Following Bush lead, Obama moves to block challenge to wiretapping program
New administration wants case against NSA dismissed
source: Raw Story
by Joe Byrne

President Barack Obama invoked “state secrets” to prevent a court from reviewing the legality of the National Security Agency’s warantless wiretapping program, moving late Friday to have a lawsuit that challenged the program dismissed.

The move — which holds that information surrounding the massive eavesdropping program should be kept from the public because of its sensitivity — follows an earlier decision in March to block handover of documents relating to the Bush Administration’s decision to spy on a charity. The arguments also mirror the Bush Administration’s efforts to dismiss an earlier suit against AT&T.

The Friday brief involves a lawsuit filed by the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing the NSA for the wiretapping program. The agency monitored the telephone calls and emails of thousands of people within the United States without a court’s approval in an effort to thwart terrorist attacks.

It also stands firmly behind the telecommunications giant AT&T. AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed that the company allowed the agency to install network monitoring hardware to spy on American citizens.

The Director of National Intelligence, the Justice Department says, “has set forth a more than reasonable basis to conclude that harm to national security would result from the disclosure of whether the NSA has worked with any telecommunications carrier.” AT&T is specifically mentioned. Public reports have fingered AT&T, Verizon, MCI and Sprint as participating in the government’s eavesdropping efforts.

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Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning–The Showdown

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=2008040182600233

March 31, 2008
by Peter Dale Scott

In August 2007, Congressman Peter DeFazio, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told the House that he and the rest of his Committee had been barred from reviewing parts of National Security Presidential Directive 51, the White House supersecret plans to implement so-called “Continuity of Government” in the event of a mass terror attack or natural disaster. (1)

Norm Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, commented, “I cannot think of one good reason” for denial. Ornstein added, “I find it inexplicable and probably reflective of the usual, knee-jerk overextension of executive power that we see from this White House.” (2)

The story, ignored by the mainstream press, involved more than the usual tussle between the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. Government. What was at stake was a contest between Congress’s constitutional powers of oversight, and a set of policy plans that could be used to suspend or modify the constitution.

There is nothing wrong with disaster planning per se. Like all governments, the U.S. government must develop plans for the worst contingencies. But Congress has a right to be concerned about Continuity of Government (COG) plans refined by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld over the past quarter century, which journalists have described as involving suspension of the constitution. (3)

In the 1980s, a secret group of planners inside and outside the government were assigned, by an Executive Order, to develop a response to a nuclear attack in which the U.S. government had been decapitated, forcing an alternative to the constitutional rules of succession. Two of these planners were Dick Cheney, then a Congressman, and Donald Rumsfeld, then a private citizen and CEO of the G.D. Searle drug company.

“One of the awkward questions we faced was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack.It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them,” said one of the COG planners in the 1980s, who spoke to James Mann (The Rise of the Vulcans, 141-42). James Bamford reported the same remark in his book Pretext for War (p. 74).

After the end of the Cold War, the urgency of coming up with plans faded. The COG nuclear planning project “has less than six months to live,” reported Tim Weiner of the New York Times. (April 17, 1994). Mann and Bamford concluded, wrongly, that all the COG planning of the Reagan era had been abandoned.

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Truth as Terrorism

By John Albanese

President Bush holds press conference. Congress urged to pass law making it easier to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mails of suspected terrorists.
- MSNBC – February 28, 2008

Just who are these suspected terrorists that President Bush seeks a blank check to spy on? Recent reports in USA Today indicates that the government’s terrorist watch list has swelled to 755,000 names. In December of 2005 NBC News reported that a secret Defense Department document listed a Quaker Meeting House gathering of anti-war activists as a “threat.”

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/

MSNBC goes on to report:

… the Pentagon now collects domestic intelligence that goes beyond legitimate concerns about terrorism or protecting U.S. military installations, say critics.

In December 2005 the ACLU published a press release: New Documents Show FBI Targeting Environmental and Animal Rights Groups Activities as ‘Domestic Terrorism’

The ACLU said that some of the documents suggest infiltration by undercover “sources” at animal rights meetings and conferences.

At times, the documents show aggressive attempts by the FBI to link PETA, Greenpeace and other mainstream organizations to activists associated with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) or Earth Liberation Front (ELF), said the ACLU. PETA, in particular, is repeatedly and falsely singled out as a “front” for militant organizations although in at least one document released today the FBI appears to acknowledge that it has no evidence to back up such assertions.

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/spying/23124prs20051220.html

Equally disturbing, on November 8, 2007 CSPAN aired a hearing of the Homeland Security Subcommittee’s “Terrorism and the Internet.” These hearings purported to identify “home grown terrorist recruiters” on the internet, in connection with House Bill HR 1955, “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007.”

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ACLU: 900,000 Names on U.S. Terror Watch Lists

February 27, 2008
Justin Rood Reports

The FBI now keeps a list of over 900,000 names belonging to known or suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.

If that number is accurate, it would be an all-time high, exponentially more than the 100,000 names on the list several years ago. But the number needs to be taken with a grain of salt: after all, the ACLU doesn’t keep the list, the FBI does, and the bureau doesn’t generally like to talk about it. (Indeed, the FBI has not yet responded to a request for comment for this post.)

But if the ACLU’s figure isn’t accurate, it’s also unlikely to be off by that much. Last September, the ACLU notes, the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reported the FBI watch list was at 700,000 names, and growing at 20,000 names per month.

The ACLU says they “extrapolated” from those figures to determine the list’s current size. ACLU’s Barry Steinhardt added that the group had spoken privately with people familiar with the watch list, who told them the 900,000 figure was not outlandish.

In the past, The FBI has told ABC News that the size of its watch list is classified. Despite that, both the bureau and the DoJ Inspector General have published the total figure in unclassified reports.

There’s no doubt the FBI’s list is growing: just last June, ABC News reported it was at 509,000 names, based on information in an unclassified FBI budget document.

But strangely, the list may be growing not because of swelling legions of foreign terrorists. Instead, it appears the FBI may be adding tens of thousands of names belonging to U.S. persons it suspects of being domestic terrorists — people who have no known ties to international terrorist organizations.

A separate entity, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), keeps a list of all names believed to belong to terrorists linked to international terror groups. That list, which was at 100,000 names in 2003, grew to 465,000 names by last June – but since then has grown only modestly, according to NCTC spokesman Carl Kropf. Today, Kropf said that list stands at roughly 500,000 names. (Unlike the FBI, the NCTC does not maintain that the size of its watch list is classified information.)

The FBI takes that list and adds to it a new collection of names which belong to U.S. persons believed to be domestic terrorists: people who have links to terrorism but not to any international group.

Last June, the NCTC was responsible for putting 465,000 names on the watch list, and the FBI appeared to add an additional 44,000. By September, extrapolating from the DoJ Inspector General’s report, the FBI’s contribution appears to have grown to somewhere north of 200,000 names.

Today – if the ACLU is to be believed – the FBI’s contribution may be as high as 417,000 names. Which would raise a new question: Where are so many domestic terrorists coming from? Or do they simply use more aliases than foreign terrorists?

Update: The FBI responded late Wednesday afternoon. Spokesman Chad Kolton did not dispute the ACLU’s figure, but noted that the watch list contains names, aliases and name variations for individuals. The number of people on the watch list, he said, was around 300,000, and only 5 percent are U.S. persons. Kolton noted that the list is “regularly reviewed for accuracy.” Last year the bureau removed 100,000 records “related to people cleared of any nexus with terrorism,” Kolton said.

Original article here.

Rule by fear or rule by law?

by Lewis Seiler, Dan Hamburg
The San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, February 4, 2008

“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”

- Winston Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943

Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and noncitizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of “an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.”

Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.

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Bush is trying to set up OpEdNews as a “terrorist recruiter.”
by Ed Martin

www.opednews.com

Barbara Peterson’s Nov. 14 article points out how Bush’s Homeland Security is trying to make the case that web sites that publish articles questioning the events of 9/11 are terrorist recruiters. Given Bush’s recourse to calling everyone who doesn’t agree with him a terrorist and combined with his executive order confiscating all the worldly goods of anyone who disagrees with him, Barbara Peterson’s article didn’t get the attention it deserves.

The sinister effect of what Bush is doing is that Barbara’s article, this article, and others here on OpEdNews that question the motives of the Bush administration and the events of 9/11 can be determined to be “terrorist recruiters.”

I’m quoting and paraphrasing from Barbara’s article, but it is well worth repeating. Here’s the part from her article that makes the connection:

At a Homeland Security sub-committee hearing on terrorism risk assessment where the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth website is presented along with Taliban recruitment sites, training manuals and bomb making techniques, Representative Jane Harmon asked Bruce Hoffman, Chairman of the Rand Corporation in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency, “So this movement develops them into violent killers?” Hoffman stated that, “falsehoods and conspiracy theorists have become so ubiquitous and believed that you almost have some sort of parallel truth, and it has become a very effective tool for recruiting people.”

Barbara points out that Hoffman is talking about A & E for Truth, calling them conspiracy theorists and equating them with the recruiting sites of the Taliban.

If that were true, which it isn’t, Bush could determine that that is an act undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq.

Now, here’s the scary part that ties it all together.

Bush’s Executive Order of July 17, 2007, stripped down to its meaning:

“All property and interests in property of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn or otherwise dealt in, detemined by the Secretary of the Treasury, to pose a significant risk of committing an act undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq.”

Does questioning what happened on 9/11 pose a risk of undermining efforts in Iraq? That’s not for us to determine, that’s strictly up to Bush and his Treasury Secretary. We have no say in the matter, but if Bush takes it into his head that we might, could, maybe, possibly pose a risk, we lose everything we have. All we have to do is ask, “Is that the way it happened?”

Notice the lack of subtlety used by lumping professional architects and engineers in with Taliban terrorists. Bush is trying to get a handle on a way to shut down anyone who questions what happened on 9/11, starting with the web sites that have the most authoritative, professional people, the ones most likely to get at the truth. He’s afraid if they keep it up, the truth just might come out.

Bush has given it away, here. By trying to prevent the truth from coming out, by not wanting the truth exposed, he’s just making it more obvious that the truth can hurt him. That’s what he’s trying to hide.

By applying qui bono, who benefits, to this thing, we can draw some obvious conclusions. Five months after Bush took office, he was dragging along with a dismal 50% approval rating, and he hadn’t even done anything. There was nothing to approve or disapprove of but the nonentity, Bush, himself. He was nothing going nowhere. Right after 9/11, his approval rating shot up to a phenomenal 90% and he had just about the whole country kissing his ass, getting everything he wanted. And, he became what he always wanted to be, a self-described “War President,” using 9/11 as the basis of his lies to create his own, personal war.

The events of 9/11 benefited George Bush enormously, more than any other man. And, he’s going to use his executive order to confiscate everything we have to keep us from asking how that came about.

Ed Martin is an unindicted curmudgeon. He is not a Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, deist, atheist, or a member of any -ism.

Simon Wiesenthal Center presents 9/11 sites alongside radical Jihadist sites to House Hearing on “Terrorism and the Internet”

Posted by reprehensor at 911blogger.com

On Tuesday, November 6, 2007, a House Homeland Security Subcommittee had a hearing on “Terrorism and the Internet”. The hearing featured presentations from several groups, including the RAND Corporation, and Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The hearing was chaired by Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, and ranking Republican, Rep. Dave Reichert.

Toward the end of the hearing, Weitzman rolls out a PowerPoint presentation that presents a few 9/11 truth sites sandwiched in between websites that offer training in terrorist tactics, and a website that glorified the attack of 9/11. Among the websites presented under the heading “Internet: Incubator of 9/11 Conpiracies and Disinformation”, are Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and other sites, such as Killtown’s, who brought this Hearing to our attention.

Now, we wouldn’t want anybody getting the wrong idea here. Here at 911blogger we are opposed to any and all terrorist activities, including STATE SPONSORED TERRORISM. Don’t really care who the state is either. It’s all bad.

Californians, if Harman is your representative, please set her straight. Washington state, if Reichert is your critter, don’t let him absorb this crap with no static.

CSPAN has been more than fair to 9/11 skeptics. Last year they broadcast Alex Jones’ American Scholars Symposium, in 2005, they broadcast David Ray Griffin, and they will probably listen to feedback regarding this broadcast.

View the hearing as a video stream here — the pertinent section begins at the 43:31 mark, but I recommend watching the entire program, because there is so much disinformation in the broadcast itself, it’s hard to know where to begin unraveling it.

Homeland Security – Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_…

Please ask the Simon Wiesthenthal Center (Mark Weitzman in particular) to stop conflating terrorist violence with 9/11 truth, and even though he has not extended the courtesy to us, be polite;

mweitzman@swcny.com

Ich bin ein Berliner (That goes for you too.)

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

– Justice William O. Douglas

I was born the very day World War II ended. My fellow postwar “Baby Boomers” grew up on old black and white documentaries of that war and the events leading up to it. But those films never really answered the most important question, a question that has nagged me, and I suspect most of my generation

How did Germany and the German people become the Mrs. O’Leary’s cow of an entire continent? How could a culture, re-formed during the Renaissance, create a horror like Auschwitz?

How does something that extraordinary happen? It’s a question that has not only burdened American Baby Boomers, but three generations of postwar Germans as well. But for them it’s much more than just a historical curiosity. For postwar Germans it’s also been a nagging sense of collective guilt – guilt about events they had nothing to do with, but guilt nonetheless. It’s a guilt built on the realization that their parents and grand parents either participated in, supported and/or enabled what happened over half a century ago — or, at the very least, did nothing to prevent or stop it.

Of course the fascist rulers of the Third Reich ruled with a heavy hand. So it’s not hard to understand why so many Germans simply laid low rather than oppose the regime.

“Nazi terror from above and the demise of the rule of law started just a few days after Hitler’s assumption of power in January 1933. The penalties of opposition became higher and higher. In the first nine months alone, at least 100,000 people, most of them leftist Germans, were thrown into hastily erected concentration camps. Others ended up in ordinary prisons and many died. Countless more were roughed up by rampaging brownshirts in broad daylight or taken into police custody on trumped-up political charges. By 1936, a brutal police state had penetrated virtually all spheres of life.” ( New York Times books.)

While the rules have tightened here since 9/11, we’ve not experienced anything near that scale. Speaking out is remains a survivable exercise.

Which begs the question; what will be our excuse? How will we explain the things we’ve allowed this administration to get away with — the torture, the “renditions,” the secret prisons, the warrant-less wiretapping, the lies we and our media allowed to stand? What are we going to tell our grand children when they ask us what the hell we were thinking, feeling and doing while all that was afoot?

I understand it’s against the rules of polite society to recklessly throw the “f” word around by comparing anything that’s happening today to the kind of atrocities that occurred under Hitler. It”s even worse to compare any contemporary American political/religious/social leader to Hitler.

So I won’t. I won’t go that far, because it hasn’t gone that far – yet.

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The Timeline to Tyranny
Ten advances towards the end of freedom and privacy in the United States

by Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, August 7, 2007

The top ten advances towards tyranny in the United States during the tenure of the Bush administration, from the Patriot Act to the latest expansion of the illegal eavesdropping surveillance program.

1) The USA Patriot Act

The party line often heard from Neo-Cons in their attempts to defend the Patriot Act either circulate around the contention that the use of the Patriot Act has never been abused or that it isn’t being used against American citizens. Here is an archive of articles that disproves both of these fallacies.

The Patriot Act was the boiler plate from which all subsequent attacks on the Constitution were formed.

2) Total Information Awareness

“Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database,” infamously wrote New York Times writer William Safire, announcing the birth of Total Information Awareness, a kind of Echelon on steroids introduced a year after 9/11.

TIA was not canned, it was simply removed from the newspaper, renamed and continues to operate under a guise of different programs.

3) USA Patriot Act II

The second Patriot Act was a mirror image of powers that Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler gave themselves. Whereas the First Patriot Act only gutted the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and seriously damaged the Seventh and the Tenth, the Second Patriot Act reorganized the entire Federal government as well as many areas of state government under the dictatorial control of the Justice Department, the Office of Homeland Security and the FEMA NORTHCOM military command.

The Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as the Second Patriot Act is by its very structure the definition of dictatorship.

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Senate Votes To Expand Warrantless Surveillance
White House Applauds; Changes Are Temporary

By Joby Warrick and Ellen Nakashima

Washington Post Staff Writers
August 4, 2007

The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government’s terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order.

The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance. Earlier in the day, President Bush threatened to hold Congress in session into its scheduled summer recess if it did not approve the changes he wanted.

The legislation, which is expected to go before the House today, would expand the government’s authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas.

As currently written, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act already gives U.S. spies broad leeway to monitor the communications of foreign terrorism suspects, but the 30-year-old statute requires a warrant to monitor calls intercepted in the United States, regardless of where the calls begin or end.

At the White House, where officials had voiced concern about that requirement, a spokesman praised the Senate vote and called on House leaders to quickly follow suit. The legislation will “give our intelligence professionals the essential tools they need to protect our nation,” spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Democratic leaders expressed disappointment about the result, but they pointed to language that would require lawmakers to reconsider the key provisions in six months.

“My Republican colleagues chose to rubber-stamp a flawed administration proposal that fails to provide the accountability needed in the light of the administration’s past mismanagement of key tools in the war on terror,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

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The Pentagon’s “Second 911″

Another [9/11] attack could create both a justification and an opportunity to retaliate against some known targets
by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, August 10, 2006

With all the fear mongering in the mainstream media today, this article may well be more relevant today than when it was written almost one year ago. -Ed.

One essential feature of “defense” in the case of a second major attack on America, is “offense”, according to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff: “Homeland security is one piece of a broader strategy [which] brings the battle to the enemy.”(DHS, Transcript of complete March 2005 speech of Secr. Michael Chertoff)

In the month following last year’s 7/7 London bombings, Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have instructed USSTRATCOM to draw up a contingency plan “to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States”. Implied in the contingency plan is the certainty that Iran would be behind a Second 9/11.

This “contingency plan” uses the pretext of a “Second 9/11″, which has not yet happened, to prepare for a major military operation against Iran, while pressure was also exerted on Tehran in relation to its (non-existent) nuclear weapons program.

What is diabolical in this decision of the US Vice President is that the justification presented by Cheney to wage war on Iran rests on Iran’s involvement in a hypothetical terrorist attack on America, which has not yet occurred:

The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections. (Philip Giraldi, Attack on Iran: Pre-emptive Nuclear War , The American Conservative, 2 August 2005)

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Bush Directive for a “Catastrophic Emergency” in America: Building a Justification for Waging War on Iran?

by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, June 24, 2007

“Another [9/11 type terrorist] attack could create both a justification and an opportunity that is lacking today to retaliate against some known targets” (Statement by Pentagon official, leaked to the Washington Post, 23 April 2006)

The US media consensus is that “the United States faces its greatest threat of a terrorist assault since the September 11 attacks” (USA Today, 12 February 2006) The American Homeland is threatened by ” Islamic terrorists”, allegedly supported by Tehran and Damascus.

America is under attack” by an illusive “outside enemy”.

Concepts are turned upside down. War becomes Peace. “Offense” becomes a legitimate means of “self-defense”. In the words of President Bush:

 

“Against this kind of enemy, there is only one effective response: We must go on the offense, stay on the offense, and take the fight to them.” (President George W. Bush, CENTCOM Coalition Conference, May 1, 2007)

The intent is to seek a pretext to wage a preemptive war.

A “terrorist attack on America” could be used to justify, in the eyes of an increasingly credulous public opinion, on “humanitarian grounds”, the launching of a major theater war directed against Iran and Syria.

Allegedly supported by Iran, the terrorists are said to possess nuclear capabilities. They are supposedly planning to explode “radiological dispersion devices” (RDD) or “dirty bombs” in densely populated urban areas in the US. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell had already forewarned in 2003 that, “It would be easy for terrorists to cook up radioactive ‘dirty’ bombs to explode inside the U.S. … How likely it is, I can’t say…” (10 February 2003).

The sheer absurdity that Al Qaeda might have advanced capabilities to wage a nuclear attack on America is, nonetheless, pervasive in US media reports. Moreover, numerous drills and exercises, simulating a terrorist attack using nuclear devices, have been conducted in recent years, creating the illusion that “the threat is real”:

“What we do know is that our enemies want to inflict massive casualties and that terrorists have the expertise to invent a wide range of attacks, including those involving the use of chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons. … [E]xploding a small nuclear weapon in a major city could do incalculable harm to hundreds of thousands of people, as well as to businesses and the economy,…(US Congress, House Financial Services Committee, June 21, 2007).

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