Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, Aug 25th, 2010

A Report in TIME magazine details how it is now perfectly legal in nine states for the government to attach secret satellite tracking devices to your car and monitor you wherever you go, without a search warrant.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the report also details how The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which made the ruling, essentially suggests that privacy should be reserved for rich people only.

The law, which now applies in California and eight other Western states, stems from a case beginning in 2007 when federal agents of the DEA covertly attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle of an Oregon man they suspected of growing marijuana.

The vehicle was parked in the man’s driveway, yet judges ruled that he did not have any reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment because they driveway was “open to strangers” such as delivery people and neighborhood children.

This ruling transgresses long standing court rules that the area immediately surrounding a private property, known as the “curtilage,” should also be considered private.

Judges also ruled that there was no reasonable expectation that the government was not tracking the man’s movements.

All appeals against the court’s motion have failed.

One Ninth Circuit judge has spoken out against the ruling however, noting that it essentially suggests that privacy is limited to those who can afford to completely close off their property with hi-tech security features such as electric gates, fences and security booths to stop anyone, including the government, sneaking around.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski raised the point and added that “cultural elitism” is rife within the justice system:

“There’s been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there’s one kind of diversity that doesn’t exist,” he wrote. “No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter.”

“1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last,” Kozinski added, noting that “Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we’re living in Oceania.”

With a Justice Department on record suggesting that the Fourth Amendment does not apply after 9/11, and an intelligence apparatus guilty of widespread covert wiretapping of American citizens’ communications, one might suggest that we found ourselves living in such an Orwellian nightmare a long time ago, now it is simply being made official.

“…if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state – with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.” the TIME reporter and professional lawyer Adam Cohen writes, noting that due to differing decisions by courts in other districts, the issue is soon likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor at Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and regular contributor to Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000;_ylt=AtaAG7Al5H4OhlrNeiYxJ679xg8F;_ylu=X3oDMTM1YmVrZWpsBGFzc2V0A3RpbWUvMjAxMDA4MjUvMDg1OTkyMDEzMTUwMDAEY2NvZGUDbW9zdHBvcHVsYXIEY3BvcwM0BHBvcwM0BHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDdGhlZ292ZXJubWVu

http://infowars.net/articles/august2010/250810GPS.htm

This is classic double speak from the enemies of the United States such as the Clinton’s and entire Obama administration.  Anyone who would side with the illegals aliens instead of the United States citizens and uphold the constitutional will of the people need to be put into prison and if not Jefferson left us a solution in the Declaration of Independence for those who will not listen to reason.  I believe we are on the brink of a 2nd American revolution and I only pray that our troops and police will stand with the people and not with the hijacked government.  All people who do not see this truth is ignorant or will participants of the destruction of The United States.

Do not apologize for your feelings of betrayal or rage against a hijacked government who has committed repeated offenses to the people and the constitution.  These grievances must be addressed and if not we will drag them out of office.  We are in the right and they are the ones who are wrong and don;t ever feel bad or apologize for that.  God bless you all.

http://azstarnet.com/news/state-and-regional/aea822e0-9a6b-11df-9fe8-001cc4c002e0.html

Monday, July 19, 2010; 1:53 AM

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation’s security.

“There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that – not just for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], but for any individual, for the director of the CIA, for the secretary of defense – is a challenge,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.

“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.

“I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”

The result, he added, is that it’s impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. “Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,” Vines said. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”

The Post’s investigation is based on government documents and contracts, job descriptions, property records, corporate and social networking Web sites, additional records, and hundreds of interviews with intelligence, military and corporate officials and former officials. Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work for describing their concerns.

The Post’s online database of government organizations and private companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.

Today’s article describes the government’s role in this expanding enterprise. Tuesday’s article describes the government’s dependence on private contractors. Wednesday’s is a portrait of one Top Secret America community. On the Web, an extensive, searchable database built by The Post about Top Secret America is available at washingtonpost.com/topsecretamerica.

Defense Secretary Gates, in his interview with The Post, said that he does not believe the system has become too big to manage but that getting precise data is sometimes difficult. Singling out the growth of intelligence units in the Defense Department, he said he intends to review those programs for waste. “Nine years after 9/11, it makes a lot of sense to sort of take a look at this and say, ‘Okay, we’ve built tremendous capability, but do we have more than we need?’ ” he said.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last week, said he’s begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. “Particularly with these deficits, we’re going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that,” he said. “Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that.”

In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. “Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers,” he said.

Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know. “I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and there are processes in place to ensure the different intelligence capabilities are working together where they need to,” he said.

Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give a speech, he mused about The Post’s findings. “After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country,” he said. “The attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.”

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.

Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can’t conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Wal-Mart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.

Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.

In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn’t include the Air Force’s mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there’s a big “Welcome!” sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it’s in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.

Each day at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, workers review at least 5,000 pieces of terrorist-related data from intelligence agencies and keep an eye on world events. (Photo by: Melina Mara / The Washington Post)

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,” which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress decided to create an agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.

While that was the idea, Washington has its own ways.

The first problem was that the law passed by Congress did not give the director clear legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters, which meant he wouldn’t have power over the individual agencies he was supposed to control.

The second problem: Even before the first director, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National Counterterrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.

And then came a problem that continues to this day, which has to do with the ODNI’s rapid expansion.

When it opened in the spring of 2005, Negroponte’s office was all of 11 people stuffed into a secure vault with closet-size rooms a block from the White House. A year later, the budding agency moved to two floors of another building. In April 2008, it moved into its huge permanent home, Liberty Crossing.

Today, many officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the ODNI is in charge of. To be sure, the ODNI has made some progress, especially in intelligence-sharing, information technology and budget reform. The DNI and his managers hold interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration. The last director, Blair, doggedly pursued such nitty-gritty issues as procurement reform, compatible computer networks, tradecraft standards and collegiality.

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system’s ability to analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

The practical effect of this unwieldiness is visible, on a much smaller scale, in the office of Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter spends much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another.

There is a long explanation for why these databases are still not connected, and it amounts to this: It’s too hard, and some agency heads don’t really want to give up the systems they have. But there’s some progress: “All my e-mail on one computer now,” Leiter says. “That’s a big deal.”

To get another view of how sprawling Top Secret America has become, just head west on the toll road toward Dulles International Airport.

As a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million give way to the military intelligence giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, find the off-ramp and turn left. Those two shimmering-blue five-story ice cubes belong to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and mapping data of the Earth’s geography. A small sign obscured by a boxwood hedge says so.

Across the street, in the chocolate-brown blocks, is Carahsoft, an intelligence agency contractor specializing in mapping, speech analysis and data harvesting. Nearby is the government’s Underground Facility Analysis Center. It identifies overseas underground command centers associated with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups, and advises the military on how to destroy them.

Clusters of top-secret work exist throughout the country, but the Washington region is the capital of Top Secret America.

About half of the post-9/11 enterprise is anchored in an arc stretching from Leesburg south to Quantico, back north through Washington and curving northeast to Linthicum, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Many buildings sit within off-limits government compounds or military bases.

Others occupy business parks or are intermingled with neighborhoods, schools and shopping centers and go unnoticed by most people who live or play nearby.

Many of the newest buildings are not just utilitarian offices but also edifices “on the order of the pyramids,” in the words of one senior military intelligence officer.

Not far from the Dulles Toll Road, the CIA has expanded into two buildings that will increase the agency’s office space by one-third. To the south, Springfield is becoming home to the new $1.8 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters, which will be the fourth-largest federal building in the area and home to 8,500 employees. Economic stimulus money is paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this kind of federal construction across the region.

Construction for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Springfield (Photo by: Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)

It’s not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this expansion, it’s also what is inside: banks of television monitors. “Escort-required” badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. “In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF,” said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. “They’ve got the penis envy thing going. You can’t be a big boy unless you’re a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF.”

SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to. Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

“You can’t find a four-star general without a security detail,” said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. “Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, ‘If he has one, then I have to have one.’ It’s become a status symbol.”

Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.

At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash, turning them into clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.

Their work is greatly enhanced by computers that sort through and categorize data. But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and half the analysts are relatively inexperienced, having been hired in the past several years, said a senior ODNI official. Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate headquarters.

When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries – Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn’t know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. “Like a zombie, it keeps on living” is how one official describes the sites.

The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation. “It’s the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens, and they want to rush to cover it,” said Richard H. Immerman, who was the ODNI’s assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards until early 2009. “I saw tremendous overlap.”

Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington’s bureaucracy. “Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn’t gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?” he said. “Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn’t produce the same thing?”

He’s hardly the only one irritated. In a secure office in Washington, a senior intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration. Seated at his computer, he began scrolling through some of the classified information he is expected to read every day: CIA World Intelligence Review, WIRe-CIA, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning Forecast, IC Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch, NCTC Spotlight . . .

It’s too much, he complained. The inbox on his desk was full, too. He threw up his arms, picked up a thick, glossy intelligence report and waved it around, yelling.

“Jesus! Why does it take so long to produce?”

“Why does it have to be so bulky?”

“Why isn’t it online?”

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don’t dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency’s analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.

A new Defense Department office complex goes up in Alexandria. (Photo by: Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)

The ODNI’s analysis office knows this is a problem. Yet its solution was another publication, this one a daily online newspaper, Intelligence Today. Every day, a staff of 22 culls more than two dozen agencies’ reports and 63 Web sites, selects the best information and packages it by originality, topic and region.

Analysis is not the only area where serious overlap appears to be gumming up the national security machinery and blurring the lines of responsibility.

Within the Defense Department alone, 18 commands and agencies conduct information operations, which aspire to manage foreign audiences’ perceptions of U.S. policy and military activities overseas.

And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.

“Frankly, it hasn’t been brought together in a unified approach,” CIA Director Panetta said of the many agencies now involved in cyber-warfare.

“Cyber is tremendously difficult” to coordinate, said Benjamin A. Powell, who served as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the government last year. “Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf.” Why? “Because it’s funded, it’s hot and it’s sexy.”

Last fall, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly opened fire at Fort Hood, Tex., killing 13 people and wounding 30. In the days after the shootings, information emerged about Hasan’s increasingly strange behavior at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he had trained as a psychiatrist and warned commanders that they should allow Muslims to leave the Army or risk “adverse events.” He had also exchanged e-mails with a well-known radical cleric in Yemen being monitored by U.S. intelligence.

But none of this reached the one organization charged with handling counterintelligence investigations within the Army. Just 25 miles up the road from Walter Reed, the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group had been doing little to search the ranks for potential threats. Instead, the 902’s commander had decided to turn the unit’s attention to assessing general terrorist affiliations in the United States, even though the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI’s 106 Joint Terrorism Task Forces were already doing this work in great depth.

The 902nd, working on a program the commander named RITA, for Radical Islamic Threat to the Army, had quietly been gathering information on Hezbollah, Iranian Republican Guard and al-Qaeda student organizations in the United States. The assessment “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already,” said the Army’s senior counterintelligence officer at the Pentagon.

Secrecy and lack of coordination have allowed organizations, such as the 902nd in this case, to work on issues others were already tackling rather than take on the much more challenging job of trying to identify potential jihadist sympathizers within the Army itself.

Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness in other ways, say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers.

These are called Special Access Programs – or SAPs – and the Pentagon’s list of code names for them runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means that very few people have a complete sense of what’s going on.

“There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs – that’s God,” said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.

Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. “What do you mean you can’t tell me? I pay for the program,” he recalled saying in a heated exchange.

Another senior intelligence official with wide access to many programs said that secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective projects. “I think the secretary of defense ought to direct a look at every single thing to see if it still has value,” he said. “The DNI ought to do something similar.”

The ODNI hasn’t done that yet. The best it can do at the moment is maintain a database of the names of the most sensitive programs in the intelligence community. But the database does not include many important and relevant Pentagon projects.

Because so much is classified, illustrations of what goes on every day in Top Secret America can be hard to ferret out. But every so often, examples emerge. A recent one shows the post-9/11 system at its best and its worst.

Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was at full throttle when word emerged that something was seriously amiss inside Yemen. In response, President Obama signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos to that country to target and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate.

In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the United States.

That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within the 5,000 pieces of general terrorist-related data that are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further.

As military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped up their effort. The flood of information into the NCTC became a torrent.

Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside Yemen.

These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred.

“There are so many people involved here,” NCTC Director Leiter told Congress.

“Everyone had the dots to connect,” DNI Blair explained to the lawmakers. “But I hadn’t made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility.”

And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasn’t the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him. “We didn’t follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence,” White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan explained afterward. “Because no one intelligence entity, or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation.”

Blair acknowledged the problem. His solution: Create yet another team to run down every important lead. But he also told Congress he needed more money and more analysts to prevent another mistake.

More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more – more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.

The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can’t find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded.

More building, more expansion of offices continues across the country. A $1.7 billion NSA data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section.

Just north of Charlottesville, the new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure campus.

Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon, a major landmark in the alternative geography of Top Secret America and four times as big as Liberty Crossing.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/tsa/static/articles/hidden-world.html

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, June 7, 2010

Former NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg member Willy Claes has confounded claims by debunkers that the secret organization which met in Sitges Spain over the last few days does not set policy, admitting during a Belgian radio interview that Bilderberg attendees are mandated to implement decisions that are formulated during the annual conference of power brokers.

In a radio interview reported on by the Belgian news website www.zonnewind.be, Claes told host Koen Fillet that Bilderberg does indeed decide policy for the coming year. Claes would certainly be in a position to know, being a two-time Bilderberg attendee as well as the eighth Secretary General of NATO from 1994 until 1995.

Claes said that Bilderberg guests are normally given around 10 minutes of talk time, after which a report is compiled of their presentation.

“The participants are then obviously considered to use this report in setting their policies in the environments in which they affect,” stated Claes, according to the translated text.

The host asked Claes to repeat this astounding admission, before Claes went on to explain that no two guest are allowed to sit next to each other more than once at Bilderberg, to enable the maximum exchange of views on important subjects.

A Dutch-speaking reader sent us the article and confirms that the translation is accurate. This represents a solid confirmation of what we already knew through witnessing Bilderberg’s leaked agenda later play out in the real world time after time – that the elitist organization does verbally set global policy in a completely undemocratic and illegal manner.

However, despite Claes, who personally attended the 1994 Bilderberg meeting in Helsinki when he was Belgium’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, confirming the obvious that Bilderberg does manufacture a consensus amongst its participants, which is then implemented as policy in the real world, during the past few days numerous debunkers have claimed that Bilderberg is just a talking shop that has no impact on the global stage.

Iain Hollingshead of the London Telegraph wrote a sophomoric piece in which he dismissed Bilderberg as “a group of willy-waggling old men comparing their security details and dreaming of past glories,” which is a complete misnomer seeing as Bilderberg is routinely attended by active Presidents and Prime Ministers very much in power and very much in a position to have an impact on current events, such as Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who attended this year’s conference with his country on the verge of becoming the next Greece.

Hollingshead claims that because the group is becoming more well known, its allure is on the wane, but fails to mention that this is because of the fine work of activists and real journalists who have spent decades trying to get the castrated corporate media to report on the event while people like Hollingshead either made childish jokes about the whole issue or even denied the very existence of Bilderberg.

One such “skeptic” is Chip Berlet, who works for a group called the Political Research Associates, which is funded in part by the Ford Foundation, founded by Edsel Ford, the son of the notorious Henry Ford, who received awards from Hitler for funding the Nazi war machine with slave labor, which somewhat taints the PRA’s stated objectives, which are apparently to track conspiracy theories and the the right-wing while “advancing an open, democratic, and pluralistic society”.

The Ford Foundation is little more than an attack dog which transnational elitists use, through its offshoots like PRA, to demonize any criticism of their agenda as extremist and anti-semitic, which is quite rich considering the history of the corporation.

Berlet himself has made a career out of characterizing the idea that powerful people might get together and discuss ways of expanding their power as a belief of the lunatic fringe.

Little surprise therefore that towards the end of Berlet’s appearance on Russia Today, in which he stumbles through a broken record of excuses claiming Bilderberg has no power, he invokes the tired old cliche that anyone who expresses concern about 200 powerful men gathering in secret with no democratic oversight whatsoever behind a wall of security is probably a closet racist.

Berlet claims the American Free Press was founded by “one of the biggest anti-semitic, neo-fascist conspiracy theorists in the world,” which coincidentally is also a pretty apt description of the man who founded the company that now pays Berlet via the Ford Foundation funding PRA receives to spew his propaganda – Henry Ford – one of Hitler’s biggest supporters.

Watch the clip.

Berlet demonizes the notion that the Bilderberg Group has any influence over world affairs or is working towards a new world order as “a lot of malarkey,” and “a hoax carried out by people who believe in an elaborate fairy tale about how power is exercised in the world”.

He then completely contradicts himself by admitting “they talk over policy” but then claims “the organization itself has no power” before stating, “The policies that are formulated don’t hold any power within the nation that people who go to the meeting….they go back to their country and say hey I heard this at the Bilderberger meeting what do you think? And the national assembly or the powerful people say I think that’s a lot of malarkey take it back and shove it someplace, so this idea that this is a plot that is carried out to 30 or 40 countries and implemented is baloney.”

Really? So according to Berlet, the Prime Minister of Spain, his Secretary General, and the Queen of Spain, all of whom attended the Bilderberg meeting this past weekend, go back home and are then told to “shove” whatever they discussed at Bilderberg by “the powerful people”. These are the powerful people! These are the people who run the country. Presumably, Berlet believes there are powerful people above the Prime Minister and the Queen of Spain who tell them what to do, which sounds like an even bigger conspiracy theory than the one he is attempting to debunk.

Of course in reality, Berlet knows that the most powerful people in the world attend Bilderberg and he is either completely ignorant or deliberately lying by claiming that Bilderberg has no impact on policy.

Merely on the face of it the claim that Bilderberg does not have an influence on policy is patently ridiculous. This would be akin to claiming that a four-day gathering of 200 MLB officials would have no impact on the future of baseball. Despite the fact that many politicians shunned Bilderberg this year because of the group’s increasing notoriety as a furtive and insidious front for anti-democratic elitists, just take a look at the list of powerful individuals who did attend.

Top CEO’s like Bill Gates of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt of Google, top bankers like Marcus Agius of Barclays and Peter Sutherland of Goldman Sachs, don’t meet with national Presidents, Prime Ministers, big newspaper owners, members of the European Parliament and officials in the U.S. government to talk about tiddlywinks. They don’t get together for four days and surround themselves with a security ring of steel to discuss the weather or American Idol – they’re at Bilderberg to come to a consensus and then to implement it in their respective spheres of influence, just as Claes confirms in the radio interview.

Using bluff and slimy semantics, apologists like Berlet imply that just because no treaties or laws are signed at Bilderberg, that the group has no power. In reality, Bilderberg sets the global consensus for the agenda that is subsequently implemented in the host countries of the Bilderberg members, a process that holds even more power than signing an individual treaty. Bilderberg sets the consensus for a whole gamut of policy areas, from oil, to the environment, to wars, to the economy.

This is confirmed not only by former NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg member Willy Claes in the radio interview we covered earlier, but it is manifestly evident in the policies that have later come to pass after being formulated at Bilderberg.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

Indeed, Bilderberg chairman Étienne Davignon last year bragged about how the Euro single currency was a brainchild of the Bilderberg Group.

“A meeting in June in Europe of the Bilderberg Group- an informal club of leading politicians, businessmen and thinkers chaired by Mr. Davignon- could also ‘improve understanding’ on future action, in the same way it helped create the Euro in the 1990s, he said,” reported the EU Observer in March 2009.

The foundations for the EU and ultimately the Euro single currency were laid by the secretive Bilderberg Group in the mid-1950’s. Bilderberg’s own leaked documents prove that the agenda to create a European common market and a single currency was formulated by Bilderberg in 1955.

As we first reported in 2003, a BBC investigative team were allowed to access Bilderberg files which confirmed that the EU and the Euro were the brainchild of Bilderberg

The summary report of the 1955 Bilderberg meeting which took place from September 23-25 1955 at the Grand Hotel Sonnenbichl in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany, talks of the “Pressing need to bring the German people, together with the other peoples of Europe, into a common market.”

The document also outlines the plan, “To arrive in the shortest possible time at the highest degree of integration, beginning with a common European market.”

Just two years later, in 1957, the first incarnation of the European Economic Community (EEC) was born, which comprised of a single market between Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The EEC gradually enlarged over the next few decades until it became the European Community, one of the three pillars of the European Union, which was officially created in 1993.

The 1955 Bilderberg summary outlines a consensus that, “It might be better to proceed through the development of a common market by treaty rather than by the creation of new high authorities.” The EEC was duly created via the Treaty of Rome, which was signed on 25 March 1957.

Debunkers like Berlet will probably still try and claim that the idea of a common European market was floating around in the early 1950’s and that Bilderberg were merely debating contemporary political ideas.

However, the same cannot be said for the single European currency, which wasn’t even introduced in the form of notes and coins until January 2002, having been first codified in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. The documents prove that Bilderberg members were pushing for its introduction nearly 40 years earlier.

“A European speaker expressed concern about the need to achieve a common currency, and indicated that in his view this necessarily implied the creation of a central political authority,” states the summary document.

True to form, the single European currency, the Euro, was not introduced until after the creation of a central political authority – the EU itself.

The document also stresses, “The necessity to bring the German people into a common European market as quickly as possible,” adding that the future was in danger without a “United Europe”.

These proven examples of Bilderberg formulating some of the biggest policies of the 20th century do not even come from leaks obtained by journalists from within the meetings, they come directly from the mouth of Bilderberg’s chairman and Bilderberg’s own internal documents.

However, leaks from inside the meetings uncovered by independent journalists have also proven routinely accurate in confirming that Bilderberg has a massive impact on policy decisions.

In spring 2002, when war hawks in the Bush administration were pushing for a summer invasion of Iraq, Bilderbergers expressed their desire for a delay and the attack was not launched until March the following year.

In 2006, journalists who got leaked information from inside Bilderberg predicted that the U.S. housing market would be allowed to soar before the bubble was cruelly popped, which is exactly what transpired.

In June 2008, we learned that Bilderberg were creating the conditions for a financial calamity, which is exactly what began a few months later with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Bilderberg has habitually flexed its muscles in establishing its role as kingmaker. The organization routinely selects presidential candidates as well as running mates and prime ministers.

Despite widespread expectation that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be announced as the first European Union President, the former Prime Minister of Belgium, Herman Van Rompuy, was picked for the role just days after he attended a Bilderberg Group dinner meeting.

Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were both groomed by the secretive organization in the early 1990’s before rising to prominence.

Barack Obama’s running mate Joe Biden was selected by Bilderberg luminary James A. Johnson, and John Kerry’s 2004 running mate John Edwards was also anointed by the group after he gave a glowing speech at the conference in 2004. Bilderberg attendees even broke house rules to applaud Edwards at the end of a speech he gave to the elitists about American politics. The choice of Edwards was shocking to media pundits who had fully expected Dick Gephardt to secure the position. The New York Post even reported that Gephardt had been chosen and “Kerry-Gephardt” stickers were being placed on campaign vehicles before being removed when Edwards was announced as Kerry’s number two.

A 2008 Portuguese newspaper report highlighted the fact that Pedro Santana Lopes and Jose Socrates attended the 2004 meeting in Stresa, Italy before both going on to become Prime Minster of Portugal.

Several key geopolitical decisions were made at the 2008 Bilderberg meeting in Washington DC, again emphasizing the fact that the confab is far more than an informal get-together.

As we reported at the time, Bilderberg were concerned that the price of oil was accelerating too fast after it hit $150 a barrel and wanted to ensure that “oil prices would probably begin to decline”. This is exactly what happened in the latter half of 2008 as oil again sunk below $50 a barrel. We were initially able to predict the rapid rise in oil prices in 2005 when oil was at $40, because Bilderberg had called for prices to rise during that year’s meeting in Munich. During the conference in Germany, Henry Kissinger told his fellow attendees that the elite had resolved to ensure that oil prices would double over the course of the next 12-24 months, which is exactly what happened.

Also at the 2008 meeting, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice formalized plans to sign a treaty on installing a U.S. radar base in the Czech Republic with Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

Rice was joined at the meeting by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who reportedly encouraged EU globalists to get behind an attack on Iran. Low and behold, days later the EU threatened Iran with sanctions if it did not suspend its nuclear enrichment program. For the first time, the majority of Bilderberg members expressed their support for an attack on Iran during this year’s meeting in Sitges.

There was also widespread speculation that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s “secret meeting,” which was accomplished with the aid of cloak and dagger tactics like locking journalists on an airplane to keep them from tracking the two down, took place at the 2008 Bilderberg meeting in DC.

So as we can see, there are a plethora of examples of Bilderberg setting a consensus on a particular policy area which later comes to pass at both the national and international levels. To claim otherwise is to be completely ignorant of the manifestly provable fact that Bilderberg has immense power in setting agreements on policy and exercises that power on a regular basis.

In light of this, Berlet and Hollingshead are either shoddy journalists who have done no research whatsoever and are merely phoning it in, or they are being paid to deliberately spew biased and completely inaccurate information by the establishment they work for in a futile attempt to convince people that Bilderberg has no power, presumably in an effort to halt growing numbers of protesters who descend on Bilderberg each year, whom Bilderberg members now class as a “threat” to their agenda and secrecy.

Paul Joseph Watson & Steve Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, June 4, 2010

Microsoft founder Bill Gates will join fellow elitists for the first time at the 2010 Bilderberg conference currently taking place in Sitges Spain, after he apparently attempted to pull a bait and switch by pretending to attend another event before being forced to admit to journalists that he will give a speech at the globalist confab.

Gates let slip that he would make his debut at Bilderberg after being asked by journalists from 20 Minutos, a free Spanish newspaper which is published daily in numerous Spanish cities as well as others around the world.

According to the report, Gates told reporters, “I’m one of those who will be present,” adding that he will take part in a debate with fellow globalists on the subjects of “energy and the needs of the poorest,” as well as climate change, renewable energy and the economic crisis.

Indicating that he will also give a speech to the Bilderberg elitists, Gates said, “I hope not to bore.”

It appears as though Gates initially tried to throw reporters off the scent by claiming he was in Barcelona to attend a Global Health Institute conference which was then mysteriously “cancelled”.

The translation of the Spanish report can be read here.

Gates’ presence at the elite confab was also confirmed by the German news agency DPA.

The Spanish report also confirms that Spain’s Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero will attend the conference this afternoon, where he will be joined by Queen Beatrix of Holland, ECB Chairman Jean Claude Trichet as well as former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld has sporadically attended Bilderberg meetings in the past but he is not a regular visitor to the annual gatherings. For Gates, this is his first time at the conference although his wife Melinda is a regular attendee.

Both Gates and Rumsfeld’s presence at this year’s event indicates that some very important developments are set to unfold over the course of the next 12 months, particularly with regard to Iran as well as the global warming agenda, which has been on the ropes since the Climategate scandal and the failed Copenhagen summit in December.

Gates’ Bilderberg presentation will also likely include information about his eugenicist projects to lower global population figures.

During a recent TED conference, an organization which is sponsored by one of the largest toxic waste polluters on the planet, Gates told the audience that vaccines need to be used to reduce world population figures in order to solve global warming and lower CO2 emissions to almost zero.

Stating that the global population was heading towards 9 billion, Gates said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services (abortion), we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent.”

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

Quite how an improvement in health care and vaccines that supposedly save lives would lead to a lowering in global population is an oxymoron, unless Gates is referring to vaccines that sterilize people, which is precisely the same method advocated in White House science advisor John P. Holdren’s 1977 textbook Ecoscience, which calls for a dictatorial “planetary regime” to enforce draconian measures of population reduction via all manner of oppressive techniques, including sterilization.

Gates’ eugenicist zeal is shared by his fellow Bilderberg elitists, many of whom have advocated draconian policies of population control in their own public speeches and writings. Indeed, the Rockefeller family funded eugenics research in Germany through the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin and Munich. The Rockefeller Foundation praised Hitler’s sterilization program in Nazi Germany. David Rockefeller attended the first Bilderberg meeting in 1954 and is now the head of Bilderberg’s “steering committee”.

A joint World Health Organization-Rockefeller inoculation program against tetanus in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines in the early 1990’s was in fact a covert trial on using vaccines to medically abort women’s babies.

“Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization, became suspicious of the motives behind the WHO program and decided to test numerous vials of the vaccine and found them to contain human Chorionic Gonadotrophin, or hCG,” writes historian F. William Engdahl in his article, Bill Gates And Neo-Eugenics: Vaccines To Reduce Population. “That was a curious component for a vaccine designed to protect people against lock-jaw arising from infection with rusty nail wounds or other contact with certain bacteria found in soil. The tetanus disease was indeed, also rather rare. It was also curious because hCG was a natural hormone needed to maintain a pregnancy. However, when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier, it stimulated formation of antibodies against hCG, rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy, a form of concealed abortion. Similar reports of vaccines laced with hCG hormones came from the Philippines and Nicaragua.”

Gates recently announced that he would be funding a sterilization program that would use sharp blasts of ultrasound directed against a man’s scrotum to render him infertile for six months. “The foundation has funded a new “sweat-triggered vaccine delivery” program based on nanoparticles penetrating human skin. The technology is described as a way to “…develop nanoparticles that penetrate the skin through hair follicles and burst upon contact with human sweat to release vaccines,” writes health researcher Mike Adams.

Gates is likely to be asked by other Bilderbergers how to get the global warming carbon tax agenda back on track after a drastic plummet in the credibility of climate change alarmists since the Climategate scandal broke.

Part of Bilderberg’s agenda to usher in a “post-industrial revolution” revolves around mandating western countries to adopt disastrous “green economy” initiatives, which as Spain has painfully experienced at first hand, cost over 2.2 jobs for every “green” job created.

The carbon tax agenda is also about enforcing a consumption tax which will drastically reduce living standards and leave people more concerned about feeding their families with little time to worry about Bilderberg’s undemocratic scheming, something the Bilderberg hierarchy are keen to oversee in an effort to squash the growing global awareness of Bilderberg and the new world order, because they view “people with income” as “a threat” to their plans for world government.

Watch Bill Gates’ comments on using vaccines to lower global population in the clip below.

Prison Planet.tv Members Can Watch Don’t Tread On Me Right Now Online - Don’t Miss Out! Get Your Subscription Today!

http://www.prisonplanet.com/eugenicist-bill-gates-to-attend-2010-bilderberg-conference.html

Wednesday morning (May 26) at about 5:20 a.m. in Chicago (hometown of former anti-gun Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels), a fatal shooting occurred that has created, in its aftermath, a public outcry that strongly signals bad times ahead for the gun prohibitionist movement in the United States.

I’d have done the same thing. They say we’ve got to give up our guns, but that’s crazy.”—Audrey Williams, neighbor

How are we going to protect our homes without guns? That gun law should be abolished.”—Butch Gant, son of shooter

Mayor Daley needs to come up with a better solution than just saying ‘turn in your guns’. . . . Crooks will not turn in theirs.”—Chicago Sun Times columnist Stella Foster

Nelson had a 13-page rap sheet that includes a number of drug and weapons convictions dating to 1998, according to police and court records. He lived less than a mile from the home he broke into. Neighbors recognized him from his mug shot as a man they had seen at the corner liquor store who went by the name “Big Ant.”

Daley’s Chicago Threatens to Charge Octogenarian for Defending Himself

Massad Ayoob
Backwoods Home Magazine
June 2, 2010

In the last posting here, we shared the most recent bizarre behavior of Chicago’s Mayor Daley in regard to “Gun Control.” Now we discover that indicted and disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich feels Mayor Daley isn’t going far enough on gun control…see LINK HERE . How interesting that Blago doesn’t mention that when he himself was arrested by The Feds, they seized his FOID (Illinois Firearms Owner’s Identification) card. Good that he’s not a hypocrite or anything…

If I can quote Blagojevich himself, who was talking about something else at the time, that’s “f—in’ golden.”

Meanwhile, an octogenarian Korean War vet in Chicago in the last few days used a firearm to shoot and kill a long-time felon (who apparently benefited from “catch and release” justice) who invaded the home the shooter shared with his wife of similar age. In rural America, that would earn a pat on the back from the county sheriff. In Daley’s Chicago, it has city authorities looking at whether they can criminally charge the old gentleman because his FOID card had expired, and because he used a handgun not currently registered under the “grandfather clause” in “handgun-free Chicago.” Public opinion is clearly with the vet: see LINK HERE.

This American veteran wielded deadly weapons in time of war as a soldier of his grateful country. He channeled that experience to protect his octogenarian wife and his 12-year-old grandson. It will be interesting to see if practical, street-smart Chicagoans hold the Chicago criminal justice system’s feet to the fire on this, to make sure that this exemplary senior citizen is not punished for being the very exemplar of Good Defeating Evil.

Last month, at the ILEETA national conference of police trainers held outside Chicago, more than one veteran Windy City cop told me that the current mayor’s dad, the original Mayor Daley, not only owned a fine gun collection but was known to go out in public carrying concealed a particularly nice Colt .38.  Ya think his son might be rebelling against parental values or something?

Lew Rockwell interviews Tom Woods, on his new book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century. Thanks to the internet, Americans can learn about such forbidden ideas as the Principles of 1798, when Jefferson and Madison laid out the idea that to give the central government the sole ability to interpret the constitution was the path to tyranny, and that the states have the right and the duty to oppose tyrannical actions by the feds.

Regimists try to demonize the idea of nullification, as they attempt to demonize all ideas that undermine centralized power, but that is not scaring libertarians, Tea Party people, and other dissidents. Nullification, decentralization, self-government, self-determination, even secession: the time of these un-PC ideas is here, and the Woods book may be the handbook of the revolution.

Websites:

• http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/ *includes a legislative tracking page
• http://www.werefuse.com/ *declares the national health care law Unconstitutional
• http://www.thomasewoods.com/ *Tom’s personal web page
• http://www.lewrockwell.com/ * all the best of the articles here