As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of an tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir! ), the National government is moving at break-neck velocity to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.
After most of, with world share rates gyrating wildly, employment and wages in a death spiral, and retirement funds and publicly-owned possessions swallowed whole by speculators in addition to rentier scum, the state better dust-off contingency blueprints lest the Greek, Spanish or British “contagion” multiply beyond the fabled coast line of “old Europe” along with infect God-fearin’ folk throughout the heimat.
Fear possibly not, they have and your lyrically-titled Civil Disturbances: Emergency Employment of Army along with other Resources, otherwise known because Army Regulation 500-50, spells out and about the “responsibilities, policy, and guidance for the Department of the Army in planning and operations involving the usage of Army resources in the control of actual or perhaps anticipated civil disturbances. ” (emphasis added)
With British politicians challenging a clampdown on social networking in the wake connected with London riots, and considering the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency having complied last week in Bay area, switching off underground cellular service to help squelch a new protest against police violence, authoritarian control tactics, aping those deployed in Egypt and Tunisia (that exercised well! ) are becoming standard in so-called “Western democracies. ”
Meanwhile up on Capitol Hill, Congress managed their part to protect us from that pesky Charge of Rights; that can be, before 81 of them–nearly any fifth of “our” elected representatives–checked-out for AIPAC-funded junkets that will Israel.
Secrecy News reported which the Senate Intelligence Committee “rejected an amendment that might have required the Attorney General as well as Director of National Intelligence to confront the issue of ‘secret law, ’ with which government agencies rely on legal authorities which can be unknown or misunderstood because of the public. ”
That change, proposed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) appeared to be rejected by voice vote, further entrenching unprecedented monitoring powers of Executive Branch agencies like the FBI and NSA.
When Antifascist Calling previously reported, the Electronic Frontier Groundwork filed a Freedom with Information Act lawsuit contrary to the Justice Department “demanding the discharge of a secret legal memo used to justify FBI access in order to Americans’ telephone records with no legal process or oversight. ”
The DOJ refused and it also now appears that the particular Senate has affirmed that “secret law” really should be guiding principles of our own former republic.
Secrecy News also disclosed which the Committee rejected a second amendment to the authorization bill, one that would own required the Justice Department’s Inspector General “to estimate the volume of Americans who have had the contents health of their communications reviewed in violation belonging to the FISA Amendments Act with 2008 [FAA">. ”
As pointed out here many times, FAA may be a pernicious piece of Bushist legal detritus that legalized the prior administration’s secret spy courses since embellished by some of our current “hope and change” leader.
During the run-up in order to FAA’s passage, congressional Democrats, including then-Senator Barack Obama and also his Republican colleagues surrounding the aisle, claimed that what the law states would “strike a balance” among Americans’ privacy rights plus the needs of security agencies to “stop terrorists” attacking the continent.
If that’s the scenario, then why can’t this American people learn whether their rights are already compromised?
Perhaps, as recent reports in Truthout and other publications suggest, former OUGH. S. counterterrorism “czar” Richard Clarke flattened “explosive allegations against a few former top CIA officials–George Tenet, Cofer Black and Richard Blee–accusing these individuals of knowingly withholding brains … about two belonging to the 9/11 hijackers who had entered the united states more than a year prior to a attacks. ”
Clarke’s allegations follow closely about the heels of an study by Truthout journalists Jeffrey Kaye as well as Jason Leopold.
“Based on on papers obtained under the Mobility of Information Act and an interview using a former high-ranking counterterrorism established, ” Kaye and Leopold mastered that “a little-known government intelligence unit, unbeknownst on the various investigative bodies probing that terrorist attacks, was ordered by senior government officials to stop tracking Osama bin Packed and al-Qaeda’s movements prior to 9/11. ”
As readers are well aware, the 9/11 provocation was the pretext utilised by the capitalist state to help wage aggressive resource competitions abroad while ramming through repressive legislation just like the USA Patriot Act as well as FISA Amendments Act that targeted the democratic rights belonging to the American people here in your house.
But FAA did extra then legitimate illegal sessions. It also handed retroactive defenses and economic cover to help giant telecoms like AT&T as well as Verizon who profited handily through government surveillance, shielding them from monetary damages which may have resulted from some sort of spate of lawsuits like asHepting v. AT&T.