…our civil liberties. The corporate state has used 9/11 in the same way the Nazi Party used the Reichstag Fire as a justification to strip away all of our most important Constitutional rights. Whether that is the right or the need of a court to issue a warrant before surveillance. Whether that is the right of a whistleblower to expose government crimes, including torture. We just saw the CIA official, Kiriakou, go to prison for 30 months. What he, purportedly, leaked to The New York Times, were war crimes.

And the interpretation of the Authorization to Use Military Force Act (AUMF) is giving the government the right, this is what this ‘White Paper’, that was leaked to NBC News was about giving the right to the Executive Branch to draw up kill lists, even if US citizens are on those kill lists.

So, this is a steady march forward, in terms of stripping away our most basic civil liberties. I would say the NDAA, this case, is the last in line of defence between what’s left of our anemic democracy and our transformation into a military state.

…to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens is back in federal court this week. On Wednesday, a group of academics, journalists, and activists will present oral arguments in court against a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, authorizing the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world without charge or trial.

I felt pride as an American. I thought, this is the American citizen that I fought for as a marine. This is a constitutional order, a rule of law, a judge, appointed by Obama, who’s willing to say that her boss was mistaken in claiming that this rule is compatible with our rule of law.
Well, as a law, it’s unprecedented, but as a practice what we’ve seen for the last 10 years is a systematic assault on the Constitution of the United States in every aspect in the aspects of the illegal surveillance, the warrantless surveillance, which was conducted against me 40 years ago by President Nixon and then led to his impeachment proceedings, but is now regarded as legal. That’s the way the law has changed. Efforts to assault me or kill me on the steps of the Capitol on May 3rd, 1972, a presidential hit squad of the kind that the president now takes pride in proclaiming that he runs all over the world.

On December 31st 2011, US President Barack Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA). The Act was passed in the House of Representatives on May 26, 2011 by a vote of 322 to 96. The Act was passed in the Senate on December 15, 2011 by a vote of 86 to 13. Coming up is an excerpt from the Act, the wording of which makes it legal to incarcerate United States citizens without recourse to any form of judicial process. Essentially these words say that if the government deems any person to have committed a “belligerent act” that person can be detained indefinitely without trial. For the purposes of defining what a “belligerent act” is. with respect to a US citizen, how does the government differentiate between an act of war against the United States vs a lawful protest against the government? Prior to this act, such a distinction would have to be decided in a court of law by a jury of a citizen’s peers. With the signing of the NDAA, the government is claiming the right to decide this unilaterally, without any judicial proceedings and no legal representation afforded to the accused.

Can the US Government now proclaim that the constitutionally protected act of protest against the government is a “belligerent act” and legally lock up those who participate in such a protest?

The provisions of the NDAA are blatantly unconstitutional. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits warrantless seizures of the person or property of US citizens. The Fifth Amendment Prohibits the depriving of US citizens of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” The Sixth Amendment includes the right to a “speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.”

These are the most basic, most essential protections of human liberty upon which the United States was founded. It would be no exaggeration to claim that the primary purpose of those who founded the United States was the creation of a nation where exactly these protections were guaranteed to all citizens. And with the signing of the NDAA, the present government of the United States has claimed the legal right to kill these constitutional protections.

“President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.

“There are laws on the books now that characterize who might be a terrorist: someone missing fingers on their hands is a suspect according to the department of justice. Someone who has guns, someone who has ammunition that is weatherproofed, someone who has more than seven days of food in their house can be considered a potential terrorist. If you are suspected because of these activities, do you want the government to have the ability to send you to Guantánamo Bay for indefinite detention?” – Rand Paul

Senator Lindsey Graham, who supports this bill, says quote “the Homeland is part of the battlefield and people can be held without trial whether an American citizen or not.”

I must tell you I was utterly appalled when I saw this legislation proposed. We didn’t learn about it until last night, because the committee hearings on it were done in secret, even though the Constitution requires that Congress do these things in public. And there were no actual hearings. Just a bunch of members of the Senate who got together and wrote this thing. And it basically says the President can arrest whoever he wants anywhere in the United States of America and keep them without charging them with a crime, without letting them see a lawyer, without bringing them to a judge for as long as he wants. How is that consistent with the Constitution?

Whenever you suspend due process, which in effect suspends the rule of law, you walk down a very dangerous path and you give authority to your government that it can then wield essentially without restraint. What worries me is it will end up creating categories of people who are then subject to arbitrary arrests. And that’s dangerous because we don’t know how those categories will be defined or interpreted in the future. All in all it’s a disaster and it’s something that should should be defeated.

Suppose the President decided one of his political opponents was an enemy of the state. He could make that person disappear. Sounds fanciful? Sounds crazy? But it’s true.

Under a program sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, police officers were trained to go door to door removing people from their homes with deadly force if necessary, escorting the people to school buses, and being delivered to a decontamination area, usually at a school or local church where the subjects will be hosed down, scrubbed down, given a series of vaccinations and held prisoner until they can be transferred to a more secure facility. The Department of Homeland Security has these programs embedded in the policing communities across the United States just waiting for orders to be given.

You don’t really need to round people up in FEMA camps if you can simply lock them down. I’ll give you one example. The city of Cambridge, I recently interviewed on my radio program a city council member from Cambridge who had given back money that was used to install video cameras. Federal money for video cameras at all the points of egress from Cambridge. And she said why do we need this, and the answer was, well in the event that we have to shut Cambridge down and keep people in, we need to know what the routes are out of the city so we can set up checkpoints and keep people from leaving.

The flu virus, or any type of biological threat, is the perfect cover for martial law and control. Because it’s something that makes everyone a potential threat. It makes everyone a potential carrier, everyone a potential “terrorist” carrying the terrorist virus. This helps us submit to tyranny, it helps us suspect our neighbors. It helps us see our government as our savior and the arbiter. And it divides the people against each other. Those “crazy people” as the CFR has said, that don’t want to take the shots verses the reasonable people that trust their government and understand that we’re supposed to roll up our sleeves when we’re given that order.

The crisis of September 11 saw a major shift in security and other legislation and has nearly singlehandedly brought about the end of privacy in the United States. USA Patriot Act 1 and 2 intruded on no less than 5 of the first 10 Bill of Rights. The John Warner Defense Act saw the end of Posse Comitatus. The Military Commissions Act saw the end of Habeas Corpus. And the REAL ID Act, attached to an emergency appropriations bill, passed with virtually no debate. Also passed during this time and attributed to the need for tighter security was the FISA Amendment Act which gave retroactive immunity to the major telecoms for their role in turning over massive amounts of cell and email communications to United States security agencies at their request. No warrant needed.

It’s not a stretch of the imagination. In fact it’s already beginning to happen where people are being given RFID chips, so that we can, you know, scan you. Now, they always try to present a good reason for doing that. Well, we’ll have your entire medical history. If you fall down unconscious, the doctors will know who you are, what drugs you’re allergic to, they’ll be able to treat you more efficiently because they have all this information. Well, the opposite is also true. If the government has all this information on you, they can also manipulate you by the use of that information. you won’t be allowed to get a job, you won’t be able to buy food, you won’t be allowed to perform any economic transactions unless you have the government RFID chip and are approved. This is one of the things that people have been worried about for a long time. The technology now exists.

Governments are notorious for creating panic to get public support for legislation and emergency measures that the population would not otherwise consider. The United States government is no different. Whether it concerns war with other nations, battling a disaster in our own country, or control over the population during natural or health emergencies, governments instill fear to coerce the population to give up their rights in order to cooperate. The mainstream media is complicit in exciting panic among the people as well. The media’s role during the H1N1 flu scare was clear. The plans are already in place to force the non-compliant public to cooperate. You can be removed from your home by force is necessary, mandatorily quarantined and vaccinated against your will. Your children can be removed from schools and taken to “safe” yet undisclosed locations until it is deemed safe for their return. This is all under the guise of protecting our nation. What has happened to our free country? Little by little we are losing our constitutional rights, yet most Americans are paying little or no attention. People do not understand that these egregious powers are not being proposed, they are already in place, ready for federal, state, or local officials to act upon during a state of emergency. You will not get a say. You will lose your freedom to speak out. You will lose your right to privacy as troops force their way into your home to search without a warrant. You will lose your right to be secure in your home, even if you have plenty of supplies and are prepared to stay. You will lose your right to be armed as troops go door to door, person to person, confiscating your legally owned firearms. You will see military in the streets of this country carrying out the will of an unrestrained government as they round up free U.S. citizens. Some state governments passed measures to forcibly quarantine residents, incarcerate those who refuse to be vaccinated, and to forcibly vaccinate your children. Legislation like this passed during the much hyped H1N1 flu outbreak.
Training has already occurred to carry out many of these measures, reminiscent of the forcing from their homes and the internment of U.S. citizens during WWII. All of this has already happened on U.S. soil. How will you be able to defend your family? How will you react when they cart your children off to an undisclosed location because the government thinks it can protect your children better than you? Will your families survival be up to you, or will it be up to an out of control government and its alphabet agencies, most of which have failed the American people over and over again? Are you going to blindly follow a government that has shown time and time again it has no respect for your constitutional rights? These rights are inalienable and cannot be taken, we cannot give them up, yet Congress and various administrations encroach on our rights all the time. Will you give up your family willingly? Will voluntarily become a captive of one of these quarantines or detention camps? What will you do? Will you go quietly?

Well we used internment camps here in the United States during World War II, and we interned Japanese Americans, or Americans I should say to be more correct, Americans of Japanese descent, and these people were cordoned off for the duration of the war. Background checks could have been done. They could have been released or cleared out of those facilities, but it was thought best because there was so much animosity towards the Japanese for the attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequent deaths of U.S. soldiers, that these people just be kept out of sight in one of their detention facilities.

Readiness Exercise 1984 was an armed forces exercise conducted on behalf of the United States federal government to test our military’s ability to detain large number of American citizens in case of civil unrest or national emergency. The military exercise anticipated civil disturbances, major demonstrations and strikes that would affect continuity of government.

One of the programs that got exposed during Iran Contra was Rex 84. Congressman Jack Brooks, in those hearings brought up the fact that in reality FEMA was a cover for a huge continuity of government program in case the American people ever rebelled, and that was the architecture of the blueprint for the illegitimate shadow government to fully take over the functions of the entire federal government, suspend the Constitution, suspend the Bill of Rights, and arrest whoever they wanted to, and that FEMA was going to control the camps that the people were going to be put into. And, FEMA would be the main governmental institution with different directors over every agency. And now when you watch FEMA on television, it’s always a Colonel or a general or an admiral in uniform who is over the different departments.

The martial law portions of Rex 84 were outlined in a 1982 memo, written by FEMA deputy John Brinkerhoff. Martial law was to be declared in the event of a national crisis, yet the plan did not define the term “national crisis”. The plan allowed FEMA to take control of both federal and state governments, appointing military commanders to replace duly elected officials. The plan also called for the rounding up of at least 21 million “American Negroes”, for delivery to various military bases converted into prison centers, also known as FEMA relocation camps. Why? Because at that time African Americans were classified as one of the largest threats to the continuity of the federal government. Who does the federal government consider the biggest threat these days?

The FBI’s counter intelligence program (COINTELPRO) was a series of covert, and often illegal programs conducted by the united States government, and aimed squarely at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. According to a Senate Select Committee Study, chaired by Senator Frank Church, and including such members as Phil Hart, Walter Mondale, and Barry Goldwater, the FBI’s motivation for conducting these programs was protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order. Targets included the Black Panther Party, the Ku Klux Klan, communists and socialist organizations, as well as nonviolent civil rights organizations, anti-war groups, and a broad range of organizations lumped together under the title “New Left” which included groups labeled for intensified attention, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Congress of Racial Equality.
Over the course of four presidential administrations, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, ordered FBI agents to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of these movements and their leaders. Speakers, teachers, and writers, even individual student demonstrators with no group affiliation were all fair game.

In October of 1999 the FBI released a report title Project Megiddo. The report was intended to alert U.S. law enforcement to new threats of domestic terrorism. The new FBI watch list now included citizens who support: Gun ownership rights, private property rights, home schooling, the U.S. Constitution. The list also included individuals who believe that U.S. elections are rigged, a new world order exists, and that American military bases will be used as concentration camps.

H.R. 5122 In 2006, the John Warner Defense Act, signed by President Bush, effectively nullified Posse Comitatus in the United States. The bill allows the President to station troops anywhere in America without consent of the governor or local authorities for the express purpose of “suppressing public disorder”.

If you ask a politician assigned to security matters today what he or she thinks about the surveillance techniques used to prevent crime, there’s a good chance that you’d be told about the benefits of closed circuit camera systems. You’d here convincing arguments about the additional safety in their vicinity because they act as a crime deterrent, Or you might here about the virtue of being able to track terrorists, by filing information about airline passengers, or by enforcing the use of biometric passports. Maybe you’d find out how trusted computing protects you from malicious software and viruses. Or how scanning emails and eavesdropping on phone calls helps the police find potential criminals of all kinds. It would probably all sound great, because the idea is that you should start thinking of these techniques as being the cream of the crop. But let’s face the not quite so obvious but nevertheless omnipresent downside of this. While public cameras may actually help these defined criminals, modern CCTV systems like the ones used in London, are even today able to lock onto any person the operators wish to track using automatic facial identification, thus enabling the police to create a detailed database of say all of your movements. The keeping of records about airline passengers flying to the U.S. and in addition the obligation for everyone to submit biometric passports, are supposed to help fight terrorism. But this also allows the secret services to gather explicit information about the nationality of every traveler. Explicit information such as your fingerprints, the color of your eyes, and a high resolution picture of your face. Information you would usually expect to be taken from suspected criminals.

Trusted computing promises to enhance security on your PC, by only allowing certain trustworthy software to run on your machine. What you’re not told is that the person who decides which software you can trust, and are therefore allowed to install on your PC, will certainly not be you. On the one hand, scanning emails and wiretapping emails for ominous keywords, could convict a few small time criminals, but on the other it allows all sorts of people involved in this monitoring process to retrieve all sorts of private information. Information you just might not want to share with the staff of your local police station.

These symptoms can all be taken as evidence of the slow but steady conversion of our western societies into police states. Our western societies, claiming to be liberal democracies, but our leaders try to enforce more and more pressive laws and instrumentalize public fear of terror to justify them.

Stop the big brother state.

The country that created EYEphones, has more than 300 million wireless users. And in the name of national security the U.S. Government will soon have a direct link to each and every hand held device.

Gathered at the scene of the September 11 terrorist attacks, federal and New York City officials joined the CEOs of the 4 largest wireless carriers, to announce the nations new tech tool. An alert system, enabling the president and government agencies to blast every American with text messages warning of terrorist threats, weather disasters, and kidnappings.

Now we have a system of mandatory and inescapable alerts through every cell phone in the land, in the event that the government decides something’s happening that we ought to know about. Now, just as the introduction of the Patriot Act came right after 9/11, so this new kind of technological invasion comes to us without any public discussion, right after the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. The use of fear for any kind of government that craves more control over peoples lives and thoughts, is that it makes people malleable; it makes them obedient. I mean you go to any airport today and you can see this in action, that people are meekly taking off their shoes, submitting to getting groped…

In December, the Department of Homeland Security began encouraging Americans to report suspicious activity to the country’s largest food retailer. Wal-Mart’s partnership with Washington has been accused of perpetrating a climate of panic, and subsequent need for more surveillance

Following the assassination of enemy #1, an American lawmaker called for increase in rail safety funding , and the creation of a no-ride list. As U.S. officials warn of more terror threats following Bin Laden’s death, many Americans remain concerned, while others are left wondering about the dangers of forsaking too much liberty for security.