A Police State You’d Better Believe In

We should not let a smooth talking political leader like our current President talk us out of the civil liberties he seemed zealous to protect.

by Jack Kenny    Thursday, 29 July 2010

The New American

When our nation is waging “war on” so many things (drugs, crime, poverty, terrorism), it’s hard to know where to enlist and when to defect. Or put another way, when should a patriot oppose his government? One answer, which we may hope is obvious, is when his government is waging war on liberty. The trick, of course, is to recognize it as such, since the government will always claim to be defending liberty when waging war against it.

Thus it is that in the “war on terrorism” our government is building, brick by brick, a new police state, called “Security.” Consider, for example, this item from The Washington Post:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words — ‘electronic communication transactional records’ — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the ‘content’ of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

There now. Don’t you feel safer and more secure already? Or do you have that creepy feeling that somebody is looking over your shoulder?

A spy unsettles US-India ties

A senior Indian editor wrote on Sunday, “Headley … was convicted on drug charges and sent to jail in the US. We know also that he was subsequently released from jail and handed over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which said that it wanted to send him to Pakistan as an undercover agent. All this is a matter of public record. What happened between the time the US sent Headley into Pakistan and his arrest at Chicago airport a few months ago? How did an American agent turn into a terrorist? The US will not say.”

March 23, 2010   Asia Times

A spy unsettles US-India ties‎
Mumbai attacks planner was a CIA agent
By M K Bhadrakumar

[Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.]

News that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had reached a plea bargain with David Coleman Headley, who played a key role in the planning of the terrorist strike in Mumbai in November 2008 in which 166 people were killed, has caused an uproar in India.

The deal enables the US government to hold back from formally producing any evidence against Headley in a court of law that might have included details of his links with US intelligence or oblige any cross-examination of Headley by the prosecution.

Flight 253: please swallow whole

The FBI story keeps changing, and the whole episode smells to high heaven. Especially since the substance used needs to be ignited by a blasting cap, conspicuously absent, and the boy’s father is deeply involved in Yemeni finance at a very crucial time.   Looks like a sheep stampede to me.

Modern perception management and deception really only require the complicity of a lazy media. Once the first ‘official’ story is out and  followed by endless blather and speculation, no amount of real investigation or facts can stand up to the sheer weight of the emotion intentionally evoked by the staged event. It all becomes part of a mishmash until people are exhausted and ready for a new serving of manufactured fodder.

Haskell Family: FBI has changed accounts 4 times; our story is the same since day one

Update: They’ve got this sheep-stampeding down to an exact science. Ominous.

Please read:

The degrading effects of terrorism fears By Glenn Greenwald