“A laptop containing the unencrypted security data for 33,000 travelers using the Clear system was stolen at San Francisco International Airport on July 26, according to CBS5 Television. The Clear system allows travelers who register and pay a $100.00 annual fee to speed through airport security by using a smart card at special kiosks in some airports. TSA has suspended new registrations in the system, which is run by a private contractor, Verified Identity Pass, Inc., a subsidiary of GE. The laptop was apparently stolen from a locked office at SFO. The company has now decided that it might be a good idea to encrypt the data in their systems. They are in the process of notifying customers that all of their personal data, including name, address, SSi number, passport number, date of birth, etc. has been compromised.
Talk about turning a wilfully blind eye: there are armed troops on the streets of Italy, a major EU country, today and not one single UK newspaper has it as a front page story, at least not in their online editions.
It’s a canard of the liberal left in the USA that the country is on the verge of fascism, but it’s been 8 years now and an observer might reasonably ask, “When do they stop teetering on the verge and tip right over the cliff?”
Police Raid Berwyn Heights Mayor’s Home, Kill His 2 Dogs
By Aaron C. Davis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; Page B01
A police SWAT team raided the home of the mayor in the Prince George’s County town of Berwyn Heights on Tuesday, shooting and killing his two dogs, after he brought in a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been delivered to his doorstep, police said.
Yes. Delivered by undercover cops.
Mayor Cheye Calvo was not arrested in the raid, which was carried out about 7 p.m. by the Sheriff’s Office SWAT team and county police narcotics officers. Prince George’s police spokesman Henry Tippett said yesterday that all the residents of the house — Calvo, his wife and his mother-in-law — are “persons of interest” in the case.
The package was addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, said law enforcement officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
Tippett said police are working to determine for whom the drugs were meant.
Calvo said yesterday that he did not know how the drugs wound up on his doorstep. He works part time as the mayor and serves as director of expansion for the SEED Foundation, a well-known national nonprofit group that runs urban public boarding schools.
“My government blew through my doors and killed my dogs,” Calvo said. “They thought we were drug dealers, and we were treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we weren’t.”
Calvo described a chaotic scene, in which he — wearing only underwear and socks — and his mother-in-law were handcuffed and interrogated for hours. They were surrounded by the dogs’ carcasses and pools of the dogs’ blood, Calvo said.
The dogs were pets, labradors to be precise, hardly the most agressive of animals, and they were running away from paramilitaries invading their space. They weren’t shot because they were a threat, but purely to terrify and intimidate the mayor and his family.
These are classic School of The Americas terror tactics and exactly the kind of thing that was done in Chile, Argentina or any number of Central American puppet states to intimidate and harass elected officials who might threaten the military or police with accountability for their political and financial misdeeds.
Prince George’s County has a reputation for brutal, dirty cops but it’s hardly alone in that. It appears that America’s police and security forces have been turned into a unaccountable collection of virtually private paramilitaries, weapons to be used by the corrupt rich against the very people that are paying for that corruption.
When heavily armed police trained to be amoral, murderous thugs are then given free rein to profit from bribery and the ludicrous ‘war on drugs’, how then can anyone we be surprised when they use those same weapons to stop anything and anyone that might cut into those profits? It’s not as though anyone in government gives a damn that the US is way over that fascist cliff and accelerating. In the dying days of the GOP it’s everybody for themselves and the devil take the hindmost. If I was an as yet uncorrupted local politician I’d be buying myself a shotgun or two. Or several.
Atrios makes a very interesting point re the news that the US Army microbiologist suspected by the FBI of the Anthrax attacks has (conveniently for all concerned) committed suicide – remember all those US media types buying ciprofloxacin boasting they’d had a warning from a senior government source?
Remember also the odd and mostly forgotten fact that Bush, Cheney and senior US administration figures were given ciprofloxacin as a phrophylactic against anthrax a full month before the anthrax attacks happened, yet U.S. Postal Service workers from DC’s Brentwood Postal Facility were denied antibiotic treatment even after it was clear that their workplace had been contaminated.
The White House has since refused to respond to requests for information or even lawsuits as to why they appear to have had foreknowledge that the attacks would happen. Atrios’ point about the warnings to Richard Cohen and others only buttresses suspicions that there’s a hell of a lot more to this than meets the eye.
But you know how it is, end of an administration, loose ends to be tidied away… Like I said, sometimes suicide can be very convenient.
Once you get over the resemblance of The Right Honourable David Wright Miliband MP to Star Trek’s Commander Data he would on the face of it appear to have all the necessary qualities to be a model New Labour leader, not least because of the blood he has on his hands; he voted very strongly for the Iraq war and he voted strongly against investigating the Iraq war, despite his later protestations of ambivalence.
Miliband went straight from Oxford into a thinktank, to becoming a well paid special adviser, to being parachuted into Parliament via a rotten borough safe seat. You see? Perfect. He’s our very own real life Pitt The Very Very Younger.
But this Minister of The Crown, responsible for foreign policy, didn’t even know until corrected by a civil servant that the government whose interests he represents abroad had given a knighthood to Sir Robert Mugabe. See for yourself on BBC’s Question Time:
(Mind you, former Tory minister Douglas Hurd hardly comes off much better, but he is ancient).
Want more? To show how unqualified Miliband is, when he got the job he had to ask the public for advice he’s so bereft of knowledge and ideas.
Today we learn that despite Miliband’s myriad public assurances, the UK has been proved complicit in the dissapearance and torture of people to Diego Garcia. He was duped, he says:
Miliband ‘duped by US’ on rendition
24 minutes ago
David Miliband is facing fresh claims that the US imprisoned terror suspects on British territory.
Campaigners said the Foreign Secretary allowed himself to be “duped by the US on a colossal scale” following new claims of interrogation on Diego Garcia, a UK-controlled island in the Indian Ocean.
A former senior American official told Time magazine that in 2002 and possibly 2003, the US imprisoned and interrogated at least one terrorist suspect on the island.
Mr Miliband has repeatedly denied claims the US has detained terror suspects on British territory.
But the anonymous source, described as a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings, told Time a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said “high-value prisoners” had been held and questioned on the island.
The official also claimed the US may have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia’s territorial waters.
And yet, somewhere here lie a few questions that may deserve to be raised. As Foreign Secretary, for instance, was it right for Mr Miliband to place his private life ahead of his public role in such a high-profile visitation? Would he have delayed the transatlantic trip by just a couple of days had the guest been the head of a less translucently repugnant regime than Saudi Arabia’s? Was he, in other words, using Jacob’s arrival as an excuse to avoid greasing the wheels of arms trading of a kind he might once, in the mythic New Labour era of “ethical foreign policy”, have openly described as stomach-turningly hypocritical?
If so, Mr Miliband sets himself a challenging precedent. Every time one of the world’s unlovelier tyrants pops along, he will have to arrange another adoption. Admittedly this is easier in the US, where babies can be picked up by citizens almost as easily as an automatic rifle from WalMart. Even so, should Assad of Syria reprise his 2002 jaunt, Mr Miliband will need to return to the States to add Abraham (I just love his commitment to the tripartite Jewish patriarchy; those shared values with the Saudis yet again!) to Isaac and Jacob.
He’s “very flattered” to be a gay icon. His blog, mainly devoted to the glories of you guessed it, David Miliband, costs the taxpayers 40K a year. That’s about 50p per visitor. (For contrast this blog’s costs are pretty much nil.)
This is not a man with an overdeveloped sense of modesty. Miliband is New Labour made flesh – well-off, overentitled, underqualified, utterly blind to his own hypocrisy. He’s another who’s convinced himself that his personal ambition is actually zeal for the public good and not just a lust for power for it’s own sake.
But now this glorified work-experience boy, not content with having been promoted way, way above his level of competence, has got the gall to think he can walk into No.10 as PM, as if the imposition of the unelected and useless Gordon Brown wasn’t bad enough already.
The reading public’s uniformly derisive reaction to this notion can be seen in the comments to his flag-planting article in the Guardian this week; the nation, or at least the Guardian reading bits, are as one on Miliband. A representative sample:
alisdaircameron
Jul 29 08, 9:53pm
Davey-wavey, you’re wrong (again).
New Labour doesn’t need to make its case afresh, or present its policies in a new light, with new packaging and sales pitch.
The public actually know your case and your policies perfectly and only too well, and utterly dislike them and your whole apparatus and outlook which fatally combine arrogance, incompetence, authoritarianism and a failure to grasp what goes on in ordinary, real people’s lives.
We’ve listened to your case ad nauseam and understand it, better than you do, and can see it for the tommy-rot it is. Have you listened? No, and no number of rigged ‘consultations’ will change this, as you are all too convinced of your rightness to realise what a catastrophic course you have plotted.
None of your party apparatchiks have done real work, but simply continued your student politics into a career, inflicting your shallow glibs idea experiments on the populace to disastrous effect, and all you can say is 2We are right, the experiment will work this time. It must, because we’re so clver”.
I’m sorry, “the project” has failed, and as it’s run its course it destroyed a once-noble party and completely betrayed all the masses who wanted something other than rehashed Thatcherism. You’ve screwed centre and centre-left politics in the UK for decades.
Go NOW, and thank your lucky stars that there aren’t (yet) baying mobs to string you up from lamp posts.
Quite.
There’s only one thing the nation has to say to Miliband – DO NOT WANT.
