Empire Despotism Upon Us, Restore the Spirit of 1776 Liberty, Let's Create a Real Republic
The US Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) controversial "rendition" program was launched under US president Bill Clinton, a former US counter-terrorism agent has told a German newspaper.
President Bush secretly ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on the international communications of U.S. citizens in violation of the warrant requirement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, abominations.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.
One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn't win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.
The constitution is the last flimsy obstacle between Bush and absolute power. That is why the administration has persisted for nearly 4 years in its case against Jose Padilla. The Padilla case has nothing to do with Al Qaida, “dirty bombers” or terrorism. These are simply the empty diversions that conceal the administration’s real intention; to remove the final impediment to the supreme authority of the executive.
Washington - Deep in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.
In the late 1990s I was living in the Washington, D.C. metro area. The roaring '90s bull market was in full swing with stock prices shooting to greater heights each day and economic growth was booming. The news media never tired of reminding us how the "white hot" sales and productivity growth was evidence of a fabulous "New Economy" that would last forever.
Recent revelations that the National Security Agency has conducted broad surveillance of American citizens' emails and phone calls raise serious questions about the proper role of government in a free society. This is an important and healthy debate, one that too often goes ignored by Congress.
"A president, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be a leader of a free people."
Since citizens' constitutional protections do not sit atop the list of CIA priorities and its focus is abroad, it pays those protections little heed. In contrast, FBI personnel, for judicial and other reasons, are trained to observe those protections scrupulously and to avoid going beyond what the law permits. That accounts, in part, for why FBI agents at the Guantanamo detention facility judged it necessary to report the abuses they witnessed. Would they have acted so responsibly had they been part of a wider, more disparate environment in which the strict guidelines reflecting the FBI's ethos were not universally observed?
In a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration, a U.S. appeals court refused on Wednesday to transfer "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla from U.S. military custody to federal authorities in Florida until the Supreme Court considered his case.
The FBI badly botched a terrorism investigation in Florida and then falsified documents to cover up the error and retaliated against an FBI whistleblower who tried to expose the wrongdoing.
This is not a partisan issue between Democrats and Republicans; it's a president unilaterally overriding the Fourth Amendment, Congress and the Supreme Court. Unchecked presidential power has nothing to do with how much you either love or hate George W. Bush. You have to imagine this power in the hands of the person you most don't want to see as president, whether it be Dick Cheney or Hillary Rodham Clinton, Michael Moore or Ann Coulter.
A new, unproven Soviet satellite system had picked up a flash in Montana near a Minuteman II silo. Then another – five, all told.
THE MOST REMARKABLE THING ABOUT THE FOLLOWING LETTER is the person who wrote it. It wasn't composed by some troglodyte, some angry freedom Ghost who lives his whole life in daily opposition to the government. It wasn't written by an Agitator, accustomed to street-level confrontations with power.
It became official today; President Bush named himself King of the United States. Granted those of us who follow this administration have seen Bush act as if he was a king and not an elected representative for the past five years but finally today Bush all but came out and said it.
What is the duty of air marshals? It is to prevent terrorists from taking over an airplane. How can a man who is unarmed and not even on the airplane take it over? Alpizar, who suffered from manic-depression, got into a panic while returning from a missionary trip to Ecuador. He got up from his seat and bolted for the door, went out it, and was running down the jetway toward the terminal.
When a population has imposed upon them, or in the case of the US voting class, and to some extent, I am sad to say, also the US underclass, chooses totalitarian dictatorship as a form of government, these things are normal, routine, and simply a part of life. People who have more experience with life under such regimes take this sort of thing for granted, and live their lives accordingly. Unless they have the resources and the wherewithal to overthrow the regime and institute a new one, and even more importantly, unless the majority of the population has the will to do so, there is really no point in being outraged, or writing scathing editorials ( a venting outlet which is shrewdly permitted even in some of the most draconian states), or indignant huffing about laws and constitutions, which as noted above, are not relevant to the actions of cartels, warlords, or strongman figureheads.
Make no mistake about it. If the secular left, the cultural Marxists, succeed in robbing us of Christmas they won’t stop there. It won’t be long before we will no longer be free to worship as we please in our own churches and synagogues.
Americans were misled into the pre-emptive war in Iraq and after nearly three years the results show no improvements. It's time to leave.
The Christmas Truce, which occurred primarily between the British and German soldiers along the Western Front in December 1914, is an event the official histories of the "Great War" leave out, and the Orwellian historians hide from the public. Stanley Weintraub has broken through this barrier of silence and written a moving account of this significant event by compiling letters sent home from the front, as well as diaries of the soldiers involved. His book is entitled Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce. The book contains many pictures of the actual events showing the opposing forces mixing and celebrating together that first Christmas of the war. This remarkable story begins to unfold, according to Weintraub, on the morning of December 19, 1914:
AFP’s science and health correspondent Jack Phillips recently took a trip to Greenland, the world’s northernmost landmass, to see for himself whether stories about global warming that have been promoted in the mainstream are true or false. His report follows.
Now that we know that President Bush, through the misuse of secret executive orders, authorized the super-secret National Security Agency to monitor domestic phone and Internet communications without any involvement of the courts, it's time to recall Admiral Poindexter and his Total Information Awareness project.
The compromise version of the Patriot Act to which House and Senate conferees agreed last week and for which the House voted yesterday is an unforgivable assault on basic American values and core constitutional liberties. Unless amended in response to the courageous efforts of a few dozen senators from both parties, the new Patriot Act will continue to give federal agents the power to write their own search warrants – the statute’s newspeak terminology calls them "national security letters" – and serve them on a host of persons and entities that regularly gather and store sensitive, private information on virtually every American.
Nor will the proposed legislation fix the way national security letters (NSLs) are secretly employed to obtain business records on Americans. In addition to credit records and financial information, NSLs let the FBI obtain a list of all Web sites a person visits, a list of a person's e-mail and instant messaging correspondents and other subscriber records.
Organizers billed the Vermont Independence Convention of Oct. 28 as “the first statewide convention on secession in the United States since North Carolina voted to secede from the Union on May 20, 1861.” North Carolina, the final state to join the Confederacy, overcame its unionist scruples with some reluctance; by contrast, the 250 or so Vermonters gathered in Montpelier, that coziest of state capitals, gloried in the prospect of disunion.
Diversity causes nothing but trouble. Think about it. Do old people want to hang around young people? No. Do young people want to hang around old people? Generally they would rather take poison. Do liberals and conservatives want to get within rifle range of each other? No. Except conservatives, because they have rifles. Southerners and damyanks cordially detest each other, except after a few beers, when they stop being cordial. Urban folk and country folk loathe each other. Management and labor, Marine boneheads and army pukes, dogs and cats, on and on, don’t nobody much like nobody.
The irony is that a two-bit dictator in a six-bit country has provided American politicians with the opportunity to forever soil America's reputation. We are now considered by most of the world as a rogue nation. Thus Saddam, as he steps up to the gallows, can take perverse pleasure in the fact that he was the cause, though inadvertently, of great and lasting damage to the United States.
It's time to make more of our listeners and site visitors aware of how vile, psychotic terrorist enemies of Freedom, Liberty and the American way of life continue to try to damage our program and news service.
"The heart of this legislation is a strong standard for keeping pseudoephedrine products out of the hands of meth cooks," she said. "There were some who wanted to water down this legislation, but Senator Talent and I stood firm."
Former Republican Congressman and CIA official Bob Barr says that there is a danger recent developments describe a trend of America slipping into a totalitarian society and that the Bush administration are doing everything in their power to see that this happens.
Bush's contempt for the constitution as a restraint on rapacious state power was typical of many of the founding fathers. When Bush denounces the "piece of paper," particularly those troublesome first ten amendments, he is reflecting the views held by Madison and Hamilton and others who felt it more correct and useful to establish a strong and powerful central state and an even stronger executive. Jefferson, from his position overseas as the United States minister to France, pushed hard for the Bill of Rights and the idea of securing private property, and persons, from a hungry central state.
Freedom is not a public-policy option and it is not a plan. It is the end of politics itself. It is time for us to take that next step and call for precisely that. If we believe what Jefferson believed, and I think we should, it is time to speak less like managers of bureaucracies, and more like Moses.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
Google is systematically failing to list and link to articles that contain explosive information about the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, Al Qaeda, and U.S. political scandals. But Google is not alone in working closely to stifle Internet discourse. America On Line, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by barricades, toll booths, off-ramps that lead to dead ends, choke points, and security checks.
Half the nation now believes the war was a mistake and wants U.S. troop withdrawals to begin. But no patriot wants to see Iraq collapse into chaos and civil war, and everything for which 2,100 Americans died and 16,000 suffered washed down a sewer.
We cannot see how our beliefs are jeopardized by someone else celebrating their beliefs -- particularly if the celebrations are those consisting, at least in part, of love, family values, spirituality, and giving thought to the less fortunate.
A police state is emerging in the United States of America. Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies are usurping their powers in order to justifiably abuse them. Anyone who dares to oppose them, or stand up to resist their authority, is being detained or even killed. They are using the Masonic philosophical analogy where the “end justifies the means” in a tyrannical rule of law “for their own good.” The Latin phrase “Ordo Ab Chao” is a Masonic theory to make order out of chaos.
A frenzy of last-minute negotiations over the Patriot Act, conducted behind closed doors as a Dec. 31 expiration date nears, has yielded a four-year renewal of the law and no substantial reforms.
No one has done more to ensure the ultimate demise of the American middle class than Alan Greenspan.
Typically, when faced with a problem, the first thing Bush administration officials do is reach for their dictionaries to pretzel and torture words into whatever shape best suits them. Then they declare themselves simply to be following precedent (which turns out, of course, to be whatever they've wanted to do all along). In this way, in the famous torture memos that flowed from the White House Counsel's office, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, the meaning of "torture" was at one point in 2002 redefined into near nonexistence ("must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death") and then made dependent on the mind and intent of the torturer.
Congress is treating the deficit as a big joke, but surely most people aren't so stupid as to think that "deficit reduction" is really that.
The freedom to change one’s mind is a human right, and we can only celebrate when someone rejects moral error in favor of truth. For that reason, we can hail the crowd of intellectuals and politicians who are turning from their support of the War on Iraq toward skepticism and rejection. I’m thinking in particular of Reps. John Murtha and Norm Dicks, and other leading Democrats as well as lower-ranking Republicans who are inching toward the dissenting camp. They are not "surrendering to terrorists" as Bush’s mouthpiece said. They are starting to reject the terrorism of war in favor of a policy of peace.
Sobran asks how anyone could possibly understand history - "the Reformation without knowing what Catholics and Protestants were fighting about? How can you understand the full significance of the French and Russian revolutions without knowing their religious background and their consequences for religious life?" and notes, " Nearly all the great literature of the last millennium also presupposes a knowledge of the Bible... Mark Twain, himself was not a believer; but he would have been astonished at the idea that you could be literate without knowing the Bible."
Never has it been clearer how the military-industrial complex functions. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics and BAE Systems are mobilized behind DD(X) and against battleships. Congressional staffers, eyeing a future in the Pentagon or the armaments industry, know the way to future advancement is not to be pro-battleship.
The Transportation Security Administration has changed the rules of its airport-security system just in time to create extra hassle for the millions of busy holiday travelers. More travelers will be subjected to random pat-downs. Screeners will routinely grope the thighs of attractive women. Security officers, now trained in "behavior recognition," will identify travelers who seem nervous (imagine that, somebody running the airport-security gauntlet and appearing nervous) and pull them aside for bonus hassling.
Trustees of the George Orwell estate yesterday announced that they intend to sue the British government over copyright breeches relating to the George Orwell novel '1984', a novel about a futuristic police state.
We are in a new era of ex-presidents. Having been the most powerful leader in the world, accepting either defeat at the polls or the finality of a second term, we now have two former Democrat presidents, Clinton and Carter, who will not get off the world stage, nor restrain themselves from the criticism of the current president.
We the people are not going to lay down and take this flavor of tyranny. Oh, there will be those who quiver at the very thought of standing up for their rights, but there will always be cowards who want others to fight for their freedom. Mrs. Davis drew her line in the sand and so should the tens of millions of Americans in this country who claim they will fight for their rights. We must let our local, state and federal elected servants hear the roar of NO from coast to coast, border to border.
We at JPFO believe that the Bill of Rights must be protected in its entirety. As one avowed liberal proclaimed (while ordering dozens of our Gran'pa Jack Bill of Rights booklets!), "You can't separate the Bill of Rights and say, 'I want this part, but not that part''"
In these two cases, our government has violated every principle of constitutional law and criminal procedure that at one time made our criminal justice system something to be proud of. The Bill of Rights held no hope for these men. Only the write of habeas corpus-that last hope for the hopeless that holds the President to account for imprisoning someone-got then in the court house door.
"The best thing that can happen to both our countries is to have an orderly flow, a controlled flow, of migration to the United States," said Fox, adding that Mexicans "contribute enormously to the U.S. economy, to U.S. competitiveness."
These are weighty and momentous considerations that go far beyond the detainees at Guantánamo. . . .[This amendment] . . . takes away jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States. It is untenable and unthinkable and ought to be rejected.
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