Aug 26, 2008 21:02 | Updated Aug 26, 2008 23:01
By JONNY PAUL, LONDON
A member of the British academic union that voted to reintroduce a boycott of Israeli academia has posted a link on the union's Web site to an anti-Semitic article on the Web site of former Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke.
Jenna Delich, a member of the University and College Union, posted a message on the UCU Web site's activist list with a link to the article.
Delich's message was in support of a colleague who backs the boycott call. It reads: "John, in support to your link this may be a long but also an interesting reading: www.davidduke.com/general/humanitarian-disaster-595.html. No comment necessary. The facts are speaking for themselves, Jenna."
The article, "Racism, not Defense, at the Heart of Israeli Politics," is an attack on the "Israeli oligarchs" and was circulated to hundreds of the union's active members. It was written by a 9/11 conspiracy theorist named Joe Quinn.
In the article he writes: "There is much evidence to warrant an in-depth investigation of the role played by agents of Israel in the 9/11 attacks. Yet the ubiquitous, tiresome and completely baseless threat of being labelled "anti-Semitic‚" for criticizing the actions of the Israeli government effectively prevents all but the most courageous from following the leads. Coincidence? We think not...
"Just what level of power do Israeli interests wield in the halls of power in the US that any investigation into Israeli spying activities on US soil against US intelligence agencies can be so completely quashed? Would this constitute a level of power and control that would allow those interests to carry off a terrorist attack like 9/11 and have it blamed on 'Arab terrorists?'"
Quinn links to the Web site of convicted Holocaust-denier David Irving saying: "On the morning of 9/11 and just as the WTC towers were crumbling, the five Israelis were caught doing the 'happy dance' as they videotaped the Twin Towers fall." The piece closes with the claim: "Either someone does something about these sick psychopaths, or they, and their kind in Washington and around the world, will destroy us all."
The link was discovered by Engage, a group of left-wing trade unionists and academics active in the anti-boycott campaign.
Dr. David Hirsh, lecturer at University of London's Goldsmiths College and editor of the Engage Web site, said: "Since 2003 academic unions have been dominated by a campaign to exclude Israelis, and nobody else, from UK campuses. We have warned the [UCU] general-secretary on numerous occasions that this campaign has imported anti-Semitic ways of thinking into our union, she either didn't understand or didn't care. That the union is now circulating racist material should be understood as a manifestation of its institutional anti-Semitism; it cannot be written off as yet another random accident."
Hirsh said Delich's e-mails on the activist list had already been the subject of two formal complaints to the union. However, the UCU judged that the evidence was unpersuasive.
Dr. Jon Pike, a member of the UCU national executive but speaking in a personal capacity, said: "I'm not surprised that anti-Semitic material has again dropped into my inbox from the union activists' list. What is shocking is the failure of the union's internal procedures to do anything about this. UCU prides itself on being an anti-racist union. In fact, it is probably the most complacent public institution in Britain in relation to increasing anti-Semitism and the leadership turns a blind eye, or worse, to the racism in the union. Behind all this is the campaign of discrimination against Israeli academics which is fostered by some in the union and encouraged by the leadership."
Eve Garrard, senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Keele University in Staffordshire, said: "This is precisely the kind of thing which drove me recently to resign from the UCU. It has become a union which is complacent about anti-Semitism: It regards prejudicial hostility toward Jews, from within the union itself, as something too unimportant for it to bother with. I didn't feel able to remain in an institution which treats anti-Semitism indulgently, as a special exception to a generally anti-racist stance."
The UCU activist e-mail list contains around 700 members. Any union member may subscribe and the list is administrated and monitored by the union.
"Anti-Semitism is routinely tolerated on the activist list when it is expressed in the language of hostility to Israel," Hirsh said. "Only a small group of Jews and anti-racists have been standing up against this culture on the list. Some have been excluded from the list on trumped up charges; others have been driven off the list by continual accusations of bad faith. Some have left the union because they cannot bear to pay their dues to what they consider to be an anti-Semitic organization."
In May, the UCU voted on a motion at its annual conference in Manchester to reintroduce an academic boycott of Israel. The called on union members "to consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions, and to discuss the occupation with individuals and institutions concerned, including Israeli colleagues with whom they are collaborating."
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1219572133936&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
The Financial Times and the “Self-Confessed Mastermind of 9/11”
By James Petraswww.dissidentvoice.org
August 27th, 2008
In recent days there is mounting evidence of the advance of totalitarianism in the political and media mainstream. The entire Western world, led by the United States, has embraced a Georgian regime, which invaded South Ossetia totally demolishing its capital city of 50,000 residents, assassinated 1500 men, women and children and dozens of Russian peace keepers. The US has mobilized a naval and air armada off the Iranian coast, prepared to annihilate a country of 70 million people. The New York Times published an essay by a prominent Israeli historian, which advocates the nuclear incineration of Iran. All the major mass media have mounted a systematic propaganda campaign against China, supporting each and every terrorist and separatist group, and whipping up public opinion in favor of launching a New Cold War. There is little doubt that this new wave of imperial aggression and bellicose rhetoric is meant to deflect domestic discontent and distract public opinion from the deepening economic crises.
The Financial Times (FT), once the liberal, enlightened voice of the financial elite (in contrast to the aggressively neo-conservative Wall Street Journal) has yielded to the totalitarian-militarist temptation. The feature article of the weekend supplement of August 16/17, 2008 — “The Face of 9/11” — embraces the forced confession of a 9/11 suspect elicited through 5 years of hideous torture in the confines of secret prisons. To make their case, the FT published a half-page blow-up photo first circulated by former CIA director George Tenet, which presents a bound, disheveled, dazed, hairy ape-like prisoner. The text of the writer, one Demetri Sevastopulo, admits as much: The FT owns up to being a propaganda vehicle for a CIA program to discredit the suspect while he stands trial based on confessions obtained through torture.
From beginning to end, the article categorically states that the principle defendant, Khalet Sheikh Mohammed, is the “self-confessed mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the US.” The first half of the article is full of trivia, designed to provide a human-interest feel to the courtroom and the proceedings — a bizarre mixture discussing Khaled’s nose to the size of the courtroom.
The central point of departure for the FT’s conviction of the suspect is Khaled’s confession, his ‘desire for martyrdom’, his assumption of his own defense and his reciting the Koran. The crucial piece of the Government’s case is Khaled’s confession. All the other ‘evidence’ was circumstantial, hearsay and based on inferences derived from Khaled’s attendance at overseas meetings.
The FT’s principle source of information, an anonymous informant “familiar with the CIA interrogation program” states categorically two crucial facts: 1. How little the CIA had known about him before his arrest (my emphasis) and (2) that Khaled held out longer than the others.
In other words, the CIA’s only real evidence was extracted by torture (the CIA admitted to ‘water boarding’ — an infamous torture technique inducing near death from drowning). The fact that Khaled repeatedly denied the accusations and that he only confessed after 5 years of torture in secret prisons renders the entire prosecution a case study in totalitarian jurisprudence. Having been subjected to unspeakable torture by US judicial investigators, facing accusations based on a confession extracted through torture, it is no wonder that Khaled refused a court appointed military lawyer — a lawyer who is part of a system of secret prisons, torture and ‘show trials’. Rather than portray Khaled as a fanatic seeking martyrdom for rejecting a lawyer, we must recognize that he is completely in his right mind to at least preserve the limited space and time allocated to him to state his beliefs and to relate his willingness to die for those beliefs. Confessions extracted from torture, have no validity in any court, especially after 5 years of solitary confinement. What the FT calls “the super terrorist” based on his stated “desire for martyrdom” is the admission of an individual who has suffered beyond human endurance and looks to death to end his horrible sub-human existence.
The FT’s embrace of the CIA and military’s coerced evidence and therefore their use of torture, puts them squarely in the camp of the totalitarian state. The right-turn of the FT mirrors the European turn toward US military confrontation with Russia, and the military build-up in Poland, the Czech Republic, Kosova, Iraq and Georgia. The FT by legitimizing torture has opened the door to making totalitarian judicial practices, arbitrary arrests, secret prisons, prolonged solitary confinement, torture, show trials and cover-up feature stories part of normal Western political life. Genteel British fascism is no less ugly than its blustery US version.
James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). Petras’ forthcoming book, Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power, is due from Clarity Press, Atlanta, in August 2008. He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu. Read other articles by James, or visit James's website.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/the-financial-times-and-the-“self-confessed-mastermind-of-911”/
Letters: WTC 7 Explanation Falls Short
" ... The computer model presented on the NIST Web site does not even match the video of the actual collapse. ... "
Houston Chronicle
Aug. 24, 2008
After I read Friday's Page A8 article, "Sept. 11 building enigma solved in investigation," and reviewed the National Institute of Standards and Technology Web site http://www.nist.gov/, I can only conclude that the "final" and official government explanation of why World Trade Center tower 7 collapsed is a far cry from a plausible explanation.
WTC 7, which was not struck by a plane and had only minor isolated fires, collapsed in perfect symmetry at literally free-fall speed. Prior to 9/11 no steel structured building had ever collapsed or even come close to collapsing due to fire. The official explanation that this symmetrical eight-second collapse was due to "thermal expansion" of the steel structure because of scattered and isolated fires defies common sense and the most elementary laws of physics. The computer model presented on the NIST Web site does not even match the video of the actual collapse.
A controlled demolition model was dismissed, allegedly because explosions were not heard. This conclusion totally defies eyewitness accounts of explosions prior to the collapse, which are widely available on the Internet. Additionally, since the controlled-demolition hypothesis was not considered, no attempt was made to examine debris for explosive residue.
Further objective investigation is clearly needed. If evidence suggests explosives were planted prior to the collapse, perhaps Securacom, the company in charge of WTC security, should be investigated as well. Since Securacom was run by the president's brother Marvin Bush and cousin Wirt Walker, I'm sure we can count on their full cooperation.
THOMAS PELLEGRINI
The Woodlands
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/5963856.html
Houston Chronicle
Aug. 24, 2008
After I read Friday's Page A8 article, "Sept. 11 building enigma solved in investigation," and reviewed the National Institute of Standards and Technology Web site http://www.nist.gov/, I can only conclude that the "final" and official government explanation of why World Trade Center tower 7 collapsed is a far cry from a plausible explanation.
WTC 7, which was not struck by a plane and had only minor isolated fires, collapsed in perfect symmetry at literally free-fall speed. Prior to 9/11 no steel structured building had ever collapsed or even come close to collapsing due to fire. The official explanation that this symmetrical eight-second collapse was due to "thermal expansion" of the steel structure because of scattered and isolated fires defies common sense and the most elementary laws of physics. The computer model presented on the NIST Web site does not even match the video of the actual collapse.
A controlled demolition model was dismissed, allegedly because explosions were not heard. This conclusion totally defies eyewitness accounts of explosions prior to the collapse, which are widely available on the Internet. Additionally, since the controlled-demolition hypothesis was not considered, no attempt was made to examine debris for explosive residue.
Further objective investigation is clearly needed. If evidence suggests explosives were planted prior to the collapse, perhaps Securacom, the company in charge of WTC security, should be investigated as well. Since Securacom was run by the president's brother Marvin Bush and cousin Wirt Walker, I'm sure we can count on their full cooperation.
THOMAS PELLEGRINI
The Woodlands
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/5963856.html
Monday, August 25, 2008
Pakistan Daily News: Indict All of the George W Bush US Government Officials - Impeachment Not Enough for September 11 World Trade Center Attacks
Indict all of the US government officials and their allies who planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks
WWW.DAILY.PK
26 AUGUST 2008
A preponderance of evidence shows that the highest officials of the Bush Administration, in collusion with many other officials from the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, FEMA, NSA, NORAD, New York City officials, air-traffic contollers, airline executives, controlled demolitions experts, computer graphics technicians, media executives, and others together planned and committed the horrible attacks of 9/11/2001 against the Pentagon and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 9/11 attacks were immediately blamed on some bogus 'Arab highjackers', a half dozen of whom were later confirmed to be still alive, and therefore innocent, after the 9/11 attacks.
The false-flag 9/11 attacks provided the excuse for the US government's 'War on Terrorism', the chief purpose of which is for the USA to gain control of the lucrative oil fields of the Middle East. A secondary purpose is to increase the taxation of US citizens for defense spending in support of the USA's enormous Military/Industrial Complex, and a tertiary purpose is to establish justification of the enactment of Police State measures within the USA under the vast, far-reaching, and politically ambiguous umbrella of 'Homeland Security'. When the rights of freedom of speech and assembly are curtailed for the citizens of the USA, the US government will be able to pursue its agenda of world domination without the domestic distraction of dissident opinions, protests, and demonstrations.
The Pentagon, CIA, FBI, and other agencies and officials of the US government have perpetrated many crimes, assassinations, and false-flag bombings and attacks against US citizens and US interests during the past fifty years, including, but by no means limited to, the State political assassinations of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Martin Luther King; the 1988 Berlin Disco bombing; the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; and the anthrax letter attacks of October 2001. The US government and its allies also committed the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005; the Madrid train bombings of 2004; the London 7/7/2005 bombings; and the recent spate of bombings in Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, and at the Indian Embassy in Kabul during the summer of 2008.
Since the end of World War Two, fanatic right-wing ideologues with corporate connections have gradually gained complete control of the US military, the US intelligence agencies, the US government, and the USA's 'Mainstream Media'. Fascism in the USA is not merely a current threat posed by the Republican Administration of George W. Bush; it is an already-accomplished situation that has been many decades in the making. Fascism in the USA is actually a 'done deal'.
The USA's long descent into fascism cannot be halted or stopped merely by electing a member of the Democrat Party to the Presidency, or by electing a Democrat majority to Congress. The infiltration and control of the US government by right-wing extremists is far too advanced and complete -- they manipulate our elected officials like puppets on a string, and a great many of our elected officials are themselves part of the fascist establishment. The right-wing takeover of the US government has been a gradual and very successful fascist coup that will not be reversed without a very serious and deadly struggle. Given the history of extreme and indiscriminate violence shown by the ruling junta of the USA, it appears quite obvious to me that restoring democracy to the USA would inevitably require a violent armed Revolution in which the American people are opposed against the forces of the US government and the US military.
As a US citizen and as a human being, I personally consider the killing of innocent people in foreign countries by the CIA, the US military, and their puppets in support of the economic interests of multinational US-based corporations to be totally immoral and intolerable, and I consider it my solemn duty to oppose US aggression and Imperialism in any way that I can. US government and Mass Media propaganda promote a climate in which the actions and activities of US troops abroad are regarded as beyond reproach, but there is nothing noble or 'heroic' about unprovoked military aggression and genocide against vulnerable and innocent foreign populations.
George W. Bush, George H. Bush, Jeb, Neil, and Marvin Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condaleezza Rice, Karl Rove, Wolfowitz, Perle, Powell, Armitage, Ashcroft, Abrams, Adelman, Feith, Bolton, Libby, Kissinger, Mueller, Tenet, Goss, Giuliani, Hayden, Chertoff, Baker, and many hundreds of other individuals working for the White House, CIA, FBI, FEMA, the Pentagon, NSA, NORAD, the airline industry, and the US news media together planned and executed the 9/11 attacks. All of the above-named and their accomplices need to be tried for Treason and Mass Murder, with the death penalty as the just and very necessary reward for their conviction of those crimes.
We need a Nuremberg-style trial for Treason and Mass Murder for all of the members of the US government, the US military, the US intelligence agencies, and their civilian accomplices in the airline industry and the news media who participated in the murderous crimes of 9/11. The death penalty should be applied to all of the principals and their accomplices, even if that means executing several hundred or even several thousand people, because crimes of this magnitude against the American people and the US Republic cannot go unpunished, and the punishment must be extreme to send a message that the American people will not tolerate such Treason -- not now or in the future. If allowed to remain unpunished and at liberty, these individuals represent a grave threat to the safety and security of all Americans. If convicted of the heinous crimes of 9/11, the death penalty is the only way to ensure that they or their allies will not somehow manage to attack America and Americans again. The executions should be performed in public and be internationally televized for the entire world to witness.
I do realize that there are some very worthy reasons to oppose capital punishment in many situations. However, it is also quite apparent to me that any show of clemency that might be given to the US government perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks leaves open the possibility that they and their sympathizers could revive their subversion of American democracy and their violence toward peace-loving Americans. That is why I advocate a policy of capital punishment without any consideration of mercy, plea-bargaining, or probation for the US government perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and their allies.
No one in or out of the US government should be exempt from prosecution and capital punishment for the Treasonous attacks of 9/11. The planners and participants in the 9/11 attacks within the US government and their accomplices must not be allowed to protect themselves behind the specious excuse of "National Security." The true security and survival of our Republic depends entirely on this.
http://www.daily.pk/world/84-worldnews/6733-indict-all-of-the-george-w-bush-us-government-officials-impeachment-not-enough-for-september-11-world-trade-center-attacks.html
WWW.DAILY.PK
26 AUGUST 2008
A preponderance of evidence shows that the highest officials of the Bush Administration, in collusion with many other officials from the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, FEMA, NSA, NORAD, New York City officials, air-traffic contollers, airline executives, controlled demolitions experts, computer graphics technicians, media executives, and others together planned and committed the horrible attacks of 9/11/2001 against the Pentagon and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 9/11 attacks were immediately blamed on some bogus 'Arab highjackers', a half dozen of whom were later confirmed to be still alive, and therefore innocent, after the 9/11 attacks.
The false-flag 9/11 attacks provided the excuse for the US government's 'War on Terrorism', the chief purpose of which is for the USA to gain control of the lucrative oil fields of the Middle East. A secondary purpose is to increase the taxation of US citizens for defense spending in support of the USA's enormous Military/Industrial Complex, and a tertiary purpose is to establish justification of the enactment of Police State measures within the USA under the vast, far-reaching, and politically ambiguous umbrella of 'Homeland Security'. When the rights of freedom of speech and assembly are curtailed for the citizens of the USA, the US government will be able to pursue its agenda of world domination without the domestic distraction of dissident opinions, protests, and demonstrations.
The Pentagon, CIA, FBI, and other agencies and officials of the US government have perpetrated many crimes, assassinations, and false-flag bombings and attacks against US citizens and US interests during the past fifty years, including, but by no means limited to, the State political assassinations of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Martin Luther King; the 1988 Berlin Disco bombing; the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; and the anthrax letter attacks of October 2001. The US government and its allies also committed the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005; the Madrid train bombings of 2004; the London 7/7/2005 bombings; and the recent spate of bombings in Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, and at the Indian Embassy in Kabul during the summer of 2008.
Since the end of World War Two, fanatic right-wing ideologues with corporate connections have gradually gained complete control of the US military, the US intelligence agencies, the US government, and the USA's 'Mainstream Media'. Fascism in the USA is not merely a current threat posed by the Republican Administration of George W. Bush; it is an already-accomplished situation that has been many decades in the making. Fascism in the USA is actually a 'done deal'.
The USA's long descent into fascism cannot be halted or stopped merely by electing a member of the Democrat Party to the Presidency, or by electing a Democrat majority to Congress. The infiltration and control of the US government by right-wing extremists is far too advanced and complete -- they manipulate our elected officials like puppets on a string, and a great many of our elected officials are themselves part of the fascist establishment. The right-wing takeover of the US government has been a gradual and very successful fascist coup that will not be reversed without a very serious and deadly struggle. Given the history of extreme and indiscriminate violence shown by the ruling junta of the USA, it appears quite obvious to me that restoring democracy to the USA would inevitably require a violent armed Revolution in which the American people are opposed against the forces of the US government and the US military.
As a US citizen and as a human being, I personally consider the killing of innocent people in foreign countries by the CIA, the US military, and their puppets in support of the economic interests of multinational US-based corporations to be totally immoral and intolerable, and I consider it my solemn duty to oppose US aggression and Imperialism in any way that I can. US government and Mass Media propaganda promote a climate in which the actions and activities of US troops abroad are regarded as beyond reproach, but there is nothing noble or 'heroic' about unprovoked military aggression and genocide against vulnerable and innocent foreign populations.
George W. Bush, George H. Bush, Jeb, Neil, and Marvin Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condaleezza Rice, Karl Rove, Wolfowitz, Perle, Powell, Armitage, Ashcroft, Abrams, Adelman, Feith, Bolton, Libby, Kissinger, Mueller, Tenet, Goss, Giuliani, Hayden, Chertoff, Baker, and many hundreds of other individuals working for the White House, CIA, FBI, FEMA, the Pentagon, NSA, NORAD, the airline industry, and the US news media together planned and executed the 9/11 attacks. All of the above-named and their accomplices need to be tried for Treason and Mass Murder, with the death penalty as the just and very necessary reward for their conviction of those crimes.
We need a Nuremberg-style trial for Treason and Mass Murder for all of the members of the US government, the US military, the US intelligence agencies, and their civilian accomplices in the airline industry and the news media who participated in the murderous crimes of 9/11. The death penalty should be applied to all of the principals and their accomplices, even if that means executing several hundred or even several thousand people, because crimes of this magnitude against the American people and the US Republic cannot go unpunished, and the punishment must be extreme to send a message that the American people will not tolerate such Treason -- not now or in the future. If allowed to remain unpunished and at liberty, these individuals represent a grave threat to the safety and security of all Americans. If convicted of the heinous crimes of 9/11, the death penalty is the only way to ensure that they or their allies will not somehow manage to attack America and Americans again. The executions should be performed in public and be internationally televized for the entire world to witness.
I do realize that there are some very worthy reasons to oppose capital punishment in many situations. However, it is also quite apparent to me that any show of clemency that might be given to the US government perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks leaves open the possibility that they and their sympathizers could revive their subversion of American democracy and their violence toward peace-loving Americans. That is why I advocate a policy of capital punishment without any consideration of mercy, plea-bargaining, or probation for the US government perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and their allies.
No one in or out of the US government should be exempt from prosecution and capital punishment for the Treasonous attacks of 9/11. The planners and participants in the 9/11 attacks within the US government and their accomplices must not be allowed to protect themselves behind the specious excuse of "National Security." The true security and survival of our Republic depends entirely on this.
http://www.daily.pk/world/84-worldnews/6733-indict-all-of-the-george-w-bush-us-government-officials-impeachment-not-enough-for-september-11-world-trade-center-attacks.html
Senate Candidate Works with 9/11 Truth Group
Allison Bruce and Dan Kelley
Rocky Mountain News
www.rockymountainnews.com
August 25, 2008
Gates Crescent Park -- Buddy Moore, independent candidate for U.S. Senate, showed up in a baseball cap and paint-splattered shorts at the park this morning to help members of We Are Change Colorado set up the site.
The organization, which has a permit for the week, will increase its presence during the week and occupy the picnic tables and parking lot across the interstate from Invesco Field as Barack Obama makes his anticipated acceptance speech Thursday night.
Moore said he was “loosely affiliated” with We Are Change. He supports the 9/11 Truth campaign, which calls for new investigations and raises questions about the 9/11 attacks.
He said he was living in France after 9/11 and saw a very different view of America.
“Our aggression towards Iraq was completely unfounded,” he said.
He has been campaigning for about six months, attending small events and peace rallies.
Moore said a key part of his campaign is to get a citizen’s amendment to the Constitution to ban the import or export of arms in the U.S.
With such a ban, the profit incentive would be taken out of war, he said.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com
www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/aug/25/senate-candidate-works-911-truth-group/
Rocky Mountain News
www.rockymountainnews.com
August 25, 2008
Gates Crescent Park -- Buddy Moore, independent candidate for U.S. Senate, showed up in a baseball cap and paint-splattered shorts at the park this morning to help members of We Are Change Colorado set up the site.
The organization, which has a permit for the week, will increase its presence during the week and occupy the picnic tables and parking lot across the interstate from Invesco Field as Barack Obama makes his anticipated acceptance speech Thursday night.
Moore said he was “loosely affiliated” with We Are Change. He supports the 9/11 Truth campaign, which calls for new investigations and raises questions about the 9/11 attacks.
He said he was living in France after 9/11 and saw a very different view of America.
“Our aggression towards Iraq was completely unfounded,” he said.
He has been campaigning for about six months, attending small events and peace rallies.
Moore said a key part of his campaign is to get a citizen’s amendment to the Constitution to ban the import or export of arms in the U.S.
With such a ban, the profit incentive would be taken out of war, he said.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com
www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/aug/25/senate-candidate-works-911-truth-group/
Siddiqui: Mystery of 'ghost of Bagram' - victim of torture or captured in a shootout?
Mother of three in court after five-year disappearance ends in Afghanistan amid conflicting claims
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Saeed Shah in Islamabad
The Guardian
August 6 2008
For five years, no one would say for certain whether Aafia Siddiqui, a mother of three with a PhD from an elite American university, was alive or dead. Her family did not know and authorities in Pakistan and the US were not saying.
Yesterday, as Siddiqui was produced before a magistrate in New York to face charges of attacking US army officers in Afghanistan last month, that central mystery was resolved.
The devout Pakistani-American Muslim, once named by the US as a top al-Qaida operative, is indeed alive and now in US custody. But almost nothing can be said for certain about her whereabouts since March 2003, when she was last seen getting into a taxi with her three children in Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi.
Some campaigners believe Siddiqui was snatched by Pakistani intelligence agents, passed to the Americans, and held in solitary confinement at the US base in Bagram, Afghanistan. There she acquired mythical status - prisoner 650 - whose wails haunted other inmates.
But the US, which has made multiple allegations against Siddiqui over the years depicting her as a courier of blood diamonds and a financial fixer for al-Qaida, has denied holding her, raising the question: where has she been for five years?
Siddiqui's emergence three weeks ago in Afghanistan is riddled with confusion. The official complaint against Siddiqui says she was picked up outside the governor's compound in the eastern Afghan city of Ghazni on July 17 by police who became suspicious of her inability to speak either of Afghanistan's main languages, Pashtu or Darri. They searched her handbag, discovering documents detailing how to make dirty bombs and biological weapons and descriptions of New York landmarks, as well as sealed glass jars of "numerous chemical substances".
A day later, the complaint says, two US army officers and two FBI agents arrived in Ghazni with their interpreters for a meeting - not realising that Siddiqui was standing behind a yellow curtain in the same room.
Siddiqui is then alleged to have jumped out from behind the curtain and snatched up the assault rifle one of the officers had placed on the floor by his feet, pointing it at the Americans, and screaming threats in English. She is said to have fired at least two shots by the time an interpreter managed to wrestle the gun away from her.
According to the complaint, one officer heard her yell "Allahu Akbar" as she opened fire. One interpreter claimed she shouted: "Get the fuck out of here."
She was shot and hit at least once in the torso but, according to the complaint, continued to hit and kick the officers before losing consciousness.
Siddiqui's lawyer, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, told CNN the scenario was utterly implausible. "This is a very intelligent woman. What is she doing outside of the governor's residence?" Sharp said.
"The woman is a PhD. Is a woman like this really that stupid? There is an incongruity, and I have trouble accepting the government's claims."
Yesterday, Afghan police in Ghazni offered another competing version of her detention, telling Reuters that the US troops had demanded she be handed over. When Afghan police refused, they were disarmed. The Americans shot at Siddiqui, thinking she was a suicide bomber. A teenage boy who was with Siddiqui remained in Afghan police custody.
Before yesterday's court appearance in New York, Siddiqui was last seen heading for Karachi's railway station, where, along with her three children, then aged seven, five and six months old, she planned to catch a train to visit an uncle in Islamabad.
Her life before that was exemplary. She had studied in America, earning a degree from MIT before moving on to a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Brandeis University. She was unhappily married, to a Pakistani.
Acquaintances over her years in Boston have described her commitment to Islam. She returned to Pakistan in 2002, where her marriage broke up and she was living with her family at the time of her disappearance. Siddiqui's relatives believe that she was abducted by Pakistani intelligence agents and later transferred to US custody. She first appeared on the radar of US intelligence services in 2001 because of a series of donations to a now-banned Islamist charity that also had Saudi connections. But she became of greater interest after the capture of the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, in March 2003, who named her under interrogation. The US argues that Muhammed would not have mentioned her unless she was connected to al-Qaida.
The BBC yesterday reported on its website that Siddiqui had married a nephew of Muhammed's called Ali Abd'al Aziz Ali following her divorce. Siddiqui's family denies the connection, but the BBC said it had confirmation from security sources and Muhammed's family.
US and Pakistani officials initially admitted that she was indeed in detention, and some reports said she was being held by the Americans outside Kabul.
But by 2004 John Ashcroft, then US attorney general, said she was among seven high-level al-Qaida suspects still at large.
In the meantime, concern for her grew after accounts emerged from prisoners at Bagram of a solitary woman inmate. Anger at her disappearance was further stoked last month when Yvonne Ridley, a British Muslim journalist, flew to Pakistan and held a press conference claiming that Siddiqui was Prisoner 650 at Bagram.
Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician, hosted the event, where Ridley, who also now does human rights work, said: "I call her the 'grey lady' because she is almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her."
A group of Arab prisoners who escaped from Bagram in 2005 said they saw a woman being taken to the toilets at the base. After breaking out, Abu Yahya al-Libi told an Arabic news channel that there was a woman from Pakistan at Bagram who was referred to simply as prisoner 650, held in solitary confinement.
The American account of her capture was dismissed yesterday. "This is one of the greatest lies of the 21st century ... " said IA Rehman, director general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), an independent organisation.
Siddiqui's sister, Fauzia, said she had been raped and tortured. "Her rape and torture is a crime beyond anything she was accused of," she said. "This is the real crime of terror here." She pleaded for the child who was with her sister when she was captured, according to the American authorities, to be immediately handed over to the family. It is unclear what has happened to the other two children.
"She has had no access to any lawyer ... presume her to be innocent before proven guilty, please. How can this punishment be fit for any crime?" said Fauzia Siddiqui.
Asim Qureshi, a London-based investigator for Cage Prisoners, a campaign group, said the US had in the past denied holding other prisoners, such as Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a Spaniard of Syrian descent also captured in Pakistan.
"They just release the information when it suits them ... everything we know about Bagram means that we know she [Siddiqui] would have suffered abuse."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/06/pakistan.afghanistan
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Saeed Shah in Islamabad
The Guardian
August 6 2008
For five years, no one would say for certain whether Aafia Siddiqui, a mother of three with a PhD from an elite American university, was alive or dead. Her family did not know and authorities in Pakistan and the US were not saying.
Yesterday, as Siddiqui was produced before a magistrate in New York to face charges of attacking US army officers in Afghanistan last month, that central mystery was resolved.
The devout Pakistani-American Muslim, once named by the US as a top al-Qaida operative, is indeed alive and now in US custody. But almost nothing can be said for certain about her whereabouts since March 2003, when she was last seen getting into a taxi with her three children in Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi.
Some campaigners believe Siddiqui was snatched by Pakistani intelligence agents, passed to the Americans, and held in solitary confinement at the US base in Bagram, Afghanistan. There she acquired mythical status - prisoner 650 - whose wails haunted other inmates.
But the US, which has made multiple allegations against Siddiqui over the years depicting her as a courier of blood diamonds and a financial fixer for al-Qaida, has denied holding her, raising the question: where has she been for five years?
Siddiqui's emergence three weeks ago in Afghanistan is riddled with confusion. The official complaint against Siddiqui says she was picked up outside the governor's compound in the eastern Afghan city of Ghazni on July 17 by police who became suspicious of her inability to speak either of Afghanistan's main languages, Pashtu or Darri. They searched her handbag, discovering documents detailing how to make dirty bombs and biological weapons and descriptions of New York landmarks, as well as sealed glass jars of "numerous chemical substances".
A day later, the complaint says, two US army officers and two FBI agents arrived in Ghazni with their interpreters for a meeting - not realising that Siddiqui was standing behind a yellow curtain in the same room.
Siddiqui is then alleged to have jumped out from behind the curtain and snatched up the assault rifle one of the officers had placed on the floor by his feet, pointing it at the Americans, and screaming threats in English. She is said to have fired at least two shots by the time an interpreter managed to wrestle the gun away from her.
According to the complaint, one officer heard her yell "Allahu Akbar" as she opened fire. One interpreter claimed she shouted: "Get the fuck out of here."
She was shot and hit at least once in the torso but, according to the complaint, continued to hit and kick the officers before losing consciousness.
Siddiqui's lawyer, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, told CNN the scenario was utterly implausible. "This is a very intelligent woman. What is she doing outside of the governor's residence?" Sharp said.
"The woman is a PhD. Is a woman like this really that stupid? There is an incongruity, and I have trouble accepting the government's claims."
Yesterday, Afghan police in Ghazni offered another competing version of her detention, telling Reuters that the US troops had demanded she be handed over. When Afghan police refused, they were disarmed. The Americans shot at Siddiqui, thinking she was a suicide bomber. A teenage boy who was with Siddiqui remained in Afghan police custody.
Before yesterday's court appearance in New York, Siddiqui was last seen heading for Karachi's railway station, where, along with her three children, then aged seven, five and six months old, she planned to catch a train to visit an uncle in Islamabad.
Her life before that was exemplary. She had studied in America, earning a degree from MIT before moving on to a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Brandeis University. She was unhappily married, to a Pakistani.
Acquaintances over her years in Boston have described her commitment to Islam. She returned to Pakistan in 2002, where her marriage broke up and she was living with her family at the time of her disappearance. Siddiqui's relatives believe that she was abducted by Pakistani intelligence agents and later transferred to US custody. She first appeared on the radar of US intelligence services in 2001 because of a series of donations to a now-banned Islamist charity that also had Saudi connections. But she became of greater interest after the capture of the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, in March 2003, who named her under interrogation. The US argues that Muhammed would not have mentioned her unless she was connected to al-Qaida.
The BBC yesterday reported on its website that Siddiqui had married a nephew of Muhammed's called Ali Abd'al Aziz Ali following her divorce. Siddiqui's family denies the connection, but the BBC said it had confirmation from security sources and Muhammed's family.
US and Pakistani officials initially admitted that she was indeed in detention, and some reports said she was being held by the Americans outside Kabul.
But by 2004 John Ashcroft, then US attorney general, said she was among seven high-level al-Qaida suspects still at large.
In the meantime, concern for her grew after accounts emerged from prisoners at Bagram of a solitary woman inmate. Anger at her disappearance was further stoked last month when Yvonne Ridley, a British Muslim journalist, flew to Pakistan and held a press conference claiming that Siddiqui was Prisoner 650 at Bagram.
Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician, hosted the event, where Ridley, who also now does human rights work, said: "I call her the 'grey lady' because she is almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her."
A group of Arab prisoners who escaped from Bagram in 2005 said they saw a woman being taken to the toilets at the base. After breaking out, Abu Yahya al-Libi told an Arabic news channel that there was a woman from Pakistan at Bagram who was referred to simply as prisoner 650, held in solitary confinement.
The American account of her capture was dismissed yesterday. "This is one of the greatest lies of the 21st century ... " said IA Rehman, director general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), an independent organisation.
Siddiqui's sister, Fauzia, said she had been raped and tortured. "Her rape and torture is a crime beyond anything she was accused of," she said. "This is the real crime of terror here." She pleaded for the child who was with her sister when she was captured, according to the American authorities, to be immediately handed over to the family. It is unclear what has happened to the other two children.
"She has had no access to any lawyer ... presume her to be innocent before proven guilty, please. How can this punishment be fit for any crime?" said Fauzia Siddiqui.
Asim Qureshi, a London-based investigator for Cage Prisoners, a campaign group, said the US had in the past denied holding other prisoners, such as Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a Spaniard of Syrian descent also captured in Pakistan.
"They just release the information when it suits them ... everything we know about Bagram means that we know she [Siddiqui] would have suffered abuse."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/06/pakistan.afghanistan
Friday, August 22, 2008
COINTELPRO 2.0: Mukasey Loosens Guidelines on Domestic Spying
" ... The directive uses 9/11 as an all encompassing justification to wage a witch hunt against dissenting citizens ... Under the new regulatory regime proposed by Mukasey, state and local police would be given free rein to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch criminal intelligence investigations based on the 'suspicion' ... Outsourced contractors from communications, defense and security corporations such as AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing ... Science Applications International Corporation [and] many more, have collaborated with Bush regime war criminals in fashioning a hypermodern, high-tech police state. ... "by Tom Burghardt
August 21, 2008
The waning months of the Bush administration can be characterized by an avalanche of changes to long-standing rules governing domestic intelligence operations.
The revisions proposed by U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and other top administration officials represent the greatest expansion of executive power since the Watergate era and should been viewed as an imminent threat to already-diminished civil liberties protections in the United States.
The slippery slope towards open police-state methods of governance may have begun with the 2001 passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, but recent events signal that a qualitative acceleration of repressive measures are currently underway. These changes are slated to go into effect with the new fiscal year beginning October 1, and are subject neither to congressional oversight nor judicial review.
Bush allies in Congress kicked off the summer with the shameful passage by the House and Senate of the FISA Amendments Act, an unconstitutional domestic spying bill that gutted Fourth Amendment protections. With broad consensus by both capitalist political parties, the FISA Act eliminates meaningful judicial oversight of state surveillance while granting virtual immunity to law-breaking telecoms.
Despite posturing by leading Democrats, including the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, the FISA legislation legalized the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program and set the stage for further assaults on the right to privacy and dissent.
Further attacks were not long in coming.
In the last month alone, mainstream media have reported that the FBI illegally obtained the phone records of overseas journalists allegedly as part of a 2004 “terrorism investigation.”
Other reports documented how the Department of Homeland Security asserts the right to seize a traveler’s laptop and other electronic devices for an unspecified period of time and without probable cause. Still other reports revealed that the administration has expanded the power of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to issue “overarching policies and procedures” and to coordinate “priorities” with foreign intelligence services that target American citizens and legal residents.
And on Wednesday, The Washington Post exposed how the federal government has used “its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations.” Ellen Nakashima writes,
The disclosure of the database is among a series of notices, officials say, to make DHS’s data gathering more transparent. Critics say the moves exemplify efforts by the Bush administration in its final months to cement an unprecedented expansion of data gathering for national security and intelligence purposes. (”Citizens’ U.S. Border Crossings Tracked,” The Washington Post, August 20, 2008)
The Post also revealed that the information will be linked to a new database, the Non-Federal Entity Data System, “which is being set up to hold personal information about all drivers in a state’s database.” Posted at the Government Printing Office’s website, the notice states that the information may even be shared with federal contractors or consultants “to accomplish an agency function related to this system of records.”
But perhaps the most controversial move towards increasing the federal government’s surveillance powers were unveiled by the Justice Department in late July. According to the Washington Post, “a new domestic spying measure… would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.”
New rules for police intelligence-gathering would apply to any of the 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive some $1.6 billion each year in federal grants. These proposed changes, as with other administration measures, were quietly published July 31 in the Federal Register.
The McClatchy Washington Bureau reported August 13 that Mukasey confirmed plans to “loosen post-Watergate restrictions on the FBI’s national security and criminal investigations,” under cover of improving the Bureau’s “ability to detect terrorists.” Marisa Taylor wrote,
Mukasey said he expected criticism of the new rules because “they expressly authorize the FBI to engage in intelligence collection inside the United States.” However, he said the criticism would be misplaced because the bureau has long had authority to do so.
Mukasey said the new rules “remove unnecessary barriers” to cooperation between law enforcement agencies and “eliminate the artificial distinctions” in the way agents conduct surveillance in criminal and national security investigations. (”FBI to Get Freer Rein to Look for Terrorism Suspects,” McClatchy Washington Bureau, August 13, 2008)
While the Justice Department’s draft proposals have been selectively leaked to the media, and DoJ is expected to release its final version of the changes within a few weeks, even then the bulk of these modifications will remain classified on grounds of “national security.”
Under the new regulatory regime proposed by Mukasey, state and local police would be given free rein to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch criminal intelligence investigations based on the “suspicion” that a target is “engaged in terrorism.” The results of such investigations could be shared “with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases,” according to Post reporters Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson.
With probable cause tossed overboard, domestic intelligence as envisaged by the Bush Justice Department is little more than a fishing expedition intended to cast a wide driftnet over Americans’ constitutional rights, reducing guarantees of free speech and assembly to banal pieties mouthed by state propagandists.
These changes are intended to lock-in Bush regime surveillance programs such as warrantless internet and phone wiretapping, data mining, the scattershot issuance of top secret National Security Letters to seize financial and other personal records, as well as expanding a security index of individuals deemed “terrorist threats” by the corporatist state.
Simultaneous with the release of new DoJ domestic spying guidelines, the Bush administration’s “modernization” of Reagan-era Executive Order 12333, as the Washington Post delicately puts it, also calls for intensified sharing of intelligence information with local law enforcement agencies.
In addition to consolidating power within the ODNI, E.O. 12333 revisions direct the CIA “and other spy agencies,” in a clear violation of the Agency’s charter, to “provide specialized equipment, technical knowledge or assistance of expert personnel” to state and local authorities.
The latest moves to expand executive power follow close on the heels of other orders and rule changes issued by the Bush regime. As researcher and analyst Michel Chossudovsky reported in June, the Orwellian National Security Presidential Directive 59/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 24 (NSPD 59/HSPD 24), entitled “Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security,” is directed against U.S. citizens. Chossudovsky wrote,
NSPD 59 goes far beyond the issue of biometric identification, it recommends the collection and storage of “associated biographic” information, meaning information on the private lives of US citizens, in minute detail, all of which will be “accomplished within the law.”
The directive uses 9/11 as an all encompassing justification to wage a witch hunt against dissenting citizens, establishing at the same time an atmosphere of fear and intimidation across the land.
It also calls for the integration of various data banks as well as inter-agency cooperation in the sharing of information, with a view to eventually centralizing the information on American citizens. (”Big Brother” Presidential Directive: “Biometrics for Identification and Screening to Enhance National Security,” Global Research, June 11, 2008)
Indeed, NSPD 59/HSPD 24 creates the framework for expanding the definition of who is a “terrorist” to include other categories of individuals “who may pose a threat to national security.”
In addition to al Qaeda and other far-right Islamist terror groups, many of whom have served as a cat’s paw for Western intelligence agencies in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the Balkans, NSPD 59/HSPD 24 has identified two new categories of individuals as potential threats: “Radical groups” and “disgruntled employees.”
In other words, domestic anarchist and socialist organizations as well as labor unions acting on behalf of their members’ rights, now officially fall under the panoptic lens of federal intelligence agencies and the private security contractors who staff the 16 separate agencies that comprise the U.S. “intelligence community.”
These moves represent nothing less than an attempt by the Bush administration to return to the days of COINTELPRO when the Bureau, acting in concert with state and local police “red squads” targeted the left for destruction.
“After 9/11, the gloves come off”
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. national security state has ramped-up its repressive machinery, targeting millions of Americans through broad surveillance programs across a multitude of state and private intelligence agencies.
While the FBI, CIA, NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the federal “tip of the spear” of current intelligence operations, they certainly are not alone when it comes to domestic spying.
Outsourced contractors from communications, defense and security corporations such as AT&T, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Verizon Communications, Northrop Grumman, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), L-3 Communications, CACI International and many more, have collaborated with Bush regime war criminals in fashioning a hypermodern, high-tech police state.
That these corporations have staked-out “homeland security” as a niche market to expand their operations has been explored by Antifascist Calling in numerous articles. As I have previously reported, it is estimated that some 70% of the personnel employed by U.S. intelligence agencies are now private contractors holding top secret and above security clearances.
Unaccountable actors virtually beyond congressional scrutiny, outsourced intelligence agents first and foremost are employees answerable to corporate managers and boards of directors, not the American people or their representatives. Chiefly concerned with inflating profit margins by overselling the “terrorist threat,” the incestuous relationships amongst corporate grifters and a diminished “public sector” demonstrate the precarious state of democratic norms and institutions in the U.S.
New rules governing FBI counterintelligence investigations will allow the Bureau to run informants for the purpose of infiltrating organizations deemed “subversive” by federal snoops. Many of the worst abuses under COINTELPRO, the CIA’s Operation CHAOS and the U.S. Army’s deployment of Military Intelligence Groups (MIGs) for illegal domestic operations during the 1960s, employed neofascists as infiltrators and as nascent death squads.
While the Bureau may have eschewed close collaboration with fascist gangs, will sophisticated, high-tech private security corporations now play a similar role in Bureau counterintelligence and domestic security operations?
If history is any judge, the answer inevitably will be “yes.”
Currently equipping the “intelligence community” with electronic specialists, network managers, software designers and analysts, will defense and security corporations bulk-up the Bureau and related agencies with “plausibly deniable” ex-military and intelligence assets for targeted infiltration and “disruption” of domestic antiwar and anticapitalist groups?
It can’t happen here? Why its happening already! As investigative journalist James Ridgeway revealed in April, a private security firm,
organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records–donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies. (”Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups,” Mother Jones, April 11, 2008)
The firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i) provided a range of services for corporate clients. According to Ridgeway, the private snoops engaged in “intelligence collection” for Allied Waste; conducted background checks and “performed due diligence” for the Carlyle Group; handled “crisis management” for the Gallo wine company and Pirelli; engaged in “information collection” for Wal-Mart. Also listed as BBI/S2i records as clients were Halliburton and Monsanto.
Mike German, a former FBI agent and whistleblower who is now the policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that once proposed changes are implemented, police may collect intelligence even when no underlying crime is suspected. This is nothing less than “preemptive policing” and a recipe for tightening the screws on dissent. The Post averred,
German, an FBI agent for 16 years, said easing established limits on intelligence-gathering would lead to abuses against peaceful political dissenters. In addition to the Maryland case [that targeted antiwar and death penalty opponents], he pointed to reports in the past six years that undercover New York police officers infiltrated protest groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention; that California state agents eavesdropped on peace, animal rights and labor activists; and that Denver police spied on Amnesty International and others before being discovered.
“If police officers no longer see themselves as engaged in protecting their communities from criminals and instead as domestic intelligence agents working on behalf of the CIA, they will be encouraged to collect more information,” German said. “It turns police officers into spies on behalf of the federal government.” (Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson, “U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules,” The Washington Post, August 16, 2008)
In a related report on Fusion Centers, that German coauthored with Jay Staley for the ACLU, they documented how so-called “counterterrorist” national collection agencies are “characterized by ambiguous lines of authority, excessive secrecy, troubling private-sector and military participation, and an apparent bent toward suspicionless information collection and data mining.”
As I reported earlier this month, citing research from German and Staley’s report, U.S. Marine Corps officers, enlisted personnel and an analyst with U.S. NORTHCOM, pilfered intelligence files and shared them with private defense contractors in hope of securing future employment.
Money talks, particularly in a political culture where the business of government is, after all, business!
With little oversight from a compliant Congress, and an “opposition” party in league with their “constituents”–multinational corporate grifters out to make a buck–the final nails are being hammered into the coffin of America’s former democratic Republic.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly, Love & Rage and Antifa Forum, he is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press. Read other articles by Tom, or visit Tom's website.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/08/cointelpro-20-mukasey-loosens-guidelines-on-domestic-spying/
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