Police State 101
New Documents Detail FBI Eavesdropping On Americans’ Emails, IMs and Phone Calls
More revelations of government spying in the panopticon society
New Documents Detail FBI Eavesdropping On Americans’ Emails, IMs and Phone Calls
More revelations of government spying in the panopticon society
Steve Watson / Infowars.net | April 8, 2008
Fresh documents reveal that the FBI is actively engaged in the monitoring of electronic communications and cell phone calls of American citizens without the prior approval of a court.
The latest documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act to the advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, and obtained by the Washington Post.
http://foundingfather1776.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/police-state-101/
U.N. Official Calls for Study Of Neocons’ Role in 9/11
Finally! The UN will get to the bottom of this conspiracy… was 9/11 allowed? Poor Richard Falk — they are discrediting him in this article and making it sound like HE was responsible for the Iran Hostage Situation! I hope our Critical American Eyes can tell bullshit from bacon. –
New York Post 04.10.08
By ELI LAKE
Staff Reporter of the Sun
WASHINGTON — A new U.N. Human Rights Council official assigned to monitor Israel is calling for an official commission to study the role neoconservatives may have played in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
On March 26, Richard Falk, Milbank professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University, was named by unanimous vote to a newly created position to report on human rights in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. While Mr. Falk’s specialty is human rights and international law, since the attacks in 2001, he has devoted some of his time to challenging what he calls the “9-11 official version.”
On March 24 in an interview with a radio host and former University of Wisconsin instructor, Kevin Barrett, Mr. Falk said, “It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don’t think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is there is a lot of grounds for suspicion, there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in and that the failure to do these things is cheating the American people and in some sense the people of the world of a greater confidence in what really happened than they presently possess.”
Mr. Barrett, who is the co-founder of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, said in an interview yesterday of Mr. Falk, “I would put him on a list of scholars who are sympathetic to the 9/11 truth movement.”
He added, “Unlike most public intellectuals today, he is both honest and very, very knowledgeable in that he understands the probable reality of 9/11. He understands that the evidence that it was a false flag operation is very strong.”
The narrative that the attacks from 2001 were a “false flag” operation is a recurring theme in the literature challenging the consensus that 19 Al Qaeda hijackers flew commercial jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. False flag refers to espionage or covert actions taken by one government made to seem like the work of another. The false flag thesis has it that the Bush administration is somehow responsible for the September 11 attacks as a pretext for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mr. Falk yesterday did not return e-mails and phone calls asking for a comment. But in 2004 he wrote the foreword to the book “The New Pearl Harbor,” by David Ray Griffin. Mr. Griffin has posited that such an inside job is the likely explanation for the attacks.
n the preface, Mr. Falk writes, “There have been questions raised here and there and allegations of official complicity made almost from the day of the attacks, especially in Europe, but no one until Griffin has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account.”
When asked for a comment about the appointment of Mr. Falk, a former American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton said, “This is exactly why we voted against the new human rights council.” A spokesman for the American embassy at the United Nations offered no comment yesterday when asked.
A spokeswoman at the United Nations, Nancy Groves, yesterday also declined to comment. “I would not make a comment on how the member states vote on appointments. It is their council, they make their decisions,” she said.
Mr. Falk’s selection to the post as rapporteur has already prompted the government of Israel formally to request that Mr. Falk not be sent to their country. The Israeli press has reported that he may even be barred from entering the country.
The deputy permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations in New York, Daniel Carmon said, “We are asking the U.N. not to send him. We cannot agree to Mr. Falk’s entrance into Israel in his capacity as the rapporteur.”
One reason the Israelis are concerned about his appointment is that Mr. Falk has compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Arabs to the Nazi treatment of Jews in the holocaust. In an April 8 BBC interview, Mr. Falk said he stood by the Israel-Nazi comparison.
The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, issued a statement yesterday saying, “This was clearly a singularly inappropriate choice for this position. Falk’s startling record of anti-Israel prejudice should have been enough to preclude him from a position where an unbiased observer is needed to report on the status of human rights in the territories.”
In a February 16, 1979, op-ed for the New York Times, Mr. Falk praised Ayatollah Khomeini and bemoaned his ill treatment in the American press. He wrote, “The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.”Nearly nine months later, student followers of Khomeini invaded the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 diplomats hostage for the following 444 days.
The Language of Washington, D.C.
In language of Washington, all not as it seems
November 27, 2006
WASHINGTON – The government’s annual accounting of hunger in America reported no hunger in its last outing. Instead, it found “food insecurity.”
Likewise, no one is even considering retreating from Iraq. “Redeploying” the heck out of there is, however, an option.
In Washington, words are a moving target that conceal at least as much as they reveal. Doublespeak runs through the discourse on Iraq, terrorism and domestic matters to a point where it’s hard to tell what is going on.
The libertarian Cato Institute recently took on the rising tide of fuzzy words in the fight against terrorism, arguing that whatever people think of what the government is doing, it would help to understand what the government is doing.
That is no easy task when the administration offers tortured definitions of torture, describes suicide by captives as “self-injurious behavior incidents,” and labeled at least one suspect an “imperative security internee” when it became constitutionally questionable to hold him as an “enemy combatant.”
Interrogations are debriefings.
Propaganda is a struggle “for hearts and minds.”
The estate tax is the death tax.
The right to an abortion is the right to “choose.”
And can anyone oppose the Patriot Act and still be a patriot?
“By corrupting the language, the people who wield power are able to fool the others about their activities and evade responsibility and accountability,” Cato’s Timothy Lynch argues in his polemic against doublespeak — an outgrowth of the doublethink and newspeak of George Orwell’s 1984 .
But nefarious “War is Peace” Orwellianisms are not the only impulse at work, by a long shot.
Some of Washington’s bland euphemisms are calculated mainly not to offend. Just as Dead End signs have been replaced in some communities by No Outlet ones, congressional oversight investigators tend these days to find “challenges” in the behavior of agencies, as they politely put it, and not quite so many “problems” — how rude.
Marketing sensibilities long ago infiltrated, if not took over, the debate in Washington, a progression most vividly seen in catchy titles given to legislation. These are the same sensibilities that, in the marketplace, prompted rapeseed oil to be sold as canola oil and a delicate fish named slimehead to come to the dinner table as orange roughy.
Republicans came to power in the 1990s offering the American Dream Restoration Act and the Common Sense Legal Reforms Act. President Clinton pitched his Middle Class Bill of Rights. President Bush this decade defied anyone to stand against something named No Child Left Behind.
Republicans pitch elimination of the “death tax” because it sounds more populist than giving rich people a break by getting rid of the “estate tax” — the same thing.
Democrats will go to the wall in defense of abortion rights without uttering that unpleasant word, abortion. Instead, they are champions of “choice” or, in a less-guarded moment, “reproductive choice.” (The cause is advocated by progressives, formerly liberals.)
The wish to be technically accurate was behind the decision of the Agriculture Department this year to squeeze “hunger” out of the equation when considering how many people go hungry.
Hunger — in the words of advisers whose recommendations were accepted by the department — is “an individual-level physiological condition that may result from food insecurity.”
The word “should refer to a potential consequence of food insecurity that, because of prolonged, involuntary lack of food, results in discomfort, illness, weakness, or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation.”
In other words, it’s not just the munchies.
The department reasoned it cannot truly measure hunger because it surveys households, and households do not get hungry — people do.
The terms “low food security” and “very low food security” replaced the old descriptions of “food insecurity without hunger” and “food insecurity with hunger.”
The fight against terrorism brings its own evolving vocabulary and semantic arguments, starting with the question of whether the war in Iraq is part of it, as Bush says, or a distraction from it, as his critics contend.
The notion of “homeland security” was foreign to American ears until the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and formation of a department with that name. Now it is an accepted distinction from the foreign-based military and intelligence matters that come under the mantle of national security.
The White House was less successful branding suicide bombers as “homicide bombers,” an Israeli euphemism meant to emphasize the murderous nature of the act and deny the “martyrdom” claimed by those who blow themselves up. The term hasn’t stuck.
And there is no more “stay the course” on Iraq. Bush found himself on the defensive when a phrase meant to convey a resolute stance came to be seen as inflexibility in the face of chaos. The rhetoric, at least, changed course.
Source:http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/couriernews/news/150635,3_1_EL27_A1DOUBLESPEAK_S1.article
The Cost of the Iraq War
Cost of the War in Iraq
I cannot believe how fast this number increases EVERY SECOND. Our world is in terrible, terrible trouble.
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182
Patterns That Connect
Here’s an exerpt I found at http://patternsthatconnect.blogspot.com/2006/03/rightwing-authoritarianism-and.html
Hostility & Fear Toward Outgroups
RWA’s are more likely to:
- Weaken constitutional guarantees of liberty, such as the Bill of Rights.
- Punish severely ‘common’ criminals in a role-playing situation.
- Admit they get personal pleasure from punishing such people.
- But go easy on authorities who commit crimes and people who attack minorities.
- Be prejudiced against many racial, ethnic, nationalistic, and linguistic minorities.
- Be hostile toward homosexuals.
- Support ‘gay-bashing.’
- Be hostile toward feminists.
- Volunteer to help the government persecute almost anyone.
- Be mean-spirited toward those who have made mistakes and suffered.
- Be fearful of a dangerous world.
