War on Terror – Page 20

Arbeid Macht Freiheit

Published on October 2, 20073 Comments

Corrupt Bush crony corporation ~~Mercenaries R Us~~ Blackwater International and their head honcho Erik Prince are in the Senate spotlight at the moment and the media is finally catching up with what bloggers have been saying about them since the invasion – not that bloggers’ll get any credit.

But you only had to look at their bloody logo to see what they are, as Gaylord Sundheim graphically points out at Inhuman Interest:

Brownshirts, 21st Century-style

I can tell you this:: I’m not even a liberal, and Blackwater is about as fucking sketchy as sketchy can be.

And someone working there knows their fascist symbolism, guaran-damn-tee you. See below:

Can you guess which logo is Blackwater’s? *

For an extra jolt of distinctly teutonic imagery such as Himmler might have admired, check out the Wayback Machine’s file on Blackwater associate company Greystone Ltd. Their original brochure is a treat, too.

Oh, and Erik Prince, the far-right Christian billionaire behind the whole Blackwater/Greystone deal has been associated with the Bush family for years in some way.

I’m sure Dubya’s granddaddy Prescott would approve.

How very coincidental that Erik Prince is also closely associated with the far-right supporting Freiheit Foundation:

While Prince’s family has contributed greatly to religious right groups, Prince’s foundation has primarily funded conservative Catholic or evangelical organizations that do not have clear ties to the religious right. A major exception is the Freiheit Foundation’s $500,000 grant to ex-Watergate felon Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, an evangelical ministry operating within the United States’ prison system and receiving financial backing from a variety of religious right funders.

[…]

Prince has also provided $195,000 to the Institute for World Politics, a graduate school in Washington DC offering training in “statecraft” by examining diplomacy, military strategy, the formation of opinion, and other such topics taught by former government officials from the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, and other such agencies as well as private institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute. Like the American Enterprise Institute, the Institute for World Politics promotes a foreign policy in line with that of the Bush administration—a policy that has functioned to help Blackwater earn government contracts and to increase Prince’s own fortune.

*It’s the bear claw. Of course it could just represent Prince’s big love of doughnuts…

OOPS NEARLY FORGOT:

Blackwater have just been awarded the contract for US domestic drug enforcement. Be afraid.

“There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”

Published on October 1, 20072 Comments

San Diego’s Republican mayor speaks surprisingly, and movingly, in support of gay marriage:

If that’s not a turnabout eniough, the Moustache of Understanding himself, millionaire economic columnist and pundit Tom Friedman, has finally spoken out against Guantanamo and the US’ implementation of the War on Terror. I get the impression he’s seen or heard or been told something that made the blinkers fall off.

9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.

It is not that I thought we had new enemies that day and now I don’t. Yes, in the wake of 9/11, we need new precautions, new barriers. But we also need our old habits and sense of openness. For me, the candidate of 9/12 is the one who will not only understand who our enemies are, but who we are.

Before 9/11, the world thought America’s slogan was: “Where anything is possible for anybody.” But that is not our global brand anymore. Our government has been exporting fear, not hope: “Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints.”

You may think Guantánamo Bay is a prison camp in Cuba for Al Qaeda terrorists. A lot of the world thinks it’s a place we send visitors who don’t give the right answers at immigration. I will not vote for any candidate who is not committed to dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans. Guantánamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.

I wonder what it was that affected him so much?

“Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, lies the shadow.”

Published on September 28, 2007

The shadow government shows forth and Cheney is summoned to council.

Whether this is a bad thing or a very very bad thing – well, that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?

An ultra-secret conservative group — so secret that members don’t even use the group’s name in communications — will feature Vice President Dick Cheney as a speaker at a meeting in Utah today.

“Cheney will address the fall meeting of the Council for National Policy, a group whose self-described mission is to promote ‘a free-enterprise system, a strong national defense and support for traditional Western values,” according to the Salt Lake City Tribune.

Founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the popular post-apocalyptic Christian-themed Left Behind books, the group holds confidential meetings three times a year attended by a small but powerful cadre of top conservatives.

[…]
We do not lobby Congress, support candidates, or issue public policy statements on controversial issues,” the group states on its website. Members “meet to share the best information available on national and world problems, know one another on a personal basis, and collaborate in achieving their shared goals.”

[…]

Cheney’s speech and other events of his trip, which coincides with a fundraising swing through West, is closed to the public and the press, according to the Tribune.

A secret speech to a secret society of far-right, religious nutjobs at public expense on public time. Why? He’s either going there to to rally support for his attack on Iran, get torn off a strip for not having yet triggered the apocalypse, or to plan the final coup.

Never has a heart attack been so overdue.

Training The Suburban Stasi

Published on September 28, 20072 Comments

From Mother Jones (via Jesus General) comes news that US Homeland Security is taking over high schools so that they can train their droids directly, with no pesky outside liberal influences like the Constitution interfering.

One of the commenters quotes Joseph Stalin – “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

Black Ops Jungle: The Academy of Military-Industrial-Complex Studies

News: Spy High
By Chris Colin

September/October 2007 Issue

Dedicated to everything from architecture to sports medicine, “career academies” claim to offer high school kids focus, relevancy, and solid job prospects. Now add a new kind of program to the list: homeland security high. In late August, Maryland’s Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.

The new school is funded and guided by a slew of federal, state, and local agencies, not to mention several defense firms. Officials say it will teach kids to understand the “new reality,” though they hasten to add that the school isn’t focused just on terrorism. School administrators, channeling Cheneyesque secrecy, refused to be interviewed for this story. But it’s no secret that the program is seen as a model for the rest of the country, with the Pentagon and other agencies watching closely.

Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or “homeland security science.” David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer “Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language.”

The school’s main goal is to get its grads jobs in the booming $24-billion-a-year homeland security industry. It’s certainly in the right location: Northeast Maryland has become a mecca for the military-industrial complex. The Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground is the county’s biggest employer, and all manner of defense contractors have set up shop nearby, including weapons maker Northrop Grumman.

However, it’s not clear how many Joppatowne grads will be on track to join the upper echelons of the intelligence community and how many will wind up as airport screeners. “We do want to encourage higher education,” Volrath says. “We also want to be realistic. Some of these defense contractors will have huge security needs, and the jobs won’t require four years of college.”

More…

Why bother with a high school at all? Why not just recruit members of the new GOPJugend straight from elementary schools? Shit, why even bother with that – how much education does actually it take to be a Bush loyalist asshole who spies on everyone they know and stripsearches and tasers people for fun?

I expect Michelle Malkins’ kids’ names are down for the first intake already.

Ein Volk, Ein Polizei, Ein National Applications Office.

Published on September 21, 2007

“The National Applications Office”.

Sounds an innocuous enough name, doesn’t it? But, according to Lindsay Bayerstein’s latest article at In These Times, like Dickens’ Circumlocution Office it’s merely a euphemism intended to hide any amount of skulduggery and underhandedness.

The NAO is a Bushco creation intended to promote, market and sell valuable information obtained by military spy satellites about us to private companies and civil law enforcement – and no-one in the Bush administration can say, or is willing to say, exactly what or who gives them the legal right to do so.

The National Applications Office, which is schedule to go live on October 1, is an office within the Department of Homeland Security.

The NAO will serve as a clearinghouse for spy satellite data for civil applications (science and the environment), homeland security, and law enforcement (national, state, and local).

The NAO is a massive expansion of the dissemination of intelligence to an entirely new group of clients. The program raises serious constitutional and civil liberties issues. Also, the DHS has said little about whether making this data available to thousands of people across the country might compromise sources and methods.

[…]

When DHS officials were called to testify before the House Committee on Homeland Security in early September, they admitted that many of their standard operating procedures hadn’t even been written down yet! The top DHS lawyer declined to testify at all.

Lindsay’s put her finger right on what’s so disturbing about this latest develeopment,

The Skynet aspect of all this is disturbing enough, as is the subterfuge and the end-run around accountability – but that’s SOP for this bunch. What’s important is the the continued blurring of the dividing line between business, private security, civil law enforcement and the military. Soon there will be no dividing line at all, there’ll just one big amorphous ‘security force’ ith sweeping and draconian powers.

These days if you were to line up an officer of each you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference: all have become little more than standard-issue paramilitaries and the government is pushing this militisation yet further. Even the Right is concerned.

I suppose this answers my question about what the Forest Service might need 700 tasers for. One security force, indivisible, with spy data for all…Bush may be stupid but he’s learned a lot from Argentina.

4. Consolidate power

Once a national security state has created a culture of fear and suppressed dissent, it may safely consolidate power, with minimal questioning by the media or challenges from dissident voices. In Argentina, power was consolidated in the military, which was given full control in the fight against “subversion.” There was no separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches – the military ran all three. There were no local or provincial elections either, and all local leaders were appointed by the dictatorship.

A key strategy of the Argentine dictatorship was to strip the judiciary of its powers. The National Commission for the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), a commission created by the first democratically elected government after the dictatorship, specifically cited the elimination of the writ of habeas corpus as a constitutional guarantee as part of the apparatus that allowed forced disappearances to continue.

Similarly, the Bush administration is trying to consolidate power in the Executive Branch. At the President’s request, Congress agreed to handover its war-making powers to the president first in Fall 2001 with the Authorization for Use of Military Force and next in Fall 2002 with the Iraq War Resolution. (8) The Department of Homeland Security was created to manage a variety of previously independent government agencies including: the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Coast Guard.

Remember that executive order Bush signed back in May? The one that enables him to take entire autocratic control of the US shoudl he declare it necessary in a ‘national emergency’, which he too gets to declare?

Not much point in being able to do that, if there’s a multiplicity of jurisdictions getting in the way of having your orders carried out. Better to bring it all under one big, convenient, dictatorial umbrella.