Click here to go to the InfoWars website for information on 9-11, etc.!


Click here to go to the Wikipedia website to learn more about the book, '1984', and its author!


Click here to go to the ImpeachForPeace.org website for information on impeachment!


Click here to go to the 'We The People Foundation's' website to sign the 'Petition(s) for Redress of Grievances'!Click here to go to the 'We The People Foundation's' website to sign the 'Petition(s) for Redress of Grievances'!


Click here to go to The Committee to Protect Bloggers website for more information!


Click here to go to the Center for Constitutional Rights website for more information!


Click here to go to The Committee to Protect Bloggers website for more information!








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Vote to indict the biggest terrorist!









Saturday, May 27, 2006


NSA Snoop Program: All About
The Neocon Enemies List

Written by Kurt Nimmo
[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by Another Day in
the Empire (kurtnimmo.com),
and/or Kurt Nimmo.
All rights reserved.]

 

     National Review Online, the home of many a Straussian neocon, has posted an excerpt from William Arkin on its Media Blog page. Arkin, who writes a column for the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post (the editors over there like to call Arkin’s Early Warning a blog), declared on May 16, in regard to the massive NSA snoop program, “there is no enemies list” and the “Bush administration has been arrogant and incompetent in communicating to the American public. It has cynically split the country into red and blue in order to give itself greater power to pursue a wrong-headed national security strategy that it claims is red, white and blue…. The Congress has also utterly failed in five months to get to the bottom of the NSA’s warantless surveillance program and thereby resolve its legality and assuage public anxiety.” In other words, it is simply more partisan politics and splenetic political manipulation la mode de Karl Rove. Nothing to see here, except a bit of unresolved legality. Please move along.

If you believe that Bush and the neocons in the White House and the Pentagon, as Arkin suggests, have not drawn up a comprehensive list of domestic enemies, and are not snooping them right now, I have a chartreuse pony to sell you.

It’s no mistake Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden was breezily selected, as predicted, by a large number of senators (78-15 in his favor) earlier today. Hayden will merge CIA and Pentagon covert and snoop operations and scant little of the work will concentrate on Osama’s cartoonish cave dwellers and the spurious boogieman known as “al-Qaeda.” William Arkin may trust his government to employ a colossal snoop program in a myopic effort to gain short term political gain, but those of us who take a look at not too distant history understand otherwise.

Verne Lyon, a former CIA undercover operative, wrote for Covert Action Information Bulletin, Summer 1990, that with “the DCS, the DOD [Domestic Operations Division], the old boy network, and the CIA Office of Security operating without congressional oversight or public knowledge, all that was needed to bring [Operation Chaos] together was a perceived threat to the national security and a presidential directive unleashing the dogs. That happened in 1965 when President Johnson instructed [John] McCone to provide an independent analysis of the growing problem of student protest against the war in Vietnam. Prior to this, Johnson had to rely on information provided by the FBI, intelligence that he perceived to be slanted by Hoover’s personal views, which often ignored the facts.” In order to “achieve the intelligence being asked for by the President, the CIA’s Office of Security, the Counter-Intelligence division, and the newly created DOD turned to the old boy network for help.” Lyon continues:

As campus anti-war protest activity spread across the nation, the CIA reacted by implementing two new domestic operations. The first, Project RESISTANCE, was designed to provide security to CIA recruiters on college campuses. Under this program, the CIA sought active cooperation from college administrators, campus security, and local police to help identify anti-war activists, political dissidents, and “radicals.” Eventually information was provided to all government recruiters on college campuses and directly to the super-secret DOD on thousands of students and dozens of groups. The CIA’s Office of Security also created Project MERRIMAC, to provide warnings about demonstrations being carried out against CIA facilities or personnel in the Washington area.

All of this should be familiar, as the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) kept a database on “a motley group of about 10 peace activists [who] showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton” in 2004, according to Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, in order to protest the corporation’s “supposed” war profiteering. “A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA’s database. It’s not clear why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention,” muses the clueless Isikoff, about as tuned in to domestic spook operations (in the case of the CIA, quite illegal under its charter) as his colleague, William Arkin, who should know better. The CIFA’s activity in regard to Haliburton is reminiscent of Project RESISTANCE, a domestic espionage operation coordinated under the DOD, a fact discovered with a simple Wikipedia search (obviously, writers working for Newsweek and the Washington Post cannot be bothered with online encyclopedias).

Under Operation Chaos and Project MERRIMAC, the CIA went about violating the strictures of the Bill of Rights with customary zeal. The CIA “infiltrated agents into domestic groups of all types and activities. It used its contacts with local police departments and their intelligence units to pick up its 'police skills'; and began in earnest to pull off burglaries, illegal entries, use of explosives, criminal frame-ups, shared interrogations, and disinformation. CIA teams purchased sophisticated equipment for many starved police departments and in return got to see arrest records, suspect lists, and intelligence reports. Many large police departments, in conjunction with the CIA, carried out illegal, warrantless searches of private properties, to provide intelligence for a report requested by President Johnson,” writes Lyon.

After Johnson left office, Nixon continued the programs. “In June 1970 Nixon met with Hoover, [Richard] Helms, NSA Director Admiral Noel Gaylor, and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) representative Lt. Gen. Donald V. Bennett and told them he wanted a coordinated and concentrated effort against domestic dissenters. To do that, he was creating the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), chaired by Hoover. The first ICI report, in late June, recommended new efforts in ‘black bag operations,’ wiretapping, and a mail-opening program. In late July 1970... the members of the ICI (were told) that their recommendations had been accepted by the White House.”

If not for the Church Committee (the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in 1975), the extent of crimes committed by the CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon would have likely remained secret. According to revelations brought forth by the committee (see the Church Committee’s supplementary detailed staff report on Operation Chaos), during “the life of Operation CHAOS, the CIA had compiled personality files on over 13,000 individuals including more than 7,000 U.S. citizens as well as files on over 1,000 domestic groups. The CIA had shared information on more than 300,000 persons with different law enforcement agencies including the DIA and FBI. It had spied on, burglarized, intimidated, misinformed, lied to, deceived, and carried out criminal acts against thousands of citizens of the United States. It had placed itself above the law, above the Constitution, and in contempt of international diplomacy and the United States Congress. It had violated its charter and had contributed either directly or indirectly to the resignation of a President of the United States (Nixon). It had tainted itself beyond hope.”

Of all this, the CIA’s blatant contempt for the rights of individuals was the worst. This record of deceit and illegality, implored Congress as well as the President to take extreme measures to control the Agency’s activities. However, except for a few cosmetic changes made for public consumption such as the Congressional intelligence oversight committee nothing has been done to control the CIA. In fact, subsequent administrations have chosen to use the CIA for domestic operations as well. These renewed domestic operations began with Gerald Ford, were briefly limited by Jimmy Carter, and then extended dramatically by Ronald Reagan.

According to the corporate media and the standard gaggle of neocon pundits, we have nothing to fear now that Hayden has won over the Senate. After all, as the neocons assure us, the CIA and spook operations emanating out of the Pentagon (and the NSA) focus on “al-Qaeda,” a shadowy group with unestablished and undocumented ties within the United States, and those of us worried about the return of Operation Chaos, Project MERRIMAC, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO are simply paranoid tinfoil hatters or worse.

Never mind the superabundance of material demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt consistent government complicity in not only denying American citizens the right to dissent and seek redress of grievances, but also employing harassment and violence against them. It appears William Arkin simply does not bother to read history and is woefully ignorant of government subversion and desecration of the Constitution. His assertion that the Bush administration and the neocons at (their) core are not interested in “enemies list” a' la Nixon is, on its face, absurd and should be discarded as a dangerous fallacy.

Addendum

Allan Uthman writes for the Buffalo Beast (Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State):

If Bush’s nominee for CIA chief, Air Force General Michael Hayden, is confirmed, that will put every spy program in Washington under military control. Hayden, who oversaw the NSA warrantless wiretapping program... is clearly down with the program. (W)hat program? To weaken and dismantle or at least neuter the CIA. Despite its best efforts to blame the CIA for “intelligence errors” leading to the Iraq war, the picture has clearly emerged — through extensive CIA leaks — that the White House’s analysis of Saddam’s destructive capacity was not shared by the Agency. This has proved to be a real pain in the ass for Bush and the gang.

Who’d have thought that career spooks would have moral qualms about deceiving the American people? And what is a president to do about it? Simple: make the critical agents leave, and fill their slots with Bush/Cheney loyalists. Then again, why not simply replace the entire organization? That is essentially what both Rumsfeld at the DoD [Department of Defense, aka "Department of War"] and newly minted Director of National Intelligence John (Negroponte) are doing — they want to move intelligence analysis into the hands of people that they can control, so the next time they lie about an “imminent threat” nobody’s going to tell. And the press is applauding the move as a “necessary reform.”

Remember the good old days, when the CIA were the bad guys?

It should be noted, regardless of the witless declarations of William Arkin and his ilk, the military is busy at work ferreting out and monitoring "terrorists", that is to say American citizens who have nothing to do with the CIA asset Osama bin Laden or the phantom “al-Qaeda,” the database.

“NBC investigative correspondent Lisa Myers reported that NBC News had obtained a secret 400-page Defense Department document listing more than 1,500 ’suspicious incidents’ across the country over a recent ten-month period,” Barry Grey wrote last December. “One of the items listed as a "threat" was a meeting held by a group of activists a year ago at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Florida to plan a protest against military recruiting at local high schools. Myers said the Defense Department data base obtained by NBC News included nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests. Among them was an anti-war protest held last March in Los Angeles, a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston, and a planned protest last April in Fort Lauderdale, Florida…. A separate press report noted that the Pentagon data base also mentioned weekly protests at an Atlanta, Georgia military recruiting station and an anti-war protest at the University of California in Santa Cruz.”

These limited revelations in and of themselves reveal that the Bush administration and the Pentagon, with the collusion of congressional Democrats as well as Republicans, have pushed aside limits on military domestic spying that were imposed following congressional hearings in the 1970s on Pentagon spying against civil rights organizations and opponents of the Vietnam War.

In addition to the creation of CIFA, mentioned above, a “second major effort to expand the military's domestic spying operations involves legislation being pushed by the Pentagon on Capitol Hill that would establish an exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information about US citizens with the Pentagon, the CIA and other agencies, as long as it was deemed that the information was related to foreign intelligence…. In addition, each of the military services has launched its own program to collect domestic intelligence. The Post quotes a Marine Corps order approved in April of 2004 that states the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity will be ‘increasingly required to perform domestic missions,’ and as a result ‘there will be increased instances whereby Marine intelligence activities may come across information regarding US persons.’”

Of course, since there is zero oversight, there really is no need to make the fraudulent claim these operations will be conducted only if “related to foreign intelligence.” As the above indicates, the government is primarily interested in snooping and subverting its own citizens, who are more of a threat to their stranglehold on power than any number of phony “al-Qaeda” groups or other contrived Freddy Kruger scarecrows.

[Privacy and the Constitution are systematically being done away with; and if "We, the People" continue to allow this to happen, very soon freedom and liberty will become a memory of something exceedingly important that no longer exists, and everyone will supposedly have to do what they're told "or else". But we must not capitulate to any of this. We must be truly courageous, and non-violently and peaceably stand up against all of these inroads of an authoritarian and totalitarian fascist police state, where liberty and freedom no longer exist, taking over the United States and the world. We must stand up against it with little or no concern(s) for what befalls us as a result of this which is doing nothing but standing up for what's right, true and in the interests of freedom and liberty, the principles upon which this country was monumentally, immutably and inalienably founded, and no less than our duty and responsibility to stand up for the preservation of, no matter what is inflicted upon us for doing so. LONG LIVE FREEDOM! (Subtitle, words in brackets ("[ ]") and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)]













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Friday, May 26, 2006



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Go to Original

 

                    BIG BROTHER'S HISTORY
                    (It Appears that the U.S. Constitution
                    Supposedly Doesn't Matter Anymore)

                    By John Prados
                    TomPaine.com

                    Thursday, 25 May 2006

                    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
                    U.S.A. and Internationally
                    by TomPaine (.com)
                    and/or John Prados.
                    All rights reserved.]

 

Click here to go to the ACLU's website!    The National Security Agency's [illegal] warrantless domestic wiretaps and its logs of Americans' phone calls are the most controversial, but by no means the only, surveillance initiative underway that has chilling implications for all Americans. American history is littered with examples of similar instances of security programs gone awry. It is three decades now since the Church Committee concluded, "The tendency of intelligence activities expanding beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings."

    In the 20th century, this history of misuse of security programs begins with World War I. A government-sponsored volunteer (read: vigilante) group, the American Protective League, was created to assist the Justice Department and military intelligence, resulting in nearly 2,000 prosecutions for allegedly "disloyal" utterances by Americans.

    Immediately after the war, the "Palmer Raids," named for then-Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, rounded up 10,000 persons for supposed anarchist or revolutionary views. These became a milestone in the creation of the FBI and the career of its first director (and Palmer's chief assistant) J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover went on to keep books on all manner of Americans; he used the information collected to exert political pressure at various times.

    Domestic intelligence programs were revived in 1936 and steadily increased in intrusiveness, impelled first by World War II, then by the Cold War. These began with the intention of monitoring foreign influence on American politics and ended up investigating "loyalty." We hardly need mention the internment of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans on hysterical suspicions of contact with the enemy in World War II.

    Though the two statutes are far different in detail, both the Internal Security Act of 1950 and today's Patriot Act represent encroachments on constitutionally guaranteed rights.Title II of the Internal Security Act actually permitted the detention of any person suspected of sabotage or espionage during invasion or insurrection and half a dozen holding camps were prepared. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations initiated "loyalty oaths" with boards to review the records of several million government employees-estimates of those fired or forced to resign range from about 2,500 to roughly 7,000. Although it never came to pass, the list of Americans to be rounded up under the Internal Security Act in the event of a national emergency numbered 26,000 persons in 1954.The inquiries carried out under the loyalty program were FBI-controlled. By 1960 it had opened approximately 432,000 files on groups or individual Americans, under guidelines that permitted investigation based on suspicion of "anarchistic or revolutionary beliefs" even if membership in any group had "not been proven" and in the absence of evidence of any current "activity of a subversive nature."

    The depredations of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the effects of Senator Joe McCarthy's charges of communist infiltration had disastrous impacts on Americans' lives, but they served merely as backdrop for more intrusive programs. In 1952 the U.S. Post Office began to record mail sent from the U.S. to Russia, a project taken over by the CIA counterintelligence staff in 1955 and called HT/Lingual. Aimed at identifying Russian spies, in the 1960s Lingual was diverted to spying on Vietnam war protesters. The mail program ended in 1973 when the post office stopped cooperating, but in its last year alone the CIA handled 4.3 million pieces of mail, photographed the envelopes of about 33,000, and opened and copied 8,700 letters-some 60 percent of them on the basis of FBI watch lists.

    The FBI, meanwhile, began an effort to infiltrate and destabilize the American communist party in 1956. Called COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Project), the effort soon expanded. In the guise of preventing communist influence on community groups, in 1960 the FBI was authorized to include "legitimate mass organizations, such as Parent-Teacher Associations, civil organizations, and racial and religious groups." Only a year later was COINTELPRO applied to the Socialist Workers Party. Before long it extended to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, the Ku Klux Klan, the women's liberation movement and a host of Vietnam antiwar groups.

    The campaign included planted news items, derogatory rumors spread inside groups, bogus hate mail, entrapment, wiretaps, deliberately aimed leaks and more. The FBI campaign against Martin Luther King, Jr. is a well-known example but only a tiny fraction of the overall effort. In creating its target lists the FBI developed a "Rabble Rouser/Agitator Index" it applied to individuals-"key agitators" and "key black extremists." There were a half million FBI files on citizens.

    The rest of the government was not far behind. Military intelligence agencies opened over 100,000 files on Americans from 1965 to 1971. The IRS compiled 11,000 "intelligence" files between 1969 and 1973 and opened tax investigations for political reasons. The CIA had another 10,000 files on Americans, and a computerized index of 300,000. Its Projects Chaos, Merrimack and Resistance were all aimed at American antiwar activists. Under Project Mudhen, the CIA, which is prohibited by law from actions inside the United States, followed journalist Jack Anderson and four colleagues in an effort to discover their sources.

    Today's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act-the very law at issue in Bush's domestic wiretapping scandal-is the direct result of National Security Agency actions of that time. Then, too, there was an Air Force general, Lew Allen, Jr., who was obliged to admit the NSA had monitored international conversations of Americans without warrant, prohibited by the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968. Upwards of 1,600 Americans were on the NSA watch list, with an average of about 800 at any given time. Operation Shamrock, it was revealed, had begun in 1947 as an effort to intercept Soviet messages by examining the texts of telegrams handed over by the cable companies (illegal under the Communications Act of 1934). In October 1967, by Allen's account, the anti-Soviet program spilled over into domestic politics when the NSA began monitoring people on its watch list, averaging about two reports a day.

    There is an eerie convergence between then and now. The government made the same claims of how its efforts were tightly controlled. General Allen also asserted that the interception program was protecting against terrorism and drug running. The Ford administration made strenuous efforts to minimize the application of existing statutes and case law, that held that "a warrant must be obtained before a wiretap is installed on a domestic organization [in this case the Jewish Defense League] that is neither the agent of nor acting in collaboration with a foreign power, even if the surveillance is installed under Presidential directive in the name of foreign intelligence gathering for the protection of the national security." In February 1975, when a House committee headed by Bella Abzug issued subpoenas to further examine Operation Shamrock, the Ford administration claimed executive privilege. The author of the Justice Department memo recommending that course was Antonin Scalia.

    Ford was unable to shield the executives of the cable companies, who were eventually forced to divulge the extent of their cooperation with the NSA, which was shown to be massive. Various proposals for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act followed, eventually resulting in the passage of the existing law. It is highly significant that while the administration considered this a "problem," the Ford Justice Department agreed to a provision in the 1976 version of the act that specified: "Nothing in this [law] shall be deemed to limit the authority of this Select Committee of Intelligence of the U.S. Senate to obtain such information as it may need to carry out its duties."

    Like these older cases, today's government surveillance issue features apparatus created for national security reaching beyond original purposes. Besides the NSA issue there is the Pentagon's "Talon" program, intended for base security, that has collected data on antiwar individuals and groups, and then failed to purge the information from its files. The FBI has monitored mosques, supposedly to watch for nuclear material. The Justice Department has engaged in runaway prosecutions of trumped-up terrorism charges in Detroit and other places. Local police forces-and the FBI, again-have infiltrated meetings, taken pictures of protests, and asked employers about individuals expressing political views protected by the First Amendment. They gained resources to execute these programs from federal grants intended to counter terrorism.

    What needs to happen before Americans understand that government surveillance is about more than protection against terrorism?

[Remember freedom and the Constitution, and that we have a duty to stand up against all of the modern-day versions of these incursions against, and violations of, liberty and the Constitution, even if they are supposedly legalized, as with the so-called "U.S.A. Patriot Act", and to stand up for freedom and the Constitution no matter what the cost(s). (Subtitle, words in brackets ("[ ]") and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)]



    John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

  ________

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

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Monday, May 15, 2006



I thought it was about time, well past time actually, to return to my poems and post at least one of them on my blog(s):



Click here to go to my new MySpace blog!


THE THOUGHT POLICE

With many thanks to George Orwell
Who warned us about what's coming

Written on 11 November 2003
By S. Wolf Britain
( And Now The Apocalypse
http://www.wolfbritain.com/ )

[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by And Now The
Apocalypse! (wolfbritain.com),
and/or S. Wolf Britain.
All rights reserved.]


The U.S. government is not a benevolent caretaker
But is rather despotic, malevolent and capricious
While going about fascistically deceiving, colonizing
Serving military-industrial "America" over humans
That don't profit from insanity, bombing and death
Unlike the many self-serving Machiavellian killers
Who run the corporate murder-for-money machinery
Which gains the whole world but has none of soul's
Love and mercy for humanity needing to predominate
Over their greed and hate that are compassionless

These "Big Brothers" want to control our thoughts
Leaving us without any True Liberties or Freedoms
And silence our "check and balance" on their aims
Of totally enslaving, dominating and mastering us
While making us absolutely subservient automatons
That do nothing but what we're told by sociopaths
Seeking to be our completely evil gods and rulers
Who care for nothing and no one except their profits
In the process of sacrificing the freedom of thoughts
For True Liberty and Mastery ONLY over ourselves

Beware the thought police!







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What do you think? The t r u t h o u t Town Meeting is in progress. Join the debate!

Go to Original

 

                    BIG BROTHER'S HISTORY
                    (It Appears that the U.S. Constitution
                    Supposedly Doesn't Matter Anymore)

                    By John Prados
                    TomPaine.com

                    Thursday, 25 May 2006

                    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
                    U.S.A. and Internationally
                    by TomPaine (.com)
                    and/or John Prados.
                    All rights reserved.]

 

Click here to go to the ACLU's website!    The National Security Agency's [illegal] warrantless domestic wiretaps and its logs of Americans' phone calls are the most controversial, but by no means the only, surveillance initiative underway that has chilling implications for all Americans. American history is littered with examples of similar instances of security programs gone awry. It is three decades now since the Church Committee concluded, "The tendency of intelligence activities expanding beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings."

    In the 20th century, this history of misuse of security programs begins with World War I. A government-sponsored volunteer (read: vigilante) group, the American Protective League, was created to assist the Justice Department and military intelligence, resulting in nearly 2,000 prosecutions for allegedly "disloyal" utterances by Americans.

    Immediately after the war, the "Palmer Raids," named for then-Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, rounded up 10,000 persons for supposed anarchist or revolutionary views. These became a milestone in the creation of the FBI and the career of its first director (and Palmer's chief assistant) J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover went on to keep books on all manner of Americans; he used the information collected to exert political pressure at various times.

    Domestic intelligence programs were revived in 1936 and steadily increased in intrusiveness, impelled first by World War II, then by the Cold War. These began with the intention of monitoring foreign influence on American politics and ended up investigating "loyalty." We hardly need mention the internment of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans on hysterical suspicions of contact with the enemy in World War II.

    Though the two statutes are far different in detail, both the Internal Security Act of 1950 and today's Patriot Act represent encroachments on constitutionally guaranteed rights.Title II of the Internal Security Act actually permitted the detention of any person suspected of sabotage or espionage during invasion or insurrection and half a dozen holding camps were prepared. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations initiated "loyalty oaths" with boards to review the records of several million government employees-estimates of those fired or forced to resign range from about 2,500 to roughly 7,000. Although it never came to pass, the list of Americans to be rounded up under the Internal Security Act in the event of a national emergency numbered 26,000 persons in 1954.The inquiries carried out under the loyalty program were FBI-controlled. By 1960 it had opened approximately 432,000 files on groups or individual Americans, under guidelines that permitted investigation based on suspicion of "anarchistic or revolutionary beliefs" even if membership in any group had "not been proven" and in the absence of evidence of any current "activity of a subversive nature."

    The depredations of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the effects of Senator Joe McCarthy's charges of communist infiltration had disastrous impacts on Americans' lives, but they served merely as backdrop for more intrusive programs. In 1952 the U.S. Post Office began to record mail sent from the U.S. to Russia, a project taken over by the CIA counterintelligence staff in 1955 and called HT/Lingual. Aimed at identifying Russian spies, in the 1960s Lingual was diverted to spying on Vietnam war protesters. The mail program ended in 1973 when the post office stopped cooperating, but in its last year alone the CIA handled 4.3 million pieces of mail, photographed the envelopes of about 33,000, and opened and copied 8,700 letters-some 60 percent of them on the basis of FBI watch lists.

    The FBI, meanwhile, began an effort to infiltrate and destabilize the American communist party in 1956. Called COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Project), the effort soon expanded. In the guise of preventing communist influence on community groups, in 1960 the FBI was authorized to include "legitimate mass organizations, such as Parent-Teacher Associations, civil organizations, and racial and religious groups." Only a year later was COINTELPRO applied to the Socialist Workers Party. Before long it extended to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, the Ku Klux Klan, the women's liberation movement and a host of Vietnam antiwar groups.

    The campaign included planted news items, derogatory rumors spread inside groups, bogus hate mail, entrapment, wiretaps, deliberately aimed leaks and more. The FBI campaign against Martin Luther King, Jr. is a well-known example but only a tiny fraction of the overall effort. In creating its target lists the FBI developed a "Rabble Rouser/Agitator Index" it applied to individuals-"key agitators" and "key black extremists." There were a half million FBI files on citizens.

    The rest of the government was not far behind. Military intelligence agencies opened over 100,000 files on Americans from 1965 to 1971. The IRS compiled 11,000 "intelligence" files between 1969 and 1973 and opened tax investigations for political reasons. The CIA had another 10,000 files on Americans, and a computerized index of 300,000. Its Projects Chaos, Merrimack and Resistance were all aimed at American antiwar activists. Under Project Mudhen, the CIA, which is prohibited by law from actions inside the United States, followed journalist Jack Anderson and four colleagues in an effort to discover their sources.

    Today's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act-the very law at issue in Bush's domestic wiretapping scandal-is the direct result of National Security Agency actions of that time. Then, too, there was an Air Force general, Lew Allen, Jr., who was obliged to admit the NSA had monitored international conversations of Americans without warrant, prohibited by the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968. Upwards of 1,600 Americans were on the NSA watch list, with an average of about 800 at any given time. Operation Shamrock, it was revealed, had begun in 1947 as an effort to intercept Soviet messages by examining the texts of telegrams handed over by the cable companies (illegal under the Communications Act of 1934). In October 1967, by Allen's account, the anti-Soviet program spilled over into domestic politics when the NSA began monitoring people on its watch list, averaging about two reports a day.

    There is an eerie convergence between then and now. The government made the same claims of how its efforts were tightly controlled. General Allen also asserted that the interception program was protecting against terrorism and drug running. The Ford administration made strenuous efforts to minimize the application of existing statutes and case law, that held that "a warrant must be obtained before a wiretap is installed on a domestic organization [in this case the Jewish Defense League] that is neither the agent of nor acting in collaboration with a foreign power, even if the surveillance is installed under Presidential directive in the name of foreign intelligence gathering for the protection of the national security." In February 1975, when a House committee headed by Bella Abzug issued subpoenas to further examine Operation Shamrock, the Ford administration claimed executive privilege. The author of the Justice Department memo recommending that course was Antonin Scalia.

    Ford was unable to shield the executives of the cable companies, who were eventually forced to divulge the extent of their cooperation with the NSA, which was shown to be massive. Various proposals for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act followed, eventually resulting in the passage of the existing law. It is highly significant that while the administration considered this a "problem," the Ford Justice Department agreed to a provision in the 1976 version of the act that specified: "Nothing in this [law] shall be deemed to limit the authority of this Select Committee of Intelligence of the U.S. Senate to obtain such information as it may need to carry out its duties."

    Like these older cases, today's government surveillance issue features apparatus created for national security reaching beyond original purposes. Besides the NSA issue there is the Pentagon's "Talon" program, intended for base security, that has collected data on antiwar individuals and groups, and then failed to purge the information from its files. The FBI has monitored mosques, supposedly to watch for nuclear material. The Justice Department has engaged in runaway prosecutions of trumped-up terrorism charges in Detroit and other places. Local police forces-and the FBI, again-have infiltrated meetings, taken pictures of protests, and asked employers about individuals expressing political views protected by the First Amendment. They gained resources to execute these programs from federal grants intended to counter terrorism.

    What needs to happen before Americans understand that government surveillance is about more than protection against terrorism?

[Remember freedom and the Constitution, and that we have a duty to stand up against all of the modern-day versions of these incursions against, and violations of, liberty and the Constitution, even if they are supposedly legalized, as with the so-called "U.S.A. Patriot Act", and to stand up for freedom and the Constitution no matter what the cost(s). (Subtitle, words in brackets ("[ ]") and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)]



    John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

  ________

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.

  Print This Story  E-mail This Story





|W|P|114869139872698052 |W|P||W|P|wolflegal@hotmail.com 5/15/2006 01:51:00 pm|W|P|Wolf|W|P|

I thought it was about time, well past time actually, to return to my poems and post at least one of them on my blog(s):



Click here to go to my new MySpace blog!


THE THOUGHT POLICE

With many thanks to George Orwell
Who warned us about what's coming

Written on 11 November 2003
By S. Wolf Britain
( And Now The Apocalypse
http://www.wolfbritain.com/ )

[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by And Now The
Apocalypse! (wolfbritain.com),
and/or S. Wolf Britain.
All rights reserved.]


The U.S. government is not a benevolent caretaker
But is rather despotic, malevolent and capricious
While going about fascistically deceiving, colonizing
Serving military-industrial "America" over humans
That don't profit from insanity, bombing and death
Unlike the many self-serving Machiavellian killers
Who run the corporate murder-for-money machinery
Which gains the whole world but has none of soul's
Love and mercy for humanity needing to predominate
Over their greed and hate that are compassionless

These "Big Brothers" want to control our thoughts
Leaving us without any True Liberties or Freedoms
And silence our "check and balance" on their aims
Of totally enslaving, dominating and mastering us
While making us absolutely subservient automatons
That do nothing but what we're told by sociopaths
Seeking to be our completely evil gods and rulers
Who care for nothing and no one except their profits
In the process of sacrificing the freedom of thoughts
For True Liberty and Mastery ONLY over ourselves

Beware the thought police!


|W|P|114772270321564270 |W|P||W|P|wolflegal@hotmail.com-->  E-mail This Story

What do you think? The t r u t h o u t Town Meeting is in progress. Join the debate!

Go to Original

 

                    BIG BROTHER'S HISTORY
                    (It Appears that the U.S. Constitution
                    Supposedly Doesn't Matter Anymore)

                    By John Prados
                    TomPaine.com

                    Thursday, 25 May 2006

                    [Copyright (c) 2006 in the
                    U.S.A. and Internationally
                    by TomPaine (.com)
                    and/or John Prados.
                    All rights reserved.]

 

Click here to go to the ACLU's website!    The National Security Agency's [illegal] warrantless domestic wiretaps and its logs of Americans' phone calls are the most controversial, but by no means the only, surveillance initiative underway that has chilling implications for all Americans. American history is littered with examples of similar instances of security programs gone awry. It is three decades now since the Church Committee concluded, "The tendency of intelligence activities expanding beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings."

    In the 20th century, this history of misuse of security programs begins with World War I. A government-sponsored volunteer (read: vigilante) group, the American Protective League, was created to assist the Justice Department and military intelligence, resulting in nearly 2,000 prosecutions for allegedly "disloyal" utterances by Americans.

    Immediately after the war, the "Palmer Raids," named for then-Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, rounded up 10,000 persons for supposed anarchist or revolutionary views. These became a milestone in the creation of the FBI and the career of its first director (and Palmer's chief assistant) J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover went on to keep books on all manner of Americans; he used the information collected to exert political pressure at various times.

    Domestic intelligence programs were revived in 1936 and steadily increased in intrusiveness, impelled first by World War II, then by the Cold War. These began with the intention of monitoring foreign influence on American politics and ended up investigating "loyalty." We hardly need mention the internment of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans on hysterical suspicions of contact with the enemy in World War II.

    Though the two statutes are far different in detail, both the Internal Security Act of 1950 and today's Patriot Act represent encroachments on constitutionally guaranteed rights.Title II of the Internal Security Act actually permitted the detention of any person suspected of sabotage or espionage during invasion or insurrection and half a dozen holding camps were prepared. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations initiated "loyalty oaths" with boards to review the records of several million government employees-estimates of those fired or forced to resign range from about 2,500 to roughly 7,000. Although it never came to pass, the list of Americans to be rounded up under the Internal Security Act in the event of a national emergency numbered 26,000 persons in 1954.The inquiries carried out under the loyalty program were FBI-controlled. By 1960 it had opened approximately 432,000 files on groups or individual Americans, under guidelines that permitted investigation based on suspicion of "anarchistic or revolutionary beliefs" even if membership in any group had "not been proven" and in the absence of evidence of any current "activity of a subversive nature."

    The depredations of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the effects of Senator Joe McCarthy's charges of communist infiltration had disastrous impacts on Americans' lives, but they served merely as backdrop for more intrusive programs. In 1952 the U.S. Post Office began to record mail sent from the U.S. to Russia, a project taken over by the CIA counterintelligence staff in 1955 and called HT/Lingual. Aimed at identifying Russian spies, in the 1960s Lingual was diverted to spying on Vietnam war protesters. The mail program ended in 1973 when the post office stopped cooperating, but in its last year alone the CIA handled 4.3 million pieces of mail, photographed the envelopes of about 33,000, and opened and copied 8,700 letters-some 60 percent of them on the basis of FBI watch lists.

    The FBI, meanwhile, began an effort to infiltrate and destabilize the American communist party in 1956. Called COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Project), the effort soon expanded. In the guise of preventing communist influence on community groups, in 1960 the FBI was authorized to include "legitimate mass organizations, such as Parent-Teacher Associations, civil organizations, and racial and religious groups." Only a year later was COINTELPRO applied to the Socialist Workers Party. Before long it extended to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, the Ku Klux Klan, the women's liberation movement and a host of Vietnam antiwar groups.

    The campaign included planted news items, derogatory rumors spread inside groups, bogus hate mail, entrapment, wiretaps, deliberately aimed leaks and more. The FBI campaign against Martin Luther King, Jr. is a well-known example but only a tiny fraction of the overall effort. In creating its target lists the FBI developed a "Rabble Rouser/Agitator Index" it applied to individuals-"key agitators" and "key black extremists." There were a half million FBI files on citizens.

    The rest of the government was not far behind. Military intelligence agencies opened over 100,000 files on Americans from 1965 to 1971. The IRS compiled 11,000 "intelligence" files between 1969 and 1973 and opened tax investigations for political reasons. The CIA had another 10,000 files on Americans, and a computerized index of 300,000. Its Projects Chaos, Merrimack and Resistance were all aimed at American antiwar activists. Under Project Mudhen, the CIA, which is prohibited by law from actions inside the United States, followed journalist Jack Anderson and four colleagues in an effort to discover their sources.

    Today's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act-the very law at issue in Bush's domestic wiretapping scandal-is the direct result of National Security Agency actions of that time. Then, too, there was an Air Force general, Lew Allen, Jr., who was obliged to admit the NSA had monitored international conversations of Americans without warrant, prohibited by the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968. Upwards of 1,600 Americans were on the NSA watch list, with an average of about 800 at any given time. Operation Shamrock, it was revealed, had begun in 1947 as an effort to intercept Soviet messages by examining the texts of telegrams handed over by the cable companies (illegal under the Communications Act of 1934). In October 1967, by Allen's account, the anti-Soviet program spilled over into domestic politics when the NSA began monitoring people on its watch list, averaging about two reports a day.

    There is an eerie convergence between then and now. The government made the same claims of how its efforts were tightly controlled. General Allen also asserted that the interception program was protecting against terrorism and drug running. The Ford administration made strenuous efforts to minimize the application of existing statutes and case law, that held that "a warrant must be obtained before a wiretap is installed on a domestic organization [in this case the Jewish Defense League] that is neither the agent of nor acting in collaboration with a foreign power, even if the surveillance is installed under Presidential directive in the name of foreign intelligence gathering for the protection of the national security." In February 1975, when a House committee headed by Bella Abzug issued subpoenas to further examine Operation Shamrock, the Ford administration claimed executive privilege. The author of the Justice Department memo recommending that course was Antonin Scalia.

    Ford was unable to shield the executives of the cable companies, who were eventually forced to divulge the extent of their cooperation with the NSA, which was shown to be massive. Various proposals for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act followed, eventually resulting in the passage of the existing law. It is highly significant that while the administration considered this a "problem," the Ford Justice Department agreed to a provision in the 1976 version of the act that specified: "Nothing in this [law] shall be deemed to limit the authority of this Select Committee of Intelligence of the U.S. Senate to obtain such information as it may need to carry out its duties."

    Like these older cases, today's government surveillance issue features apparatus created for national security reaching beyond original purposes. Besides the NSA issue there is the Pentagon's "Talon" program, intended for base security, that has collected data on antiwar individuals and groups, and then failed to purge the information from its files. The FBI has monitored mosques, supposedly to watch for nuclear material. The Justice Department has engaged in runaway prosecutions of trumped-up terrorism charges in Detroit and other places. Local police forces-and the FBI, again-have infiltrated meetings, taken pictures of protests, and asked employers about individuals expressing political views protected by the First Amendment. They gained resources to execute these programs from federal grants intended to counter terrorism.

    What needs to happen before Americans understand that government surveillance is about more than protection against terrorism?

[Remember freedom and the Constitution, and that we have a duty to stand up against all of the modern-day versions of these incursions against, and violations of, liberty and the Constitution, even if they are supposedly legalized, as with the so-called "U.S.A. Patriot Act", and to stand up for freedom and the Constitution no matter what the cost(s). (Subtitle, words in brackets ("[ ]") and/or emphasis added by Wolf Britain.)]



    John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

  ________

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. t r u t h o u t has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is t r u t h o u t endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on TO may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.

  Print This Story  E-mail This Story





|W|P|114869139872698052|W|P| |W|P|wolflegal@hotmail.com 5/15/2006 01:51:00 pm|W|P| Wolf|W|P|

I thought it was about time, well past time actually, to return to my poems and post at least one of them on my blog(s):



Click here to go to my new MySpace blog!


THE THOUGHT POLICE

With many thanks to George Orwell
Who warned us about what's coming

Written on 11 November 2003
By S. Wolf Britain
( And Now The Apocalypse
http://www.wolfbritain.com/ )

[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by And Now The
Apocalypse! (wolfbritain.com),
and/or S. Wolf Britain.
All rights reserved.]


The U.S. government is not a benevolent caretaker
But is rather despotic, malevolent and capricious
While going about fascistically deceiving, colonizing
Serving military-industrial "America" over humans
That don't profit from insanity, bombing and death
Unlike the many self-serving Machiavellian killers
Who run the corporate murder-for-money machinery
Which gains the whole world but has none of soul's
Love and mercy for humanity needing to predominate
Over their greed and hate that are compassionless

These "Big Brothers" want to control our thoughts
Leaving us without any True Liberties or Freedoms
And silence our "check and balance" on their aims
Of totally enslaving, dominating and mastering us
While making us absolutely subservient automatons
That do nothing but what we're told by sociopaths
Seeking to be our completely evil gods and rulers
Who care for nothing and no one except their profits
In the process of sacrificing the freedom of thoughts
For True Liberty and Mastery ONLY over ourselves

Beware the thought police!


|W|P|114772270321564270|W|P| |W|P|wolflegal@hotmail.com -->