping badly when he was arrested at the Nogales border crossing in September 2005 on a charge of money laundering.

Covarrubias’ attorney, Stephen G. Ralls, said the doctor had “a lapse of judgment” but did not know specifically what George was wanted for. The doctor had no previous criminal record, Ralls said.

Covarrubias was being held as a flight risk at the Adams County Jail in Gettysburg.

Prosecutors allege the drug ring conspired to buy marijuana from Tucson, Ariz., and elsewhere and distributed more than a ton of it in central Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and other areas between 2004 and 2006.

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Behe, the lead prosecutor, said all but one of the 35 defendants in the case have signed plea agreements and most have pleaded guilty and been sentenced. The other defendant remains at large, he said.

George has signed a plea agreement and is expected to plead guilty at a hearing next week.

[…]

Yahoo News

This is nonsense inside nonsense.

Firstly, the ‘war on drugs’ is insane. This man should not have been hounded for trying to sell dried plants. Its as stupid as arresting people for selling dried tomatoes.

Secondly, the insane biometric mania that is spreading to all four corners of the earth is a direct result and comes out of this insane ‘war on drugs’, and has created the need, Minority Report style, for people to have their fingerprints and soon, their eyes replaced by rogue doctors.

The equation is this: no ‘war on drugs’ = no organized crime = no insane laws = more freedom + less violence

Simple!

This man almost GETS IT:

He is saying what we have been saying for YEARS about the impotence of 20th century strategies (demonstrating, petition writing, candle vigils etc. etc.) against the 21st century war machine and the Murder Inc. Cabal™

[…]

I am asking you to disrupt the business as usual on your campuses. It wont be enough as it has become painfully obvious to simply mimic the techniques and the cool chants of the ’60s and ’70s anti-war movement. Our current anti-war movement is impotent.

We need new ideas, we need youth. We need YOU YOU YOU to wake up. A new age and a new war demand new ways of protest. Where are these new ways these new ideas going to come from?

They are gong to come from YOU.

YOU young people.

YOU young students who have been anethstetized for too long.

Its time to snap out of it.

[…]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fzt4Q9VCpc

Something the losers at StopWar need to heed and obey clearly.

Anyone with one working brain cell knows that the old rules do not apply to this new game; not because the old rules were not good but because the ‘other side’ is playing by a different set of rules that the StopWar, CodePink, sheeple have not yet woken up to.

Clearly, and thankfully, there are many people who are waking up. That video has been seen by 2,038,058 people.

It is not too late!

By Mariko Sanchanta in TokyoPublished: October 25 2007 01:32 | Last updated: October 25 2007 01:32Millions of visitors to Japan will be required to have their photographs and fingerprints taken from next month as part of new immigration procedures meant to help prevent terrorist attacks.

The move, which includes fingerprinting longtime permanent foreign residents, marks the first time a country other than the US has introduced such procedures. The US adopted similar measures following the September 11 attacks and the UK and European Union are considering introducing comparable requirements.

The new measures have been attacked by human rights groups, which have said the collection of biometric data could play into the hands of Japanese xenophobes and raises privacy issues.

“This will further the perception in Japan that foreigners are terrorists and at the same time rejects the idea that the Japanese could be terrorists as well,” said Makoto Teranaka, secretary-general of Amnesty International Japan. “In fact, all recent terrorist attacks have been conducted by the Japanese,” he said, pointing to the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

The new procedures are part of an amendment of Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, which contains measures to prevent terrorism. The measures come into force on November 20. In certain instances, Japan will be able to share its biometric data with other governments.

The move has been criticised by many foreigners living in Japan, particularly as the government has said it wants to make Tokyo an international financial centre. It also coincides with the government’s long-running Visit Japan campaign, which aims to increase the number of foreign visitors. Last year, more than 8m people visited the country, up from 5.2m in 2001.

Though Japan invited public comments on the new measure, one could only do so in Japanese.

If a foreigner refuses to be fingerprinted and photographed, he or she will not be permitted to enter the country.

Certain individuals, including “special permanent residents” (which include longtime ethnic Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Brazilian-Japanese residents), people under 16 and diplomats will be exempted from the new procedures.

Financial Times

Fingerprinting tourists and anyone for that matter will not prevent ‘terrorist attacks’.

Like the article says, the people who do ‘terrorist attacks’ (more accurately, mass murder by poison) are JAPANESE not TOURISTS, and even if they fingerprinted all Japanese citizens alive that would not prevent another gas attack.

Some Japanese citizens have a long standing problem with foreigners so maybe this insane measure is a consequence of that; in any case, thats Japan off of my list of places to visit!

Another Post Tipping Point^™ post.

UPDATE!

Amnesty International calls bullshit:

[…]

Amnesty International is calling for the immigration plan to be abandoned.

“Making only foreigners provide this data is discriminatory,” said Sonoko Kawakami of Amnesty’s Japan office.

“They are saying ‘terrorist equals foreigner’. It’s an exclusionary policy that could encourage xenophobia.”

The new system is being introduced as Japan campaigns to attract more tourists.

More than 6.7m foreign visitors came to Japan in 2006, government statistics show. Immigration officials say they are unsure how long tourists can expect to wait in line for the checks to be made.

Britain is set to require non-European foreign nationals to register biometric details when applying for visas from next year.http://www.news.com.au/
[…]

And amazingly, they think that this will HELP bring new visitors to Japan!

I ride a bicycle around London, and never wear a helmet. I have never worn a helmet in my life to ride either a motorcycle or a bicycle.

Free people do not wear bicycle helmets.

There is a completely ’21st Century British Insanity™’ piece in today’s Times ‘Alpha Mummy’ where a shrieking, hysterical, illogical, fear soaked nincompoop equates cycling with children to, wait for it…. CHILD ABUSE.

I’m not making this up.

After getting up off of the floor, being thrown down by fits of laughter as a man Tased, I read some of the comments and found this site, cyclehelmets.org which is absolutely wonderful.

First of all, no free country has helmet laws. Period.

Helmet laws spring from that same foul well of immoral laws that says you cannot ingest whatever you like, or have consensual sex in whatever way you like in the privacy of your own home – that you have no privacy, that the fruit of your labour does not belong to you, that your children do not belong to you, but to the state. These diseased ideas, that are absolutely un-British are the sort of thing ‘Eleanor Mills’ espouses by extension when she says what she said in that piece.

I will give the devil her due and say that she posed this as a question, but the fact remains that this vile thought, this absurd question actually passed her mind, and she then actually posted it on the internets. Nothing wrong with the latter of course, but honestly…I digress.

This site has the proof that cycle helmets are ineffective as safety devices, and, like the fear pumped safety mania that has spread all over the west, are just another piece of nanny statism that can be proved to be pointless. Not only that, but these useless laws the site argues further diminish the rule of law in general, since the law is plainly seen to be not only an ass, but unreasonably interfering in private matters.

Look at this graph:

The countries with more and safer cycling are where fewest cyclists wear helmets. This is a fact.

In the past, you would have read this piece by Eleanor Mills and then perhaps entered into a debate with someone about cycle helmets and how they, “make people safer”. You would have had to rely on anecdotes and gut feeling to make your point, and you might have been able to win if you were eloquent.

Now with the internets, people like Eleanor Mills can write a piece of garbage and have it shot down within ten minutes of it being published, and furthermore, everyone who knows how to click on a link will be able to trash her aberrant thought.

In conditions like this, liberty is the default result, and now we can see how it is going to happen. Logic, common sense and the facts are now no longer stuck in treacle, and time to delivery of these facts is near instant.

The Ron Paul campaign in a few short months has put complex questions into the public arena, all thanks to the internets:

Message from Ron Paul

The other day, my old sparring partner in so many Congressional committee hearings, Alan Greenspan, was on the Fox Business Channel. After Alan promoted his new book, the reporter asked if we really needed a central bank. Greenspan looked stunned, and then said that was a good question; he actually talked about fiat money vs. a gold standard. Now, the ex-Fed chairman is not about to endorse our sound monetary policy, but you know our Revolution is working when such a question is asked in the mainstream media, and this powerful man gives such an answer.

You and I are reopening a whole host of questions that the establishment thought it had closed off forever: on war, on taxes and spending, on inflation and gold, and on the rule of law and our Constitution.

As China and Japan start ‘an unprecedented flight from the dollar‘ only Ron Paul is talking about the causes and what must be done to stop it. Only Ron Paul comes up the with the numbers showing how much america is spending on running its foul empire – ONE TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.

Helmet laws and empires are inextricably linked. The same urges that drive evil and venal mass murderers to spread plagues of death all over the world are the same ones that make parliaments and legislatures pass helmet laws and all the other illiberal and useless control laws that should all be removed from the statute books.

This is in no way ‘a stretch’; in fact, you can file it under ‘act locally, think globally’.

Your freedom on the local, personal level is essential to maintaining peace and non interference on the global level. When you lose your liberty and mass murderers, international gangsters, counterfeiters and vicious organized crime syndicates engineer it, the bad consequences are not only going to affect you, but your neighbours, your cities your country and the entire world.

FINALLY it is being understood, albeit at the eleventh hour.

The Homeland Security Department is trying to squash criticism of its slow development of an exit piece to the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program.

Robert Mocny, US-VISIT director, said yesterday the agency has decided a piece of the exit program will require airlines to collect biometric data of visitors leaving the country when they check in at the airport. Mocny said DHS will issue a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register by January 2008 detailing the program.

“We don’t have too many details yet,” Mocny said during a conference on identity management sponsored by the Information Technology Association of America in Washington. “The technology worked fine during the pilots, but we want to see what infrastructure is out there already.”

DHS has conducted an experimental biometric exit program at 14 major airports in the past three years.

DHS discontinued a pilot exit program May 6 based on radio frequency identification technology. DHS stopped requiring foreign nationals to use RFID-equipped US-VISIT kiosks to check out as they leave the country. Some described those kiosks as difficult to use, and the RFID tags used in the exit program proved to be unreliable.

Mocny said he would like to see airlines volunteer for the program, but many companies are against this concept, fearing it would delay check-in times.

He added that DHS’ bigger challenge will be creating an exit system for land ports.

“Our goal is to have an exit system for air and sea ports by December 2008,” Mocny said. “The exit system is important, but it was not the first thing we wanted to do. The entry system was more important.”

Despite these plans, lawmakers remain frustrated about DHS’ slow pace in developing the exit system.

Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas), ranking member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology, said he would like to see DHS focus more on the program.

“We ask about US-VISIT every time secretary [Michael Chertoff] testifies because we are worried about visa overstays,” McCaul said. “We are still not satisfied with their response. I think it has been on the backburner because [the Secure Border Initiative]-Net has been their priority focus. I understand why, but I would like to see more focus on US-VISIT’s exit system.”

McCaul added that there is a lot of interest in Congress on secure identification cards. He pointed to a host of bills requiring technically advanced identifications such as H.R. 98, which calls for the Social Security Administration to produce cards with encrypted machine-readable electronic identification strips and an electronic eligibility database with citizenship and resident work status that employers could check potential employees against.

But he also warned that getting some of these bills passed may be tougher than before.

“The new Congress shifted toward more American Civil Liberties Union driven,” McCaul said. “It is not as much about security, but what the government is doing wrong in not protecting citizen’s privacy. It is a good debate to have, but in some areas such as the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act it is going the wrong way.”

McCaul said Mike McConnell, head of the Director of National Intelligence, said the government would have to go through the FISA court to get permission to capture 70 percent of all communication.

[…]

http://www.fcw.com/online/news/150554-1.html

Post tipping point; use the Google to find out what we have to say about this.

Vote Ron Paul.

Legalise all drugs: chief constable demands end to ‘immoral laws’
By Jonathan Brown and David Langton
Published: 15 October 2007

One of Britain’s most senior police officers is to call for all drugs – including heroin and cocaine – to be legalised and urges the Government to declare an end to the “failed” war on illegal narcotics.

Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, advocates an end to UK drug policy based on “prohibition”. His comments come as the Home Office this week ends the process of gathering expert advice looking at the next 10 years of strategy.

In his radical analysis, which he will present to the North Wales Police Authority today, Mr Brunstrom points out that illegal drugs are now cheaper and more plentiful than ever before.

The number of users has soared while drug-related crime is rising with narcotics now supporting a worldwide business empire second only in value to oil. “If policy on drugs is in future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral, to be replaced with an evidence-based unified system (specifically including tobacco and alcohol) aimed at minimisation of harms to society,” he will say.

The demand will not find favour in Downing Street. In his conference speech this year, Gordon Brown signalled an intensification of the existing battle. “We will send out a clear message that drugs are never going to be decriminalised,” the Prime Minister told the party.

The Tories also rejected the proposals. David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, said a more effective move would be the creation of a UK border police force to stop drugs getting into the country as well as expanding rehabilitation centres. He added: “We would put police on the streets to catch and deter drug dealers and we would ensure sufficient prison capacity so they could actually be punished.”

Mr Brunstrom, whose championing of speed cameras has made him a hate figure among some motoring groups, also found his suggestion that the war on drugs was unwinnable dismissed as a “counsel of despair” by the Association of Chief Police Officers. “Moving to total legalisation would, in our view, greatly exacerbate the harm to people in this country, not reduce it,” an Acpo spokeswoman said.

But the 30-page report, entitled Drugs Policy – a radical look ahead, includes a number of persuasive voices. Today Mr Brunstrom will urge his colleagues to submit the paper to Westminster and the Welsh Assembly. In it, he quotes the findings in March this year of a Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts commission, which stated that “the law as it stands is not fit for purpose” and argues for the replacement of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act with a new Misuse of Substances Act.

That would mean scrapping the ABC system introduced by the home secretary James Callaghan with a new scale that assesses substances, including alcohol and tobacco, in relation to the harm they cause – although he admits banning booze and cigarettes is not likely.

But he notes that figures from the Chief Medical Officer have found that, in Scotland, 13,000 people died from tobacco-related use in 2004 while 2,052 died as a result of alcohol. Illegal drugs, meanwhile, accounted for 356 deaths. The maximum penalty for possessing a class A drug is 14 years in prison while supplying it carries a life term.

Mr Brunstrom indicates that there is a growing mood for change. He cites the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, which criticised the Government for failing to switch to an evidence-based policy approach. The report also includes quotes from former home secretary John Reid, admitting “prohibition” doesn’t work, and the Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, conceding “it drives the activity underground” . There is also supportive evidence from former Chief Inspector of Prisons Lord Ramsbotham, a retired High Court judge, and Scotland’s Drug Tsar, Tom Wood.

As well as hitting the country hard in economic terms – class A drug use in England and Wales costs the country up to £17bn a year, 90 per cent of which is due to crime – there are also a series of socially damaging knock-on effects, he says.

He argues that prohibition has created a crisis in the criminal justice system, destabilised producer countries and undermined human rights worldwide. By pursuing a policy of legalisation and regulation, he concludes, the Government will “dramatically reduce drug-related criminality and will enable significant funds to be transferred from law enforcement to harm reduction and treatment procedures that are known to work.”

There was a mixed response from groups that work with users. Danny Kushlick, a director of the charity Transform Drug Policy Foundation, praised Mr Brunstrom for his “great leadership and imagination”. But Clare McNeil, a policy officer for Addaction, said talk of legalisation distracted attention from the more important issue of rehabilitation. “We have some sympathy with his views and the reasons and why he believes this but we are not in favour of legalisation,” she said.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said it was ” significant” that a senior police officer had spoken out although he too thought the police chief’s views went too far. “Where he is absolutely right is that the Government’s drugs policy is failing and failing spectacularly. The refusal of the Government to think radically means we are letting thousands of young boys and girls down.

“I am not persuaded that full legalisation is the way forward but what is necessary is that a more logical and evidence-based approach is needed which is less susceptible to whims of individual home secretaries … The system does not work as it is.”

The Chief Constable’s verdict

• British drugs policy has been based upon prohibition for the last several decades – but this system has not worked well. Illegal drugs are in plentiful supply and have become consistently cheaper in real terms over the years.
• The number of drug users has increased dramatically. Drug-related crime has soared equally sharply as a direct consequence of the illegality of some drugs. The vast profits from illegal trading have supported a massive rise in organised crime.
• The ABC classification of drugs is said by the RSA Commission to be indefensible and is described as “crude, ineffective, riddled with anomalies and open to political manipulation”. Most importantly, the current ABC system illogically excludes both alcohol and tobacco.
• Mr Brunstrom says: “If policy on drugs is in the future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral. Such a strategy leads inevitably to the legalisation and regulation of all drugs.”
• The chief constable asserts that current British drugs policy is based upon an unwinnable “war on drugs” enshrined in a flawed understanding of the underlying United Nations conventions, and arising from a wholly outdated and thoroughly repugnant moralistic stance.
• He concludes: “The law is the law. In the meantime, I will continue to enforce it to the best of my ability despite my misgivings about its moral and practical worth.”

Independent

What struck me about this story is that the police man behind it says that prohibition is immoral.

Anyone with one working brain cell knows that prohibition is not only immoral, but that it is the very mother and engine of ‘organized crime’.

The Mafia in the USA was born out of the prohibition era when the manufacture, buying and selling of alcohol was outlawed.

That includes beer and wine.

The ‘war on drugs’ has been nothing more than a flimsy pretext to bring in police state measures and absurd ‘money laundering’ laws and surveillance that impact the ordinary person more than any ‘criminal’.

I single quoth criminal because no one today would say that Seagrams and any brewwer of beer is a criminal, yet, if you grow a single plant in your own garden, you can be sent to gaol for a long time. It is completely absurd, and what’s more, everyone knows it, including the poor beleaguered police who have to waste their time enforcing these insane laws.

This article says that there is a ‘growing mood for change’. This is true not only about the bogus, immoral, stupid and pointless war on ‘drugs’ but about everything. It is the same mood that is behind the mass exodus from this country. It is the same mood that is behind the meteoric rise of Ron Paul.

Everyone, everywhere has HAD ENOUGH, and they are slowly waking up, asking the right questions, and, more importantly, taking steps to do something about it.

The great and the good and the deluded of Stop the War explain why they are prepared to be fooled twice:

Why you should join us:

“The authority for this march derives from our ancient right to free speech and assembly enshrined in our history. It is only fair to tell you that the march will go ahead, in any case, and I will be among those marching.”
Tony Benn, in letter to the Home Secretary

Tony Benn is old enough to understand what is going on, and he also undoubtedly knows that an attack on Iran is in the offing. That he is promoting this march is highly suspicious, as he must know more than anyone involved in this business that the march will have no measurable effect on anything to do with either Iraq or Iran and the diabolical plans being executed on them.

“A protest demanding all the troops out now is of national significance. To try and stop that protest is a major interference with free speech. The march should go ahead whether it is formally permitted or not.”
Walter Wolfgang, Labour Party NEC

A protest demanding all troops out now is of no significance. To try and stop that protest is a minor nuicance to the Murder inc Cabal (Mark 2) and free speech is being used to distract from the true monster that is The War Machine. The march should not go ahead, and other, more effective tactics should be used.

“The government want to bury the issue of their disastrous war. They will not succeed. We will be marching in our thousands on Monday.”
Lindsey German, Convenor Stop the War Coalition

And you will achieve nothing. It is YOU who will not succeed.

“In a democracy we expect peaceful protest to be permitted. We are not yet in the kind of tyranny that the Burmese people have to suffer, I hope the authorities will reconsider.”
Bob Wareing MP

You are already in a tyranny, and it is people like you that voted for it:

How Robert Wareing voted on key issues since 2001:

• Has never voted on a transparent Parliament.votes,
• Voted moderately against introducing a smoking ban.votes,
• Voted moderately against introducing ID cards.votes,
• Voted very strongly against introducing foundation hospitals.votes,
• Voted very strongly against introducing student top-up fees.votes,
• Voted moderately against Labour’s anti-terrorism laws.votes,
• Voted very strongly against the Iraq war.votes,
• Voted moderately for investigating the Iraq war.votes,
• Voted very strongly against replacing Trident.votes,
• Voted very strongly for the hunting ban.votes,
• Voted moderately for equal gay rights.votes,

So don’t even go there.

“Gordon Brown cannot praise protesters in Burma and then ban a protest in London. I will be protesting on Monday, regardless of whether Police permission is granted.”
Ben Griffin (ex SAS trooper)

Gordon Brown is an accessory to MASS MURDER. He can and will say that night is day and day is night, and it is people like you that allow him to do it, because you refuse to face the truth and use tactics that will work to destroy the war machine.

“If people aren’t allowed to have their say on all our streets, what kind of Parliament are we meant to be defending?”
Michael Kustow, theatre director

You mean you do not know? This is a Parliament that is going to compel you to carry the most invasive ID card ever invented. This is the Parliament that rubber stamped over 3000 new draconian laws under the Bliar regime. This is the Parliament that ignored the 2 million people who marched in London to prevent the bloody murderous catastrophy that is the illegal invasion of Iraq. THAT is the kind of Parliament you are defending. You are supporting the war and propping up the legitimacy of this murderous Parliament by going on this march.

“This is rather a ham-fisted attempt to prevent us from demonstrating. What the government and police do is up to them. We will just ignore them and we have the moral and logical high-ground. I will be marching on Monday 8 October.”
Mark Thomas, comedian

Sorry Mark, you will NOT have the logical high-ground. Going on this march is COMPLETELY ILLOGICAL, and an intelligent man like you must understand this.

“It’s becoming remarkably hard to escape the feeling we’re ruled by people who are basically paranoid authoritarian incompetents.”
Iain Banks, author

At last, someone with something sensible to say.

“It is depressing that our democratic rights are being whittled away bit by bit. We will look back and wonder how this happened. They wouldn’t get away with this in one go. First an arrest for reading names, then a ban on marches. What will be next?”
Benjamin Zephaniah, poet

Your democratic rights are already gone; that is why this march has been banned. You ask what it will be next? Why not spend Monday on the internets finding out, instead of wasting your time on a useless gesture.

“The stop the war demonstration on 15 February 2003 was arguably the most politically influential march in Britain since the 1970s, so it’s no surprise that politicians are immobilising anti-war demonstrations now. At a time when the political debate at Westminster occupies ever narrower ground, it’s vital that voices from outside are heard.”
David Edgar, playwright

This is completely wrong. The stop the war demonstration on 15 February 2003 was the greatest failure in British politics since no one seemed to get the message that demonstrations no longer have any power. If everyone had woken up and understood that we need to think and act very differently from now on, it could have been the watershed event that we needed to finally put an end to the war machine (or at least Britain’s part in it). Instead, the very people who put the march on are now calling for more of the same broken strategy, albeit on a smaller scale, knowing that they failed completely, despite having the entire country behind them and being proved right by the terrible result of the Iraq invasion.

They have learned ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, and this is the failure that will allow the invasion of Iraq to carry on and which will facilitate the bombing of Iran.

Politicians are immobilizing your march because that makes you concentrate on your lost rights and not the War Machine that is directly responsible for you losing them. It is in no way vital that voices from the outside are heard. What you need to do is act in a way that stops the problem. Marching will not do this. Having your voice heard will not do this. You are wasting your time, and acting like a mouse in a laboratory maze.

All of these people have their hearts in the right place (except maybe Tony Benn, if you are the paranoid type); what they are failing to do to a man is THINK. They are not applying any sort of logic to this problem and they are being lead like brainless sheep to an event that will do nothing but fail.

THINKING is the most important step that none of these people have taken. They have the constituency, they have the moral high ground. Why will they not light the blue touch paper and do something that will end this nightmare?

David cameron in his ‘virtuoso speech’ said that he is going to concentrate on Afghanistan if elected. Clearly he doesn’t have a feel for what is going on in the UK. It is quite astonishing that he is not following what is happening with Ron Paul in the USA; even if he faked what ‘Dr. No’ is doing it would sound better than what he is trotting out. But I digress. Stop the War is in error with this non strategy of protesting. They are missing an opportunity to seize the imagination of the nation with a new idea that will galvanize everyone in the UK and restore hope.
The main problem I fear is that they have no imagination at all and thus have nothing to work with to make the magic happen.

Now, there is a possibility that if these famous people are tasered and billy clubbed and beaten to death, that this might cause a huge outrage that will stir the country to action. Anything is possible. Lets hope they get the shit beaten out of them in that case, because certainly if they are allowed to march and nothing is done, the day will pass away and the news of it will be plankton in the whales belly.

This march is a fools errand. All marches after 15 February 2003 are fools errands.

Eventually they will come to see this, mark my words.

Our leaders would undoubtedly be happy if we “moved on” from Iraq. They don’t want to talk about it any more: it was a dreadful blunder, and reflects little credit on any of them. Presumably this is why the question has hardly been debated in parliament. Although the majority of the public were always against the war, this was not reflected by their elected representatives. The government behaved in a way that was transparently undemocratic but the Conservatives won’t call them on it, for without their almost unanimous support the whole project couldn’t have happened.

But to conveniently forget Iraq now is to forfeit the only possible benefit the war might have: the chance to rethink the dysfunctional political system that got us into this hole. If we don’t, we risk digging a series of ever deeper holes. The Iraq adventure was justified as the planting of a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Not only did it utterly fail at that, it also undermined our democracy. Appealing to our paranoia more than our vision, George Bush and Tony Blair obtained restrictions on freedoms that had taken centuries to evolve. They said these were necessary to ensure our security – a device used by authoritarian leaders since time immemorial.

Civil liberties never seem important until you need them. But by definition, that is the very time you won’t be able to get them, so they have to be in place in advance, like an insurance policy. In his book Defying Hitler, the historian Sebastian Hafner describes how Germany slid into nazism. At first people laughed at Hitler and played along with what seemed trivial changes in the law. For most Germans it was all rather abstract, and they were expecting things to return to normal when Hitler faded back into obscurity. Only he didn’t, and civil liberties were so compromised there was no way to stop him.

If we don’t stand up about Iraq then we tacitly sanction the next steps in this deadly experiment of democratic evangelism. Those will likely include an attack on Iran, a permanent force of occupation in Iraq (probably always the intention), the complete militarisation of the Middle East, and a revived nuclear future.

What do you mean by ‘stand up’? This is the question.

Stop the War Coalition planned a march from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square on Monday – the day parliament resumes – to draw attention to the fact that a lot of us are still thinking about Iraq and to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops. Using an archaic law (the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act), that demonstration has now been banned. Now why would that be? Stop the War Coalition has organised dozens of such demonstrations, and as far as I know not one person has been hurt. So it can’t be public safety that’s at stake.

No, it’s the elephant in the room. This government wants to show itself as clean and new, and doesn’t want attention drawn to the elephant and the mess it has left on the carpet. So it invokes an old law, to shave a little more off the arrangements by which citizens communicate their feelings to government (a process, by the way, called democracy).

The elephant in the room is Stop the War. They are wearing the emperors new clothes. They are engaging in the inexplicable and illogical behavior that needs to be explained.

Two million people marched in the streets against the illegal, immoral, unjustified, murderous invasion of Iraq; a demonstration which Stop the War organized, and that two million were supported by at least another ten who didn’t turn up, and they were all ignored.

Anyone who now calls for more demonstrations is part of the problem. I have said this again and again on BLOGDIAL, and it took the failure of the march to get my fellow BLOGDIALERS to swallow that bitter pill. It may be your ‘democratic right’ to protest but the fact is that demonstrating is a useless gesture, and this has been comprehensively proven.

The time you have spent writing this article Eno, and the thought you put behind it was wasted. It would be far better for you and Stop the War to break out a pack of Oblique Strategies to allow you to come to a solution that will solve the actual problem, since it appears that you cannot synthesize on on the fly or off the cuff. Your problem is the momentum of the war machine and the attack on Iran that is on the horizon. That is what you need to comprehensively defeat; that is the fire you have to put out.

Demonstrations are an energy sink; they are a distraction. Your essay about you not being able to demonstrate has diverted your energy away from the problem by two degrees; firstly, you are complaining about not being able to demonstrate, which in itself is useless, because demonstrations do not work to solve the problem.

This is how they keep you under tight control, you and Stop the War and anyone else who is decent and moral. You need to stop working for these people, because they are not offering any real solutions. All they are offering is a never ending series of useless marches and petitions. It has to stop. If you do not accept this, then you must be prepared for war without end.

It would take courage for Gordon Brown to say: “This war was a catastrophe.” It would take even greater courage to admit that the seeds of the catastrophe were in its conception: it wasn’t a good idea badly done (the neocons’ last refuge – “Blame it all on Rumsfeld”), but a bad idea badly done. And it would take perhaps superhuman courage to say: “And now we should withdraw and pay reparations to this poor country.”

I don’t see it happening. But the demonstration will, legal or not: on Monday Tony Benn will lead us as we exercise our right to remind our representatives that, even if Iraq has slipped off their agenda, it’s still on ours. Please join us.

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2184946,00.html

WE ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT.

Tony Benn and Stop the War are gatekeepers who’s only aim is to pacify the outrage of the public and to channel it into useless acts that will not solve the problem.

Anyone who marches at this event is a FOOL.

One of two things will happen at this event:

• All of you or some of you will be arrested, and nothing will change.
• They will let the march go ahead, and you will all go home and nothing will change.

If you are really serious about putting an end to war, you all need to think hard. Think about how you solve other problems in your life, like leaking pipes or repairing a tyre puncture. You need to apply that logic to this problem, the problem of the war machine.

If you really think that marching will change anything then you are either delusional or deliberately acting to keep the whole obscene war economy running. I do not know or care which one it is, but what you cannot do is call for more impotent marches without being challenged.

ID card-based criminal record checks get thumbs up

Gemma Simpson

Tuesday October 02, 2007

Plans for a new service using the government’s controversial ID cards scheme to speed up criminal record checks have met with approval from volunteers involved in a trial of the technology.

The volunteers piloted two potential online services developed by the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) and the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) which could be used to authenticate the identities of and information supplied by job applicants.

At the trials, all volunteers went through a simulated experience of applying for a position requiring a CRB check. The participants met a prospective employer, filled out the CRB disclosure application form and had their identity authenticated by a counter-signatory. Their criminal record information was then disclosed to the company requesting it.

Each volunteer completed two legs in the trial — one using a passport and one using an ID card.

The passport-based system would use an applicant’s UK passport with information from the IPS to make sure the data provided is correct — with this system likely to come into effect before the second system. The second online service would use ID cards issued to UK citizens and foreign nationals residing in the UK for more than three months with information from the IPS to check application data. This system could be introduced in the longer term.

Nearly all (96 percent) of the 160 volunteers said the passport-related service is an improvement on the current arrangement and 71 percent rated it as a “great improvement”.

Nearly nine out of 10 volunteers said the ID card-linked service is even more robust than the passport-linked process.

But Phil Booth, national co-ordinator of the NO2ID anti-ID card campaign, criticised the trial because he said it tested the customer experience of the CRB check in isolation, while “glossing over the inconvenience and intrusiveness of the ID system as a whole”.

Booth said: “IPS is trying to sell a so-called benefit without any reference to actual cost or reality.”

[…]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/

Well well well.

It looks like the contents of the ‘Frances Stonor-Saunders’ email are confirmed as correct yet again:

[…]

There will be spaces on this database for your religion, residence status, and many other private and personal facts about you. There is unlimited space for every other details of your life on the NIR database, which can be expanded by the Government with or without further Acts of Parliament.

[…]

Private businesses are going to be given access to the NIR Database. If you want to apply for a job, you will have to present your card for a swipe. If you want to apply for a London Underground Oyster Card, or a supermarket loyalty card, or a driving license you will have to present your ID Card for a swipe. The same goes for getting a telephone line or a mobile phone or an internet account.

[…]

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1207

ID cards were sold to the public on the basis that they would only hold a small amount of information. Now we see that they are to be used for CRB checks.

You can now guarantee that they will indeed hold residence status, religion, criminal record and everything else that they can possibly store on you.

Once again, for the thousandth time, if you do not register for this card they cannot include you in the database.

Meanwhile, David Cameron has reiterated his promise to scrap ID cards. He will of course, have to scrap the NIR and biometric passports to really come through on this promise.

You’ve probably seen the front page of yesterday’s Mail on Sunday“Officials from the top of Government to lowly council officers will be given unprecedented powers to access details of every phone call in Britain under laws coming into force tomorrow. The new rules compel phone companies to retain information, however private, about all landline and mobile calls, and make them available to some 795 public bodies and quangos. The move, enacted by the personal decree of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, will give police and security services a right they have long demanded: to delve at will into the phone records of British citizens and businesses”

As usual the Daily Mail are permitted to complain about all this stuff, but within the acceptable boundaries of plebdom. So it goes, “what if it falls into the wrong hands ?”. But of course, one struggles to think what is the ‘right hands’ in this circumstance. We’ve talked about all this stuff before on here.

Council workers asking permission from a nominated person ? Various other agencies, quangos ?

You have to think about it. What possible means do they have to interpret or act on such information ? Presumably it will be possible to phone up any government agency and arbitrarily ‘grass’ on someone you don’t like and get their phone call and internet web surfing use put into the hands directly of council, government workers ?

I remember when all this was being concocted, one of the ‘selling points’ about the phone snooping side of things (due to come in later) was that it will only be a small amount of data, ie it couldn’t show the subject of the phone call itself (obviously), but that’s not the case with internet data retention, the subject of intent is very much known from the URL requested, and can be much much more intimate. And I don’t think people really understand the implications of this.

And where are the powerful voices against all this ? Where is business ? What are they afraid of ? Are they afraid the Labour spin machine of doting commissars obsessed with hideous ideology will turn against them and start looking at their phone calls and internet records ?

Naturally all this itself is just one small part of the the regime’s ongoing plans.

This sounds a like a communist police state to me, hidden behind the crap about ‘shared values, security, terrorism, a new ‘modern’ crime’ and so on. As such I think it’s only fair to treat the country as that as I’ve said before. How else exactly are you supposed to treat it?

[…]

Jultra

At last, Jultra is back.

The question that arises from this article is…are you able to live without a phone? and if the answer is ‘no’ how can you use the phone network in a way that allows you to preserve your privacy?

Will we now see a proliferation of private un-tappable untraceable Asterisk networks supplanting the phone network?

Billionaire Kool-Aid drinker says Big Brother is desired:

LONDON – Residents of big cities like New York and London must accept that they are under constant watch by video cameras, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday.

Bloomberg, holding talks with his London counterpart Ken Livingstone, said such measures as London’s “ring of steel” — a network of closed-circuit cameras that monitors the city center_ were a necessary protection in a dangerous world.

“In this day and age, if you think that cameras aren’t watching you all the time, you are very naive,” Bloomberg told reporters at London’s City Hall.

“We are under surveillance all the time” from cameras in shops and office buildings, “and in London they have multiple cameras on every bus and in every subway car,” he added.

“The people of London not only support it, but if Ken Livingstone didn’t do it they would try to run him out of town on a rail. We live in a dangerous world, and people want to have security cameras.”

During his visit, Bloomberg was getting a demonstration of the ring of steel, a system of cameras and road barriers introduced during the years of Irish Republican Army bombings to protect London’s central business district.

London has one of the world’s highest concentrations of surveillance cameras. An estimated 4 million CCTV cameras operate in Britain, and some civil liberties campaigners have warned the country is becoming a “surveillance state.”

New York has far fewer, but the number is growing. Authorities hope to implement an $81.5 million version of the ring of steel for lower Manhattan, featuring surveillance cameras as well as barriers that could automatically block streets.

[…]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071001/ap_on_re_us/bloomberg_surveillance

First of all, “Residents of big cities like New York and London” do not have to accept anything like this; especially when it does not work to prevent crime, costs a fortune in money and costs everyone their dignity and liberty.

London doesn’t feel like it used to. Having cameras on you all the time has a dibilitating effect on a city and everyone in London is suffering from the ill effects of CCTV…wether they know it or not.

Check out these Google results. The jury (we still have those for the moment, at least rhetorically) is out on this matter. CCTV doesn’t work, and the next step is dismantling the entire CCTV network. Most of the cameras operating in the UK are illegal in any case.

You will note that the future is not one of all pervasive Big Brother surveillance. There are many examples where the future is free of the insane fear that is gripping the ‘democracies’. This era will pass and the totalitarian apparatus dismantled, just like the Soviet Union was dismantled. It is a question of WHEN not IF. Certainly the issue of wasted money and lack of results will be one of the key reasons why this will happen.

I don’t even have to go into the causes of this irrational fear and the real solutions to putting an end to this insanity do I? We have gone over it so many times!

CCTV is Security Theatre. To have real security, you need to remove the thorn from the lions foot and do all the other things that are reasonable and moral.

That is how you stop people from doing bad things in your city.

As for crime, you need to take care of the endemic problems in the police forces, and then double the numbers. You need to stop locking people up for no reason and end the insane prohibition that has been destroying America for generations.

Lastly…

Check this out in particular, for Epic Win Value.

[…]
Fingerprints
T5 will have shops, cafes and bars like any other airport, and some of those are already fitted out – Harrods to name one.The terminal also has some new features, particularly in the area of security.

HEATHROW TERMINAL FIVE SECURITY

Every passenger will have their photograph taken and fingerprint scanned at passport control. Their fingerprint will be checked again at the gate before boarding.

“It’s so we can make sure that the person who turns up at the gate is the same one who checked in,” Mr Pearman says.

Another state-of-the-art addition involves X-ray scanners which screen hand luggage before they enter departures.

Never used before, the Advanced Threat Identification system is designed to detect explosives and liquids in baggage and automatically divert suspicious bags to one side for further examination.

In fact, the entire building is designed with security in mind: “We’ve been able to work security in, rather than try to add it on afterwards,” Mr Pearman says.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7015785.stm

This is of course, a total lie.

This building has been built with Security Theatre in mind…but you know this, because we have written about the abomination that is Terminal 5 before.

This nauseating piece of propaganda from BBQ by the completely ignorant ‘Victoria Bone’ is astonishing in its breathless promoting of Terminal five in nothing but glowing terms.

She completely leaves out any negative consequences to the fingerprinting of criminals passengers, and this is in the light of the huge fight against biometric ID cards that is going on in this country. Such an omission can only be by design, and that therefore means this article is pure propaganda and part of a ‘softening up’ exercise for the British population, who, if they were told about what this really means to them, might refuse to fly out of Terminal 5 altogether.

Richard Rogers has made one of the worst buildings in the history of mankind. His firm is going to be responsible (unless the building is retrofitted and fixed to work correctly) for a violation of humans on a scale bigger than the concentration camps of Germany; Up to 30m passengers will travel through Terminal 5 every year.

Millions of people are going to be processed through this infernal machine, by his design, humiliating, violating and dehumanizing them for no other reason than that it was possible to do.

History will judge this building and its designer after the biometric fad and ‘security’ (Security Theatre) hysteria are over over.

They will say that what Richard Rogers has done with this Terminal 5 was pure evil, architecture in the service of Fascism and it will cast a dark shadow over any other building or success he ever had.

I for one, I will never travel through this building. I will not submit to this Fascism and inhuman architectural experimentation.

SHAME SHAME SHAME once again on BBQ for this blatant piece of propaganda.

SHAME on Richard Rogers, who has designed this Fascist monstrosity.

I pray that the truth about this building gets out and that people refuse to mover through it.

And for you people who do not know anything about identity and security, a quick recap.

There is absolutely no reason to take people’s fingerprints and photographs as they check in.

First of all, this is being done not only for international flights, but for ALL FLIGHTS including domestic ones. That means that if you, a British Citizen, want to fly to Manchester you have to be fingerprinted.

Inside your own country!

That is INSANE.

The reason why they are doing this is that travelers on international flights and domestic flights are mixed in one large unsegregated departure lounge, unlike any other airport in the world, where passengers flying on domestic and international flights are normally separated by walls. If someone got on a flight that connects through terminal five, it could be possible for them to get onto a domestic flight and then evade immigration control since the passenger area is mixed. To fix this problem with the building, they are fingerprinting EVERYONE so that this loophole is closed.

This has to be the stupidest mistake ever in the history of architecture.

The article above does not mention this of course, since it is propaganda.

Secondly, when you check into an international flight in a properly designed airport, you go to the international departure lounge and show your passport, which has your photo in it. The staff check your face against the picture in your passport. The name in your passport is checked against your name in your ticket. You are let through.

When you get to the gate, you show your passport again and your ticket stub, and the staff check your face against the photo in your passport, and the name on the stub. You are let onto the flight.

Fingerprinting you is nothing more than Security Theatre; this extra step adds no extra security to the normal process of checking in, and similarly, taking another photo of you in addition to the one you have in your passport adds no extra security whatsoever.

This is total Security Theatre, insanity and vendor driven garbage.

And there you have it.

By all means, tell everyone you know about this outrageous and vile building.

‘A Coup Has Occurred’

Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming war with Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at an American University symposium on September 20. Below is an edited transcript of Ellsberg’s remarkable speech:

I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.

If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.

Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.

And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.

It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …

This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.

Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.

Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.

The Next Coup

Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world – in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.

I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.

I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.

That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to, in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.

It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president – elected or not – with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.

When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country – but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.

They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”

It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.

Founders Had It Right

Now I’m referring to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.

It’s not just “our way of doing things” – it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.

That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …

But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.

Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t, it doesn’t even make it unlikely.

That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – and the public and the media, we have freed the White House – the president and the vice president – from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.

And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.

And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. … I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.

What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.

And … we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.

However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small perhaps – anyway not large – possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.

Restoring the Republic

Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.

Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little…

We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, “traitor,” “weak on terrorism” – names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.

How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.

I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.

And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a Führer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.

I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.

I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada – who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war – is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously upholding his oath.

The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.

Congressional Courage

On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate – and frankly of the Republicans – that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.

I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.

Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.” Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?

I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.

We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words “swear him in” when it came to testimony.

I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.

And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves – they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.

That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/ellsberg2.html

Collecting of Details on Travelers Documented U.S. Effort More Extensive Than Previously Known

By Ellen Nakashima Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, September 22, 2007; Page A01

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department’s Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf.

The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been greatly expanded and automated since 2002, according to former DHS officials.

Officials yesterday defended the retention of highly personal data on travelers not involved in or linked to any violations of the law. But civil liberties advocates have alleged that the type of information preserved by the department raises alarms about the government’s ability to intrude into the lives of ordinary people. The millions of travelers whose records are kept by the government are generally unaware of what their records say, and the government has not created an effective mechanism for reviewing the data and correcting any errors, activists said.

The activists alleged that the data collection effort, as carried out now, violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data related to Americans’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, such as their choice of reading material or persons with whom to associate. They also expressed concern that such personal data could one day be used to impede their right to travel.

“The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society,” said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco whose records were requested by the Identity Project, an ad-hoc group of privacy advocates in California and Alaska. The government, he said, “may be doing it with the best or worst of intentions. . . . But the job of building a surveillance database and populating it with information about us is happening largely without our awareness and without our consent.”

Gilmore’s file, which he provided to The Washington Post, included a note from a Customs and Border Patrol officer that he carried the marijuana-related book “Drugs and Your Rights.” “My first reaction was I kind of expected it,” Gilmore said. “My second reaction was, that’s illegal.”

DHS officials said this week that the government is not interested in passengers’ reading habits, that the program is transparent, and that it affords redress for travelers who are inappropriately stymied. “I flatly reject the premise that the department is interested in what travelers are reading,” DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. “We are completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel that the traveler may be reading.”

[…]

Washington Post

This is of course, a bald faced lie; if they are not interested in what a person is reading, then they would not collect data on the titles of books that you are carrying with you when you travel.

These people are so thick that they cannot even come up with a plausible lie to tell, they just come up with insane non-sequiturs like, “we are not interested in it, thats why we do it”.

As loath as I am to help out the perpetrators of this utter evil and the de destroyers of the american way of life, I have to point out a single reason that a skilled liar might give for the retention of a list of books people are carrying into the USA.

Numbers Stations.

Hell-spawn Chertoff could assert in terror movie plot style that they need to keep a list of books people are carrying because section of the text from these books might be used as One Time Pads to decrypt messages sent by OBL from his secret mountain lair.

It would go like this:

“NSA needs to have a list of all books being carried with travelers so that they can load their 25 million CPU supercomputer under mount Rushmore with the texts of all these books and then run them brute force against all classified ads, Numbers Station transmissions and every other possible source of encrypted messages.”

There you have it. And there are some people in the USA who would willingly drink that Kool-Aid and then preach it like religion, and there are millions more who would subsequently believe it unquestioningly, and then conveniently forget that it ever happened a year or two down the road.

The fact that traitors like Chertoff do not bother to come up with lies like that, which whilst being improbable are at least open to sound bite debate, shows just how sure they are that they are going to take over the usa and grind it into dust.

Back to the gist; RFID tags in books and other property will make this sort of association of objects to people much easer. They will (or do they right now?) then keep a list of ‘bad books’ or ‘suspicious literature’ any of which will cause you to be flagged should you buy them or be detected carrying them.

And if you think that avoiding the land of the great satan will keep you out of their databases:

Ann Harrison, the communications director for a technology firm in Silicon Valley who was among those who obtained their personal files and provided them to The Post, said she was taken aback to see that her dossier contained data on her race and on a European flight that did not begin or end in the United States or connect to a U.S.-bound flight.

“It was surprising that they were gathering so much information without my knowledge on my travel activities, and it was distressing to me that this information was being gathered in violation of the law,” she said.

James P. Harrison, director of the Identity Project and Ann Harrison’s brother, obtained government records that contained another sister’s phone number in Tokyo as an emergency contact. “So my sister’s phone number ends up being in a government database,” he said. “This is a lot more than just saying who you are, your date of birth.”

Edward Hasbrouck, a civil liberties activist who was a travel agent for more than 15 years, said that his file contained coding that reflected his plan to fly with another individual. In fact, Hasbrouck wound up not flying with that person, but the record, which can be linked to the other passenger’s name, remained in the system. “The Automated Targeting System,” Hasbrouck alleged, “is the largest system of government dossiers of individual Americans’ personal activities that the government has ever created.”

Astonishing.

And finally, from the bug-eyed beelzebub pocket devil Chertoff:

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in August 2006 said that “if we learned anything from Sept. 11, 2001, it is that we need to be better at connecting the dots of terrorist-related information. After Sept. 11, we used credit-card and telephone records to identify those linked with the hijackers. But wouldn’t it be better to identify such connections before a hijacker boards a plane?”

What ‘we learned’ you little devil, is that america is as vulnerable as any county is to being dismantled from the insiede and all it takes is a few evil and intelligent traitors to pull it off.

Furthermore, and stepping forward into the frame, what you should have learned (by now) is that there is a consequence to killing people in foreign countries (Vietnam). There is a consequence to imposing regimes on people (Iran, Operation AJAX) interfering with other peoples anything.

Now, with everyone running from the dollar like it is the plague, and the chinese threatening to destroy america without firing a shot, the american government is finally and literally going to pay for all the evil it has done, and the american people are very sadly going to pay for the evil that they have allowed to happen and which they have explicitly endorsed with their votes; remember this is all is entirely the fault of the voting public, who returned a war criminal to office, and who seem to be resisting the only man who can save America (with a capital ‘A’).

Once again. If there is one country on this earth that can turn such a disaster around it is the US of A.

They can be a great people…they wish to be.

Accept HillaryCare or Face Homelessness

Kurt Nimmo
Wednesday September 19, 2007

“Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that a mandate requiring every American to purchase health insurance was the only way to achieve universal health care but she rejected the notion of punitive measures to force individuals into the health care system,” reports News for clueless Yahoos.

Sure, Clinton rejects “punitive measures,” that is if you consider homelessness and the prospect of starvation, enforced by the government, something less than punitive. Clinton said “she could envision a day when ‘you have to show proof to your employer that you’re insured as a part of the job interview—like when your kid goes to school and has to show proof of vaccination,’” Yahoo News continues. In other words, you’ll need HillaryCare in order to get a job, no word on how you’ll be able to afford it after months of unemployment. Call it a Catch-22, one the scribes over at the Associated Press did bother to mention.

Incidentally, for a presidential selectee, Clinton is awful stupid, even though former fed mob boss Alan Greenspan thinks she is a genius. Every single state in the United States allows for vaccination medical exemptions and a few even permit philosophical and/or religious exemptions, although the American Medical Association is attempting to put an end to this and force your children to be injected with thimerosal (i.e., mercury), formaldehyde, aluminum, and other toxins.

In other words, your children are not required to “show proof of vaccination” to enter school, although not going to a federal “education” indoctrination center may be considered a blessing.

Clinton is not stupid, of course. Rather she is an accomplished liar—on par with her war criminal husband—and a conniving Bilderberg doorstop, determined to impose the globalist agenda, even if it results in your kids ending up autistic, thanks to a mercury cocktail lovingly injected.

“On Tuesday, Clinton began airing a 30-second ad statewide in Iowa and New Hampshire promoting her new health care plan. The ad reminds viewers of her failed effort to pass universal health care in the early 1990s, trying to portray a thwarted enterprise as one of vision,” News for Yahoos continues. “The ad also highlights her support as senator for an expanded Children’s Health Insurance Program and for more affordable vaccines…. Her health care plan would require every American to buy health insurance, offering tax credits and subsidies to help those who can’t afford it. The mandatory aspect of her proposal, however, gets glossed over in the ad.”

It stands to reason Clinton’s plan will be “mandatory”—under penalty of taser-wielding, ninja-black drabbed SWAT cops—and, soon after she is selected by way of Diebold, Clinton will make sure millions of kids are stricken with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, seizures, mental retardation, hyperactivity, dyslexia, and other developmental disorders, such as autism.

[…]

http://adereview.com/blog/?p=48

Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt! Kurt!