Wednesday, April 30, 2008

War on Free Thought and Dissent Reaches Our Children

Why those who orchestrated 911 must be brought to trial: Italy and Japan question 911 while our children are indoctrinated

On 11 September 2001, the world changed. Not because the attacks on the United States were unique, since there have been many documented cases of false flag operations
throughout history. The world changed because we forfeited the freedom
of generations to come to obtain a delusional sense of security from madmen.

The reason that corporations like the United States
even bother to release “official” documents so full of holes that you
could fly a plane through them, is because by doing so, every branch of
government must regurgitate this “official” story. This means that
schools, which are meant to educate our children, are actually
indoctrinating them into a corrupt system established for the proliferation of war.

This would explain why the government of California is “clamping down on homeschooling by parents” stating that “parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children.” This is indeed a frightening turn of events,
specially if you consider that Governor Schwarzenegger “has proposed
cutting nearly $5 billion dollars from California’s education system, sparking the distribution of ‘pink slips’ to over 20,000 teachers.” Close to 90,000 more could be sent out, straining the education system to the breaking point.

Other States are also waging war on free thought. Arizona has passed a measure backing 'American values' in state schools.

Arizona schools whose courses "denigrate American values and the
teachings of Western civilization" could lose state funding under the
terms of legislation approved Wednesday (April 16) by a House panel.

SB1108 also would bar teaching practices that "overtly encourage dissent" from those values, including democracy, capitalism,
pluralism and religious tolerance. Schools would have to surrender
teaching materials to the state superintendent of public instruction,
who could withhold state aid from districts that broke the law.

Another section of the bill would bar public schools, community
colleges and universities from allowing organizations to operate on
campus if it is "based in whole or in part on race-based criteria"…

If the proposal becomes law, however, it would have a statewide
reach. And that concerned even some lawmakers who voted for it, saying
the language of what would and would not be prohibited is "vague."


This is the system that the United States of America is establishing to educate our children: a system which prohibits free thought or dissent.


Have we forgotten that “the English colonies in North America were founded on dissent,
and almost immediately after religious dissenters arrived in
Massachusetts Bay voices of protest rose up against the puritan
authorities.” Are we not aware that “dissent is as American as apple pie?”


With these laws, anyone questioning the “official” 911 story will be
persecuted. How is it possible that Japan’s government can raise
questions about 911 but our children might be prohibited from doing so?

This is a printout from the homepage of the FBI of the warrant for
Osama Bin Laden and some other documents that you have in front of you.

Here on the page they write about the large reward that is out for Bin Laden. For what is this large amount of money offered?

You read here that this reward is for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings
in Dar es Salaam and in Kenya. Only this is mentioned here.

According to the homepage of the FBI 9/11 is not mentioned here.
Last year on July 5 a formal inquiry was made to the FBI Headquarter.
The FBI official Lex Tomb (?) did answer the request declaring that
there is no proven connection.

The information that was given stated that there is no proven
evidence available linking Bin Laden to more than those two bombings.
According to this FBI information Osama Bin Laden is not officially
sought for 9/11. Are you aware of this? This question is for Foreign
Minister Komura.

The Evidence that the “Official” 911 Story is a Fabrication

Why is Japan’s parliament questioning 911?
Because the “official” story that the US government has been peddling
is completely falling apart, and the world is waking up to the reality
that something is very wrong with the so-called “War on Terror.” When will Americans accept the truth of 911 and begin to hold those who committed these horrendous acts accountable?

911 Truth is the Key

Which brings us to the following post on George Washington’s Blog: Former President of Italy: 9/11 was an Inside Job - “On November 30th, the former President of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, wrote in Italy's largest newspaper:




[Bin Laden supposedly confessed] to the Qaeda September [attack] to the two
towers in New York [claiming to be] the author of the attack of the 11,
while all the [intelligence services] of America and Europe ... now
know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from
the CIA American and the Mossad with the aid of the Zionist world in
order to put under accusation the Arabic Countries and in order to
induce the western powers to take part ... in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.

Mr. Cossiga joins a very long list of top
military leaders, intelligence professionals, scientists, structural
engineers, architects, members of Congress, 9/11 Commissioners, legal
scholars, heroic first responders, family members of 9/11 victims and
psychiatrists who question the government's version of 9/11
.

Why the Truth of 911 Must Revealed

911 is different from the assassination of JFK and the Oklahoma City bombing. Those events were blamed on internal patsies, 911 was not.

Two wars are now being fought with devastating consequences while a third is being planned with “all options on the table,” directly implying the use of Nuclear Weapons .

If we are going to continue our campaign of spreading death and
destruction to the rest of the world and ourselves, then we should at
least understand why we are doing it and who is orchestrating it. By
bringing those who committed this crime to trial, we will be able to
break this chain of ignorance which has promised to bring our children
and us war without end.......amen?

Keep fighting the good fight, with your minds as weapons!!

......................kosmicdebris.................................


Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Tell us the TRUTH....mainstream media = ownership determines content.


This is what Canada-north America is saying..........
  1. the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being
    unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful,
    overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even
    attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing
    armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed
    or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown
    adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for
    future generations to pay or repudiate. This fiscal irresponsibility
    has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (causing
    poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time
    of reckoning is fast approaching…

    “It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our
    government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned
    expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other
    nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for
    the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official
    defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of
    Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed
    $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the
    largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth.
    Leaving out President Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has
    doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the
    largest since the second world war.”


  2. Bank bail-outs to be kept secret
    - “The Bank of England has imposed a permanent news blackout on its
    £50bn-plus plan to ease the credit crunch. Ferocious and unprecedented
    secrecy means taxpayers will never know the names of the banks that
    have been supported through the special liquidity scheme…

    “Requests under the Freedom of Information Act are to be denied.
    Details will be kept secret even after 30 years - the period after
    which all but the most sensitive state documents are released. Any Bank
    of England employee leaking the names of institutions involved will
    face court action for breach of contract…


    “The scheme, drawn up by King and approved by Chancellor Alistair
    Darling, aims to improve banks' liquidity by temporarily swapping
    bundles of mortgages and credit card debt for Treasury bills, which are
    short-dated Government debt that matures within nine months. The scheme
    will run for three years so these bills will be replaced by new ones
    when required.”


  3. Cutoffs and Pleas for Aid Rise With Heat Costs
    - “After struggling with soaring heating costs through the winter,
    millions of Americans are behind on electric and gas bills, and a
    record number of families could face energy shut-offs over the next two
    months, according to state energy officials and utilities around the
    country...

    “Under the federal aid program, at least 5.8 million households
    will have received grants to help with heating bills in this fiscal
    year, ending Sept. 30, which is an increase of 3.7 percent from last
    year, according to figures to be issued Friday by the Energy Assistance
    Directors’ Association.


    “This is the highest number in 16 years, Mr. Wolfe said. And the
    numbers would have been higher if some states had not been forced to
    reduce the number of aid recipients by increasing grants or tightening
    eligibility requirements — in effect choosing to provide more aid to
    fewer people.”


  4. The coming tidal wave: Bank sees 6.5 million foreclosures
    - “The investment bank Credit Suisse is now predicting that 6.5 million
    American homeowners -- that's one out of every eight that has a
    mortgage -- will end up in foreclosure over the next five years.

    “In a report this week titled ‘Foreclosure Trends: A sobering
    reality,’ Credit Suisse predicts home prices will continue to fall
    throughout 2008 and 2009, causing a huge wave of foreclosures.”


  5. Brazil bans rice exports, protests in Peru - “Africa, Latin America to be short 500K tons of rice as Brazil becomes latest country to ban rice exports."

    “Brazil has banned the export of rice over fears that a supply
    crunch and rising global prices could threaten food supplies at home.
    Reinhold Stephanes, Brazil's agriculture minister, said the move was in
    response to a number of other countries, mostly in Asia, who have also
    banned rice exports, causing an imbalance in the global rice market.
    The move came the same week as the World Food Programme said its budget
    deficit as a result of soaring food prices hit $755 million.”


  6. UK's super-rich 'getting richer'
    - “The top 1,000 richest people in the country now have more than
    £400bn between them, it estimates - up almost £53bn in the last year…

    “Philip Beresford, who has compiled the list since it was first
    published in 1989, said: ‘Until now, the 11 years of Labour government
    have proved a boon for the super-rich, rarely seen before in modern
    British history.’”


  7. It's So Much Worse Than You Think
    - “For months, we've been experiencing a liquidity crisis that has
    locked up credit markets. It's now apparent that the debt market was a
    disaster waiting to happen ... and that the collapsing housing market
    was all that was needed to end the wait.


    “The problem is, if you look at the catalyst for this crash, you'll
    see that the correction may have just begun. As of November, housing
    was 8.4% off its peak. That's right, a mere 8.4% decline has caused
    financials to melt down, homebuilders to go bankrupt, and the panicked
    Federal Reserve to ignore its inflation-fighting mandate and push
    through interest-rate cuts -- despite the highest inflation rates since
    1990.


    “But how bad could it get? Well, Goldman Sachs -- noteworthy for
    being the one big investment bank that was smart enough not to get
    burned by securitized mortgages -- has predicted that if there's no
    recession, the housing market will probably fall by 15%. If there is a
    recession, Goldman thinks prices could fall by 30%. That's a heck of a
    lot more than the current 8.4% decline.”




    click to enlarge source


    “So, using Goldman's 15% estimated decline, 21% of people with
    mortgages would owe more money than their house is actually worth. If a
    recession develops -- which, frankly, seems likely to me -- and the
    market falls 30%, then nearly two of every five mortgages would be
    under water.”



  8. Peak Civilization and the Winter of Our Disconnect
    - “The first headlines of food rationing in America are buzzing across
    the internet as I write this article. They underscore the unequivocal
    reality that collapse is going to compel us to feed ourselves or quite
    simply, we will perish. I believe that food security is the most
    urgent, the most immediate issue to which we must attend at this moment
    of Peak Civilization. For months, this website has been informing
    readers about food storage and preservation
    and other aspects of preparedness. It is now time, if you have not
    already done so, to organize groups of citizens in your neighborhood,
    schools, churches, and community centers to plant and maintain gardens.
    In addition, collapse is compelling us to rapidly mobilize our
    neighborhoods and communities to not only accumulate our own supply of
    stored water but to organize citizens to work with local public water
    utilities to ensure that they remain public and are not privatized.”

  9. Stocks decline as consumer confidence falls to 26-year low
    - “The Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index came in
    at 62.6 for April, down from 69.5 a month earlier — and the lowest
    reading since the early 1980s — as Americans contended with rising
    energy and food prices. Consumers' flagging mood is worrisome for Wall
    Street because consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of U.S.
    economic activity.”

  10. The Biofuels Scam, Food Shortages and the Coming Collapse of the Human Population
    - “So, to repeat, the food bubble is now starting to implode. What does
    it all mean? It means that as these economic and climate realities
    unfold, our world is facing massive starvation and food shortages. The
    first place this will be felt is in poor developing nations. It is
    there that people live on the edge of economic livelihood, where even a
    20% rise in the price of basic food staples can put desperately-needed
    calories out of reach of tens of millions of families. If something is
    not done to rescue these people from their plight, they will starve to
    death.

    “Wealthy nations like America, Canada, the U.K., and others will be
    able to absorb the price increases, so you won't see mass starvation in
    North America any time soon (unless, of course, all the honeybees die,
    in which case prepare to start chewing your shoelaces...), but it will
    lead to significant increases in the cost of living, annoying consumers
    and reducing the amount of money available for other purchases (like
    vacations, cars, fuel, etc.). That, of course, will put downward
    pressure on the national economy.


    “But what we're seeing right now, folks, is just a small
    foreshadowing of events to come in the next couple of decades. Think
    about it: If these minor climate changes and foolish biofuels policies
    are already unleashing alarming rises in food prices, just imagine what
    we'll see when Peak Oil kicks in and global oil supplies really start
    to dwindle.”


  11. Customers in line for billions as banks lose unfair charges case
    - “UK banks could be forced to return billions of pounds of overdraft
    fees to consumers after a high court judge said the fees could be
    challenged by the Office of Fair Trading…

    “According to the OFT, banks receive up to £3.5bn a year in
    unauthorised overdraft fees - nearly £10m a day. They charge up to £39
    for a bounced cheque, standing order or direct debit, and critics of
    the system say this does not reflect the actual cost incurred by the
    banks, which could be as little as £2…


    “He said up to £9bn could now be reclaimed by bank customers.”


  12. Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World
    - “Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world,
    are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing.
    Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West
    Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand
    outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers
    are hoarding grain stocks.”

  13. Saudi King says keeping some oil finds for future
    - “Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah said he had ordered some new oil
    discoveries left untapped to preserve oil wealth in the world's top
    exporter for future generations, the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA)
    reported.

    “‘I keep no secret from you that when there were some new finds, I
    told them, 'no, leave it in the ground, with grace from god, our
    children need it',’ King Abdullah said in remarks made late on
    Saturday, SPA said.”


  14. IRS Audits of Big Companies Fall to All-Time Low
    - “The FY 2007 audit rate for the nation's largest corporations has
    plunged to its lowest level in the last 20 years, less than half what
    it was in FY 1988 ... The historic collapse in audits for the
    corporations with $250 million or more in assets was especially notable
    during the last two years when the rate dropped from 43% in FY 2005, to
    34% in FY 2006 and then to an all-time low of 26% in FY 2007.



    click to enlarge source


    “But along with the declining number of audits for the largest
    corporations, the IRS data point to a second significant finding: the
    thoroughness of these essential audits has been dropping. One example
    of this broad problem can be seen by the fact that the typical amount
    of time auditors spend on each of the large corporate audits is down by
    20% over the last five years.”


  15. How New Global Banking Rules Could Deepen the U.S. Crisis
    - “But despite all the sober and deep thought that went into them, many
    regulators, academics, and financial analysts are increasingly
    concerned that the new regulations will end up making today's financial
    crisis worse rather than better. BaselII is intended to keep banks safe
    by requiring them to match the size of their capital cushion to the
    riskiness of their loans and securities. The higher the odds of
    default, the less they can lend, all else equal.

    “Here's the problem. Today, many banks already face so many risks
    that implementing Basel II as written will put them in a capital
    squeeze. They will either have to reduce risk by cutting back on
    lending, or sell more shares to give themselves a bigger capital
    buffer, or both. If the banks do lend less, it could cause an even
    steeper economic decline, which would lead to more defaults and cause
    banks to ratchet back even more, and so on in a downward spiral.”


  16. Governor Schwarzenegger Proposes Mass Teacher Lay-Off In Public School
    - “The Governor of California has proposed cutting nearly $5 billion
    dollars from California’s education system, sparking the distribution
    of “pink slips” to over 20,000 teachers this past week. Close to 90,000
    more could be sent out.

    “With California on the brink of financial crisis the state’s
    governor must look for areas to trim the fat, so to speak. According to
    an area news report the state’s $16 billion USD budget failure put the
    governor is a crunch, proposing a nearly $ 5 billion USD CUT in school
    funding.”


  17. Hedge fund managers get billion-dollar paydays
    - “Hedge fund managers, those masters of a secretive, sometimes
    volatile financial universe, are making money on a scale that once
    seemed unimaginable, even in Wall Street's rarefied realms…

    “The richest hedge fund managers keep getting richer — fast. To
    make it into the top 25 of Alpha's list, the industry standard for
    hedge fund pay, a manager needed to earn at least $360 million last
    year, more than 18 times the amount in 2002. The median American
    family, by contrast, earned $60,500 last year.


    “Combined, the top 50 hedge fund managers last year earned $29
    billion. That figure represents the managers' own pay and excludes the
    compensation of their employees. Five of the top 10, including Simons
    and Soros, were also at the top of the list for 2006. To compile its
    ranking, Alpha examined the funds' returns and the fees that they
    charge investors, and then calculated the managers' pay…


    “With a combined $2 trillion under management, the hedge fund
    industry is coming off its richest year ever — a feat all the more
    remarkable given the billions of dollars of losses suffered by major
    Wall Street banks.


    “In recent months, however, scores of hedge funds have quietly died
    or spectacularly imploded, wracked by bad investments, excess borrowing
    or leverage, and client redemptions — or a combination of those events…


    Since 1913, the United States witnessed only one other year
    of such unequal wealth distribution — 1928, the year before the stock
    market crashed
    , according to Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow
    at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Such inequality is
    likely to impede an economic recovery, he said.”

    emphasis added by chycho


  18. US Fed Responsible for the Credit Crisis
    - “There has been a lot of talk in the news recently about the Federal
    Reserve and the actions it has taken over the past few months. Many
    media pundits have been bending over backwards to praise the Fed for
    supposedly restoring stability to the market. This interpretation of
    the Fed's actions couldn't be further from the truth.

    “The current market crisis began because of Federal Reserve
    monetary policy during the early 2000s in which the Fed lowered the
    interest rate to a below-market rate. The artificially low rates led to
    over investment in housing and other malinvestments. When the first
    indications of market trouble began back in August of 2007, instead of
    holding back and allowing bad decision-makers to suffer the
    consequences of their actions, the Federal Reserve took aggressive,
    inflationary action to ensure that large Wall Street firms would not
    lose money. It began by lowering the discount rates, the rates of
    interest charged to banks who borrow directly from the Fed, and
    lengthening the terms of such loans. This eliminated much of the stigma
    from discount window borrowing and enabled troubled banks to come to
    the Fed directly for funding, pay only a slightly higher interest rate
    but also secure these loans for a period longer than just overnight.


    “After the massive increase in discount window lending proved to be
    ineffective, the Fed became more and more creative with its funding
    arrangements. It has since created the Term Auction Facility (TAF), the
    Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), and the Term Securities Lending
    Facility (TSLF). The upshot of all of these new programs is that
    through auctions of securities or through deposits of collateral, the
    Fed is pushing hundreds of billions of dollars of funding into the
    financial system in a misguided attempt to shore up the stability of
    the system.


    “The PDCF in particular is a departure from the established pattern
    of Fed intervention because it targets the primary dealers, the largest
    investment banks who purchase government securities directly from the
    New York Fed. These banks have never before been allowed to borrow from
    the Fed, but thanks to the Fed Board of Governors, these investment
    banks can now receive loans from the Fed in exchange for securities
    which will in all likelihood soon lose much of their value.


    “The net effect of all this new funding has been to pump hundreds of
    billions of dollars into the financial system and bail out banks whose
    poor decision making should have caused them to go out of business.
    Instead of being forced to learn their lesson, these poor-performing
    banks are being rewarded for their financial mismanagement, and the
    ultimate cost of this bailout will fall on the American taxpayers.
    Already this new money flowing into the system is spurring talk of the
    next speculative bubble, possibly this time in commodities.


    “Worst of all, the Treasury Department has recently proposed that
    the Federal Reserve, which was responsible for the housing bubble and
    subprime crisis in the first place, be rewarded for all its
    intervention by being turned into a super-regulator. The Treasury
    foresees the Fed as the guarantor of market stability, with oversight
    over any financial institution that could pose a threat to the
    financial system. Rewarding poor performing financial institutions is
    bad enough, but rewarding the institution that enabled the current
    economic crisis is unconscionable


Monday, April 21, 2008

Tell Congress:

Investigate the Propaganda Pundits






Finally, real proof…….Embedded functionaries caught manipulating the media, truth exposed......
The New York Times has exposed a secret Pentagon campaign to infiltrate the media with pro-war propaganda.
The scheme reaches all the way to the Bush White House, where top officials recruited dozens of "military analysts" to spread favorable views of the war via the news. Many of these propaganda pundits didn't reveal that they were working from Pentagon scripts or lobbying for companies seeking to cash in on major military contracts.
This is a violation of every conceivable standard of journalism -- and possibly of federal law.

Send a letter to Congress and demand better media. Use the text below or write your own.



send this message........
Subject:
Investigate the Propaganda Pundits

Dear [Decision Maker],

Please personalize your message
The New York Times has exposed a quiet Pentagon campaign to infiltrate the media with pro-war propaganda. According to the newspaper, top officials recruited dozens of "military analysts" to spread favorable views of the war via major news media. Many of these pundits were working from Pentagon scripts while also lobbying for major military contractors looking to cash in on the war.

I urge Congress to investigate these military pundits and their ties to the Bush administration, defense contractors and our national news media.

This is not a partisan issue. An administration secretly forcing favorable views via the press is a violation of every conceivable standard of journalism -- and possibly of federal law.

Please take action to determine whether these acts violate federal law prohibiting "covert propaganda."

Thank you,

[Your Name]
[Your Address]
[City, State ZIP]

Secure link to send personal letter to your legislator urging immediate investigation.



*boycott news networks that spread propaganda, ie. turn of the living room psychological operation. Resist media manipulation, think independently.



Keep fighting the good fight, with your minds as weapons!!
...................................................................................kosmicdebris.........................................................

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Fascist America

In 10 easy steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration. Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognize the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realize.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilization". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilization as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasize, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalized. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favor of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorize citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution.

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbors to spy on neighbors. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favor of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organizations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalize or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organizations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organizations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalize certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realize that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spear’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialized about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realizing it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.



American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (Introduced in House)
HR 3835 IH
110th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 3835
To restore the Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government
abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
October 15, 2007
Dr. PAUL introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the
Judiciary, and in addition to the Committees on Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and
Select Intelligence (Permanent Select), for a period to be subsequently determined by
the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the
jurisdiction of the committee concerned
A BILL
To restore the Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of
America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007'.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS AND PURPOSE.
(a) Findings- Congress makes the following findings:

(1) Unchecked power by any branch leads to oppressive transgressions on
individual freedoms and ill-considered government policies.

(2) The Founding Fathers enshrined checks and balances in the Constitution
to protect against government abuses to derail ill-conceived domestic or
foreign endeavors.

(3) Checks and balances make the Nation safer by preventing abuses that
would be exploited by Al Qaeda to boost terrorist recruitment, would deter
foreign governments from cooperating in defeating international terrorism,
and would make the American people reluctant to support aggressive
counter-terrorism measures.

(4) Checks and balances have withered since 9/11 and an alarming
concentration of power has been accumulated in the presidency based on
hyper-inflated fears of international terrorism and a desire permanently to
alter the equilibrium of power between the three branches of government.

(5) The unprecedented constitutional powers claimed by the President since
9/11 subtracted national security and have been asserted for non-national
security purposes.

(6) Experience demonstrates that global terrorism can be thwarted,
deterred, and punished through muscular application of law enforcement
measures and prosecutions in Federal civilian courts in lieu of military
commissions or military law.

(7) Congressional oversight of the executive branch is necessary to prevent
secret government, which undermines self-government and invites
lawlessness and maladministration.

(8) The post-9/11 challenges to checks and balances are unique in the
Nation's history because the war on global terrorism has no discernable
end.

(b) Purpose- The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 is intended to restore the Constitution's checks and balances and protections against government abuses as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

SEC. 3. MILITARY COMMISSIONS; ENEMY COMBATANTS; HABEAS
CORPUS.

(a) The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is hereby repealed.

(b) The President is authorized to establish military commissions for the trial of
war crimes only in places of active hostilities against the United States where an
immediate trial is necessary to preserve fresh evidence or to prevent local
anarchy.

(c) The President is prohibited from detaining any individual indefinitely as an
unlawful enemy combatant absent proof by substantial evidence that the
individual has directly engaged in active hostilities against the United States,
provided that no United States citizen shall be detained as an unlawful enemy
combatant.

(d) Any individual detained as an enemy combatant by the United States shall be
entitled to petition for a writ of habeas corpus under section 2241 of title 28,
United States Code.

SEC. 4. TORTURE OR COERCED CONFESSIONS.
No civilian or military tribunal of the United States shall admit as evidence
statements extracted from the defendant by torture or coercion.

SEC. 5. INTELLIGENCE GATHERING.
No Federal agency shall gather foreign intelligence in contravention of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.). The President's
constitutional power to gather foreign intelligence is subordinated to this
provision.

SEC. 6. PRESIDENTIAL SIGNING STATEMENTS.
The House of Representatives and Senate collectively shall enjoy standing to file a
declaratory judgment action in an appropriate Federal district court to challenge
the constitutionality of a presidential signing statement that declares the
President's intent to disregard provisions of a bill he has signed into law because
he believes they are unconstitutional.

SEC. 7. KIDNAPPING, DETENTIONS, AND TORTURE ABROAD.
No officer or agent of the United States shall kidnap, imprison, or torture any
person abroad based solely on the President's belief that the subject of the
kidnapping, imprisonment, or torture is a criminal or enemy combatant; provided
that kidnapping shall be permitted if undertaken with the intent of bringing the
kidnapped person for prosecution or interrogation to gather intelligence before a
tribunal that meets international standards of fairness and due process. A knowing
violation of this section shall be punished as a felony punishable by a fine or
imprisonment of up to 2 years.

SEC. 8. JOURNALIST EXCEPTION TO ESPIONAGE ACT.
Nothing in the Espionage Act of 1917 shall prohibit a journalist from publishing
information received from the executive branch or Congress unless the publication
would cause direct, immediate, and irreparable harm to the national security of
the United States.

SEC. 9. USE OF SECRET EVIDENCE TO MAKE FOREIGN TERRORIST
DESIGNATIONS.
Notwithstanding any other law, secret evidence shall not be used by the President
or any other member of the executive branch to designate an individual or
organization with a United States presence as a foreign terrorist or foreign
terrorist organization for purposes of the criminal law or otherwise imposing
criminal or civil sanctions.

Downsize DC

Sign the petition.
Read the bill.

http://www.downsizedc.org/read_the_laws.shtml