Filed under: 2-party system, ACLU, Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Canada, Detainee, Dick Cheney, Dictatorship, Donald Rumsfeld, Empire, Extraordinary Rendition, FBI, Fascism, George Bush, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Hillary Clinton, Nazi, Neolibs, New York, Oppression, Syria, Torture, US Constitution, War Crimes, War On Terror, civil liberties, civil rights, egypt, federal crime, federal crimes, human rights, interrogation, left right paradigm, obama, rendition | Tags: Maher Arar
Outsourcing Torture To Continue Under Obama
Anthony Gregory
Campaign For Liberty
August 25, 2009
Flashback: Obama Orders Continuation Of Illegal CIA Renditions
About two years ago, candidate Obama, writing in Foreign Affairs, strongly criticized Bush’s practice of “extraordinary renditioning.” Under this policy, terror suspects were apprehended, transferred, sometimes through secret prisons and black cites, and handed over to foreign regimes like Egypt and Morocco. Sometimes this involved torture. Maher Arar, for example, was a Canadian citizen later determined to be innocent, captured in New York and sent to Syria where he was tortured in brutal ways. See this piece in the New Yorker chroniciling other such horror stories.
Obama’s criticism of renditioning, along with his general criticism of the Bush administration’s violations of habeas corpus, was one of his most serious indictments of the war on terrorism as managed by the Republicans.
Now the New York Times reports that “[t]he Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but will monitor their treatment to insure they are not tortured.”
How will they monitor such treatment? The administration “would give the State Department a larger role in assuring that transferred detainees would not be abused.” This is the State Department headed by Hillary Clinton — the same politician whom Ann Coulter had said she’d vote for over John McCain because Clinton was more pro-torture!
The Times goes on to report:
“It is extremely disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration practice of relying on diplomatic assurances, which have been proven completely ineffective in preventing torture,” said Amrit Singh of the American Civil Liberties Union, who tracked rendition cases under President George W. Bush.
She cited the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian sent in 2002 by the United States to Syria, which offered assurances against torture but beat Mr. Arar with electrical cable anyway.a new administrative interrogation unit, to be housed within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which will oversee the interrogations of top terror suspects using largely non-coercive techniques approved by the administration earlier this year.”
Filed under: 1984, Barack Obama, Big Brother, Communism, Control Grid, DHS, DOJ, Dictatorship, Empire, FBI, Fascism, Hitler, Homeland Security, Military, Military Industrial Complex, Nazi, Neolibs, Oppression, Police State, Surveillance, War On Terror, americorps, boy scouts, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, florida, gestapo, hitler youth, informant, informant program, militarization, nanny state, nazi youth, neocons, obama, obama youth corps, orwell, securecorps, spy force, stasi, stasi tactics, truth movement, u.s. constitution, u.s. military, u.s. soldiers, u.s. troops, urban warfare, youth brigade, youth brigades | Tags: Citizen Observers, Citizen Observers program, cops, Matthew Falconer, national civilian security force, Robert Gellately, universal civil defense
Florida Candidate For Mayor Wants 1,000-Strong Youth Spy Force
Falconer proposes swarms of citizen informers casing neighborhoods looking for suspicious behavior
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
August 26, 2009
A frontrunner to become Mayor of Orange County Florida proposes to combat crime in the area by creating a 1,000 person strong spy force who would cruise around neighborhoods on bikes reporting suspicious behavior to uniformed supervisors, a creepy program with dark undertones of the Hitler Youth program of 1930’s Nazi Germany.
Matthew Falconer, who professes to be a Libertarian, has been handing out a business card to potential voters outlining his platform.
On the back of the card, Falconer outlines his intention to, “Improve public safety by putting 1,000 additional observers on patrol in your neighborhood.”
Falconer’s website provides more detail as to what exactly this new program will entail.
My solution is to innovate. I call for the implementation of my “COPs” program (Citizen Observers). This program will put 1000 young people on bicycles with radios patrolling our neighborhoods keeping our citizens safe. My mission is to prevent crime and move away from the responsive method of public safety in Orange County. The observers will ride through specific areas, seek out criminal behavior, and report events to a uniformed supervisor. They will also talk with residents to find out who is committing the crimes in the area and attempt to gather information to solve existing crimes.
Falconer’s website states that the “public safety personnel” will receive just $10 dollars an hour, meaning the cost of the entire program will amount to no more than $2.5 million dollars a year.
Falconer’s intention to “move away from the responsive method to public safety” and instead have poorly trained amateur teenage spies watching their neighbors and actively seeking out suspicious behavior with seemingly little accountability whatsoever sets a dangerous precedent. Even if the program has genuine intentions behind it, the potential for members of the 1,000 strong spy force to abuse their power to settle scores with neighbors they don’t like is clearly a possibility, which is exactly what has happened historically when citizens are afforded the power to inform on each other.
Falconer’s proposal is clearly anti-American and unconstitutional. Though some may argue that vigilantes are a good thing in an age of growing corruption and police brutality, the fact is that vigilantes are traditionally responsive to crime and act as watchmen, they do not spy on the innocent and actively seek out potential criminal behavior, as Falconer’s program outlines.
Fears about the creation of an East German-style Stasi outfit that would keep an eye on Americans were raised in July of last year when President Barack Obama, during a speech on the campaign trail, promised a “national civilian security force” that would be just as powerful as the U.S. military.
As we have documented, informant programs that encourage Americans to spy on each other are already in operation across the country in a number of different guises.
The legacy of training Americans to spy on each other in the name of “safety” has its origins in Operation TIPS, which was supposedly nixed by Congress, a DOJ, FBI, DHS and FEMA coordinated program that would have recruited one in twenty-four Americans as domestic informants, a higher percentage than was used by the Stasi in Communist East Germany.
Government funding was cut after an outcry but private funding continues and the same program was introduced under a number of sub-divisions including AmeriCorps, SecureCorps and the Highway Watch program.
Similar programs being run bother privately and under government auspices are increasingly beginning to mirror the citizen denunciation campaigns that became prominent in Nazi Germany.
One common misconception about Nazi Germany was that the police state was solely a creation of the authorities and that the citizens were merely victims. On the contrary, Gestapo files show that 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information provided from denunciations by “ordinary” Germans.
“There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors,” wrote Robert Gellately of Florida State University.
You Tube user Austin White makes his feelings about Falconer’s proposal clear in the clip below.
Obama Calls For National Civilian Stasi TSA may hand cash rewards to tipsters about crimes or security violations
Filed under: 9/11 Truth, Afghanistan, Coup, Iran, Jundullah, Pakistan, State Sponsored Terrorism, Tehran, War On Terror, alqaeda, fasle flag, inside job, proxy war, sunni, truth movement | Tags: Sistan-Baluchestan, Zahedan
Top Sunni rebel on Iran death row says US ordered attacks
AFP
August 26, 2009
ZAHEDAN: A top Sunni rebel who is awaiting execution in Iran said on Tuesday that his militant group received orders from the United States to launch terror attacks in the Islamic republic.
Abdolhamid Rigi, brother of shadowy Jundallah (Soldiers of God) group leader Abdolmalek Rigi, told reporters his brother was an Al-Qaeda point man in Iran six years ago but that later the group broke off ties with him.
‘The United States created and supported Jundallah and we received orders from them,’ Rigi said in Iran’s restive southeastern city of Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan.
‘They (US officials) told us whom to shoot and whom not to. All orders came from them. They told us that they would provide us with everything we need like money and equipment.’
Filed under: 1984, 1st amendment, 4th amendment, Airport Security, Big Brother, CBP, Control Grid, DHS, Homeland Security, Oppression, Police State, Surveillance, US Constitution, War On Terror, civil liberties, civil rights, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, nanny state, orwell, right to privacy, us customs
ACLU Sues Homeland Security over Laptop Searches
Chloe Albanesius
PC Mag.com
August 27, 2009
The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday sued the Department of Homeland Security in an effort to uncover documents related to laptop searches at the border.
“The ACLU believes that suspicionless searches of laptops violate the First and Fourth Amendments,” the group wrote in the suit, filed in a New York District Court.
In July 2008, the Customs and Border Protection agency within DHS published formal guidelines for laptop border searches that gave CBP officials permission to search laptops and electronic devices at the border. Court cases on the topic have generally found that citizens should have diminished expectations of privacy when re-entering the country because the U.S. has a right to protect itself and control what crosses its borders.
Critics of the policy claim that laptop searches are an invasion of privacy – a personal computer holds a lot more information than a suitcase full of clothes or briefcase full of paperwork. What’s to stop CBP from copying the contents of your computer and keeping it on file indefinitely, they have argued.
