Is The U.S Descending Into Fascism?

Jason P

peacefrompaul wrote:

Jason P wrote:

I'm surprised anyone is even left to comment about this latest news after the majority of us were pulled from our homes when the Patriot Act was signed.

No worries, big brother is watching you.

Sea and Kat?

peacefrompaul

Jason P wrote:

peacefrompaul wrote:

Jason P wrote:

I'm surprised anyone is even left to comment about this latest news after the majority of us were pulled from our homes when the Patriot Act was signed.

No worries, big brother is watching you.

Sea and Kat?

Well played

WaveCameCrashin

Freedom for most people is something sacred, and many have been willing to sacrifice their lives for it. It is not just another word, for we measure the health of our democracies by the standard of freedom. We use it to measure our happiness and prosperity. Sadly, freedom of information, expression and speech is being eroded gradually without people paying much attention to it. Freedom of movement is permitted within certain zones, freedom of reading is disappearing, and the right to privacy is dwindling with the increased surveillance of our every move.

And that pretty much sums it up.. Pretty damn sad. By the time the masses wake up it will be to late..

unsung

The Amash amendment to NDAA failed today. We are screwed. They just trashed the bill of rights.

brianlux

WaveCameCrashin wrote:

By the time the masses wake up it will be to late..

Have the masses ever been awake?

WaveCameCrashin

brianlux wrote:

WaveCameCrashin wrote:

By the time the masses wake up it will be to late..

Have the masses ever been awake?

Yeah I think more people are engaged now than they-we used to be.. At the same time though I think a lot of people feel hopeless and they can't make a difference.

brianlux

WaveCameCrashin wrote:

brianlux wrote:

WaveCameCrashin wrote:

By the time the masses wake up it will be to late..

Have the masses ever been awake?

WaveCameCrashin wrote:

Yeah I think more people are engaged now than they-we used to be..

The internet certainly has been helpful that way.

WaveCameCrashin wrote:

At the same time though I think a lot of people feel hopeless and they can't make a difference.

I suppose technology might be partly responsible for that as well. (I'm thinking about your Big Bro streetlights.)

Byrnzie

Very interesting article here on the subject of espionage and propaganda:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 37812.html

Phillip Knightley: When is a terror threat not a terror threat? Let's ask a man called Felix...

All intelligence services rely on convincing the public there is a monster at large waiting to grab them
Phillip Knightley

Friday 11 May 2012


The British undercover agent in the underpants bomb plot that has emerged so sensationally in recent days, was recruited using a technique pioneered by the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky. And Dzerzhinsky would be looking down from wherever he is now and smiling with satisfaction at the latest twists of an episode in which Western intelligence agencies have apparently foiled a plan to attack a US-bound plane.

Dzerzhinsky took over anti-terrorism duties in the newly-emerged Russia at the end of the First World War when the country was riven with revolt and violence. He realised that he had no chance of identifying all the terrorist threats and those planning to perpetrate them. Instead he developed a questionable technique that has become part of espionage theory throughout the international intelligence community: you lure the terrorist to you.

When the story of the foiled bomb plot first broke it seemed too good to be true. The security authorities had intercepted a man carrying a supposedly undetectable bomb which was being examined at the FBI laboratories in Quantico, Virginia. This suggested an amazing piece of intelligence work. What had led the authorities to the man? Why were they suspicious of him? Had they been tipped off? As details emerged it became apparent that the action was rather more straightforward.

In the tradition of Dzerzhinski, the Saudi intelligence service had apparently "dangled" one of its agents in front of known al-Qa'ida members hoping for a "bite". To make the bait attractive, the agent, it later emerged, was a British passport holder. Al-Qa'ida was fooled and handed him the bomb with instructions to smuggle it on a plane bound for the United States. He handed it over to the Saudis. It seems likely that the Saudis passed on the information the agent had gathered on al-Qa'ida to enable the US to mount a drone attack on an al-Qaida leader in Yemen. The Saudis are thought to have planned more operations for its star undercover agent but were forced to abandon them when the story leaked to the Western media. Thus espionage history repeated itself, and echoes can be heard of the most famous of all counter-espionage operations in the Soviet Union, the Trust.

The Trust appeared to be a huge anti-Bolshevik organisation working from Moscow to overthrow the Communists and reverse the revolution. Instead,Dzerzhinski used it to identify anti-communists. All he needed to do was set up the organisation and wait to see who joined it. He could then choose when to roll it up and arrest its members or whether to let it run in the hope of revealing bigger prey.

In intelligence circles the Trust became a textbook operation and its principles copied worldwide. But to be most effective required a ruthlessness that Western services often felt unable to carry out. For instance, if the authenticity of a front organisation was questioned, the KGB did not hesitate to initiate a terrorist incident to reinforce the organisation's reputation. So the Trust would plant bombs that would kill innocent people just so that possible recruits would think it a genuine organisation.

In the West, a front organisation could also run into legal difficulties when it came to winding it up and arresting those who had been tempted to join. Judges wanted convincing that the authority running the operation had not been tempted to act as agents provocateurs and had provoked people into acts that they would not otherwise have considered. This is why the main user of front organisations was at first the British Customs in drug busts rather than the Security Service, MI5, or the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, the thinking being that the courts would be more sympathetic if a huge haul of heroin was involved and not a bewildered possible terrorist.

British Customs actually advertised for recruits, placing notices in Pakistani journals asking for young Pakistanis going on holiday to Pakistan to contact the British High Commission if they were approached when on holiday to courier drugs back to Britain. Those who did were then instructed to deliver the drugs to the High Commission which took over their transport back to the UK where the Pakistani who had been recruited would deliver them as instructed. At the handover the Customs would pounce and arrest the ringleaders. The headlines in the British press would trumpet: "Huge drugs bust. Smugglers' plot foiled". But as evidence in court showed, the whole plot had been initiated by British Customs and the drugs brought into Britain by Customs themselves.

The difficulty the British Security Service MI5 has faced in its anti-terrorism operations is that it was created to face a Communist threat, and terrorism was at first beyond its ken. Give it a communist plot and it had files, informers and precedents to work with. But tasked after 9/11 with tacking possible terrorist cells in Britain it did not know where to start. Then someone remembered Felix Dzerzhinsky. Subsequent "successes" in fighting terrorism have sprung from operations modelled on the Trust.

But they are risky. How far can an undercover officer go in suggesting a terrorist operation before he risks a judge eventually ruling that he was acting as an agent provocateur? Are the violent sentiments of a member of the group real or just a fantasy? In most counter-terrorism operations of this nature there always remains the suspicion that the accused would not have acted in the way they did if not encouraged to do so by the undercover officer.

All intelligence services rely on convincing the public that there is a monster out there in the big wild world waiting to grab them. Only an alert intelligence service can protect them and keep them safe. All intelligence services promote this view which is what gives them more in common with each other than the governments that employ them. Genuine risk assessments of the dangers of terrorism tend to be played down because they show that the chances of an ordinary citizen dying in a terrorist attack is about the same as dying from a fall in the bath.

Phillip Knightley's books include 'The Second Oldest Profession', a history of espionage

Jason P

The Twitter Act

Once again, social media proves to be more powerful then any tool the government could possibly realize ...

Twitter Gives Police Information on Source of Threatening Tweet

Twitter has now turned over information it had initially denied to NYC police about the user whose account issued threats of an attack "just like in Aurora" on the Broadway theater where Mike Tyson's one-man show is playing.

The New York Police Department subpoenaed Twitter Tuesday for the user's identity after the social media giant refused authorities' emergency request for the information.

"This s**t ain't no joke yo I'm serious people are gonna die just like in aurora," the user tweeted Aug. 1.
Police officials won't comment on whether they have spoken to the account's owner or the potential for any attack. Police said they have some indication of the direction their investigation might take, based on the information Twitter provided, but would not disclose it at this time.

The Twitter user's account seems to have been suspended because an error message now appears where the account was active as recently as Tuesday evening.

A few days before the Aug. 1 tweet, the unidentified person posted that he or she knew that the theater left its exit doors unlocked and was going to plan the shooting "step by step."

http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-gives-police-information-source-threatening-tweet-143151322--abc-news-topstories.html

Zoso

the bullshit bush freedom acts were the start of this and seemed like at the time most people were in support of this.

DriftingByTheStorm

brianlux wrote:

WaveCameCrashin wrote:

By the time the masses wake up it will be to late..

Have the masses ever been awake?

Actually, B
Stumbled on this recently:
Brzezinsky at CFR posits mass global political awakening as second of two major political shifts of the age ... at 2min apps.

He actually then gripes that this awakening is causing political obstructions to important globalist policy efforts. Aww, dangnabbit. You mean you lie to man for ages, and then he wakes up to hate you because you never bothered to explain yourselves to him? Huh. Who'd a thunk. Der dee der.

Byrnzie

Something to think about here:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ss-johnson

The 'war on terror' - by design - can never end

As the Pentagon's former top lawyer urges that the war be viewed as finite, the US moves in the opposite direction

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 January 2013

Last month, outgoing pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson gave a speech at the Oxford Union and said that the War on Terror must, at some point, come to an end:

"Now that efforts by the US military against al-Qaida are in their 12th year, we must also ask ourselves: How will this conflict end? . . . . 'War' must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the 'new normal.' Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives. . . .

"There will come a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaida and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, that al-Qaida will be effectively destroyed."

On Thursday night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviewed Johnson, and before doing so, she opined as follows:

"When does this thing we are in now end? And if it does not have an end — and I'm not speaking as a lawyer here, I am just speaking as a citizen who feels morally accountable for my country's actions — if it does not have an end, then morally speaking it does not seem like it is a war. And then, our country is killing people and locking them up outside the traditional judicial system in a way I think we maybe cannot be forgiven for."

It is precisely the intrinsic endlessness of this so-called "war" that is its most corrupting and menacing attribute, for the reasons Maddow explained. But despite the happy talk from Johnson, it is not ending soon. By its very terms, it cannot. And all one has to do is look at the words and actions of the Obama administration to know this.

In October, the Washington Post's Greg Miller reported that the administration was instituting a "disposition matrix" to determine how terrorism suspects will be disposed of, all based on this fact: "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade." As Miller puts it: "That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."

The polices adopted by the Obama administration just over the last couple of years leave no doubt that they are accelerating, not winding down, the war apparatus that has been relentlessly strengthened over the last decade. In the name of the War on Terror, the current president has diluted decades-old Miranda warnings; codified a new scheme of indefinite detention on US soil; plotted to relocate Guantanamo to Illinois; increased secrecy, repression and release-restrictions at the camp; minted a new theory of presidential assassination powers even for US citizens; renewed the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping framework for another five years, as well as the Patriot Act, without a single reform; and just signed into law all new restrictions on the release of indefinitely held detainees.

Does that sound to you like a government anticipating the end of the War on Terror any time soon? Or does it sound like one working feverishly to make their terrorism-justified powers of detention, surveillance, killing and secrecy permanent? About all of this, the ACLU's Executive Director, Anthony Romero, provided the answer on Thursday: "President Obama has utterly failed the first test of his second term, even before inauguration day. His signature means indefinite detention without charge or trial, as well as the illegal military commissions, will be extended."

There's a good reason US officials are assuming the "War on Terror" will persist indefinitely: namely, their actions ensure that this occurs. The New York Times' Matthew Rosenberg this morning examines what the US government seems to regard as the strange phenomenon of Afghan soldiers attacking US troops with increasing frequency, and in doing so, discovers a shocking reality: people end up disliking those who occupy and bomb their country:


"Such insider attacks, by Afghan security forces on their Western allies, became 'the signature violence of 2012', in the words of one former American official. The surge in attacks has provided the clearest sign yet that Afghan resentment of foreigners is becoming unmanageable, and American officials have expressed worries about its disruptive effects on the training mission that is the core of the American withdrawal plan for 2014. . . .

"But behind it all, many senior coalition and Afghan officials are now concluding that after nearly 12 years of war, the view of foreigners held by many Afghans has come to mirror that of the Taliban. Hope has turned into hatred, and some will find a reason to act on those feelings.

"'A great percentage of the insider attacks have the enemy narrative — the narrative that the infidels have to be driven out — somewhere inside of them, but they aren't directed by the enemy,' said a senior coalition officer, who asked not to be identified because of Afghan and American sensitivities about the attacks."

In other words, more than a decade of occupying and brutalizing that country has turned large swaths of the population into the "Taliban", to the extent that the "Taliban" means: Afghans willing to use violence to force the US and its allies out of their country. As always, the US - through the very policies of aggression and militarism justified in the name of terrorism - is creating the very "terrorists" those polices are supposedly designed to combat. It's a pure and perfect system of self-perpetuation.

Exactly the same thing is happening in Yemen, where nothing is more effective at driving Yemenis into the arms of al-Qaida than the rapidly escalated drone attacks under Obama. This morning, the Times reported that US air strikes in Yemen are carried out in close cooperation with the air force of Saudi Arabia, which will only exacerbate that problem. Indeed, virtually every person accused of plotting to target the US with terrorist attacks in last several years has expressly cited increasing US violence, aggression and militarism in the Muslim world as the cause.

There's no question that this "war" will continue indefinitely. There is no question that US actions are the cause of that, the gasoline that fuels the fire. The only question - and it's becoming less of a question for me all the time - is whether this endless war is the intended result of US actions or just an unwanted miscalculation.

It's increasingly hard to make the case that it's the latter. The US has long known, and its own studies have emphatically concluded, that "terrorism" is motivated not by a "hatred of our freedoms" but by US policy and aggression in the Muslim world. This causal connection is not news to the US government. Despite this - or, more accurately, because of it - they continue with these policies.

One of the most difficult endeavors is to divine the motives of other people (divining our own motives is difficult enough). That becomes even more difficult when attempting to discern the motives not of a single actor but a collection of individuals with different motives and interests ("the US government").

But what one can say for certain is that there is zero reason for US officials to want an end to the war on terror, and numerous and significant reasons why they would want it to continue. It's always been the case that the power of political officials is at its greatest, its most unrestrained, in a state of war. Cicero, two thousand years ago, warned that "In times of war, the law falls silent" (Inter arma enim silent leges). John Jay, in Federalist No. 4, warned that as a result of that truth, "nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it . . . for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans."

If you were a US leader, or an official of the National Security State, or a beneficiary of the private military and surveillance industries, why would you possibly want the war on terror to end? That would be the worst thing that could happen. It's that war that generates limitless power, impenetrable secrecy, an unquestioning citizenry, and massive profit.

Just this week, a federal judge ruled that the Obama administration need not respond to the New York Times and the ACLU's mere request to disclose the government's legal rationale for why the President believes he can target US citizens for assassination without due process. Even while recognizing how perverse her own ruling was - "The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me" and it imposes "a veritable Catch-22" - the federal judge nonetheless explained that federal courts have constructed such a protective shield around the US government in the name of terrorism that it amounts to an unfettered license to violate even the most basic rights: "I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret" (emphasis added).

Why would anyone in the US government or its owners have any interest in putting an end to this sham bonanza of power and profit called "the war on terror"? Johnson is right that there must be an end to this war imminently, and Maddow is right that the failure to do so will render all the due-process-free and lawless killing and imprisoning and invading and bombing morally indefensible and historically unforgivable.

But the notion that the US government is even entertaining putting an end to any of this is a pipe dream, and the belief that they even want to is fantasy. They're preparing for more endless war; their actions are fueling that war; and they continue to reap untold benefits from its continuation. Only outside compulsion, from citizens, can make an end to all of this possible.

unsung

Zoso wrote:

the bullshit bush freedom acts were the start of this and seemed like at the time most people were in support of this.

And they still are. Anyone seen Cindy Sheehan lately? Maybe she is out front of Obama's Chicago house protesting and I missed it.

dustinpardue

http://www.examiner.com/article/revisit ... ts_article

DriftingByTheStorm

dustinpardue wrote:

http://www.examiner.com/article/revisiting-history-did-jack-ruby-predict-the-america-of-today?CID=examiner_alerts_article

holy SHIT !!!

I fucking love that Ruby quote ... the part about the Kennedy assassination where he is making it EXTRAORDINARILY CLEAR that he was ORDERED by "those in power" to kill Oswald (and if you look at the theatrical circumstances of the Oswald murder itself, you already knew this, without his say so) and that the reason for the murder of both Oswald AND Kennedy was related to deep-politics ... BUT I HAVE ***NEVER*** SEEN THE BACK HALF OF THAT QUOTE.

***What a Fucking Bombshell ...and What a Fucking Context For It***

I mean, fucking truly.
It FRAMES THE ENTIRE JFK ASSASSINATION.
That quote, now that i have seen it in full,
it almost becomes the ULTIMATE blurb regarding the events. It says EVERYTHING you need to know:

The Part I've Read And Seen Repeatedly (damning enough on it's own):
“Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred or my motives. The people that had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in will never let the true facts come above board to the world."

THE REAL FUCKING KNITTY GRITTY (the goddamn bombshell):

"Gentlemen, I want to tell you the truth, but I cannot tell it here. If you want a fair shake out of me you have to take me to Washington. I tell you that a whole new form of government is going to take over the country and I know I won’t live to see you another time.” - Jack Ruby (on JFK, and apparently the NWO)

***THANKS FOR THAT, DUSTIN***
!!!

dustinpardue

DriftingByTheStorm wrote:

dustinpardue wrote:

http://www.examiner.com/article/revisiting-history-did-jack-ruby-predict-the-america-of-today?CID=examiner_alerts_article

holy SHIT !!!

I fucking love that Ruby quote ... the part about the Kennedy assassination where he is making it EXTRAORDINARILY CLEAR that he was ORDERED by "those in power" to kill Oswald (and if you look at the theatrical circumstances of the Oswald murder itself, you already knew this, without his say so) and that the reason for the murder of both Oswald AND Kennedy was related to deep-politics ... BUT I HAVE ***NEVER*** SEEN THE BACK HALF OF THAT QUOTE.

***What a Fucking Bombshell ...and What a Fucking Context For It***

I mean, fucking truly.
It FRAMES THE ENTIRE JFK ASSASSINATION.
That quote, now that i have seen it in full,
it almost becomes the ULTIMATE blurb regarding the events. It says EVERYTHING you need to know:

The Part I've Read And Seen Repeatedly (damning enough on it's own):
“Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred or my motives. The people that had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in will never let the true facts come above board to the world."

THE REAL FUCKING KNITTY GRITTY (the goddamn bombshell):

"Gentlemen, I want to tell you the truth, but I cannot tell it here. If you want a fair shake out of me you have to take me to Washington. I tell you that a whole new form of government is going to take over the country and I know I won’t live to see you another time.” - Jack Ruby (on JFK, and apparently the NWO)

***THANKS FOR THAT, DUSTIN***
!!!

You're welcome! Took a whie to write, but I finally got it where it needed to be for publication. Glad you enjoyed. Keep posting your stuff, i'll keep reading. I always enjoy.

riotgrl

dustinpardue wrote:

http://www.examiner.com/article/revisiting-history-did-jack-ruby-predict-the-america-of-today?CID=examiner_alerts_article

Here's a thought I always have when reading that speech by Eisenhower where he "warns' against the military industrial complex...was he able to stop/prevent or otherwise put an end to this complex? Most assuredly, this is a significant problem in the US and warning against it was one thing but participating in it is something else altogether which I believe that he, at least to a certain extent. I know that was not the gist of your article(which was really great BTW) but since it was in there I thought I would throw that thought out