Gun Control and the Second Amendment
- Thread starter Stu
- Start date
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- complete bullshit
I've been shooting over 40 years. If someone can call me a gun nut and get away with it, think I'll come up with a new handle for the poor folk brought up in a boxed world with no shooting that are against guns. Let me think...............inexperienced.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-re...bya-caused-benghazigate-stevens-death/5322741
[h=2]New Report: Brennan’s ‘Black Ops’ In Libya Caused “Benghazigate”, Stevens Death[/h] By Patrick Henningsen
Global Research, February 13, 2013
21st Century Wire
Region: Middle East & North Africa
Theme: Intelligence
In-depth Report: NATO'S WAR ON LIBY
Benghazigate’ continues to unravel, and the man who’s front and center at this week’s Washington DC hearings is now being blamed for the villa siege last September…
According to a new investigative book published by two former US special operations soldiers, and serialised exclusively in yesterday’s Daily Mail, former CIA Director, David Petraeus, was blackmailed by two senior CIA officers into resigning and was made to publicly admit to his affair with intelligence operative Paula Broadwell. Of course, this angle of the story will surely drive book sales, but it’s not the most significant revelation in the story…
Drone-Master J: John Brennan
In their book which is due to be release tomorrow entitled, Benghazi: The Definitive Report, authors Jack Murphy (Army Green Beret) and co-author Brandon Webb (Navy SEAL and friend of Glen Doherty who died in the Benghazi siege) also revealed that ‘Drone-Master J’, John O. Brennan - President Barack Obama’s current CIA Director nominee who was the President’s own deputy NSA advisor at the time, had been authorizing covert ‘unilateral operations outside of the traditional command structure’, using the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) across Libya and North Africa. It is Brennan’s black ops that are said to have prompted retaliation inside Libya that led to the September 11 Benghazi compound siege that killed four Americans, including ‘Ambassador’ Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
It’s worth noting here that the Benghazi siege was initially blamed by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and the entire US media and the BBC at the time – on a highly deceptive YouTube film entitled, “The Innocence of Muslims”. That was the first stages of the cover-up.
So, according to the new book, it’s John O. Brennan who was the architect of events that led to the debacle known as Benghazigate? Apparently, yes, but not quite…
Murphy and Webb’s book, although very hard-hitting and well-researched, through what the authors describe as “a vast network of military insiders and intelligence officers to uncover the ‘untold’ story behind the attacks”,focuses on the Petraeus Affair, but only provides surface detail on the actual nature of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’s mission there in Libya.
Nor do the authors explain that the compound in question was not an “Embassy” in Benghazi as the Obama White House first referred to it, nor was it a “US Consulate”, or a “CIA safe house” as came to be known in later reports. Susanne Posel of OccupyCorporatism.com, reports what is more likely to be the real story:
Hand in the honey pot: Petraeus and Broadwell.
According to The Mail story, Petraeus’s ousters were,’high-level career officers on the CIA who got the ball rolling on the investigation’. The Mail exclusive goes on to explain how the Petraeus story unfolded and triggered a ‘palace coup’:
Chris Stevens and CIA gun-running
According to the Daily Mail, Webb and Murphy’s book does document that “Stevens likely helped consolidate as many weapons as possible after the war to safeguard them, at which point Brennan exported them overseas to start another conflict”.
Although both authors, who run a website called SOFREP.com - a news site written and edited by current and former members of the special operations community, appear to be ‘well-positioned’ to access classified insider information about events and a ‘vast network’ of contacts in the game, they could have gone a lot deeper into what are now mainstream allegations: that Chris Stevens was CIA point man for running illegal guns out of Libya via Turkey into Syria for the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Even Kentucky Senator Rand Paul challenged Hillary Clinton on these charges, but was stonewalled by the outgoing Secretary of State.
The book says that Stevens was aiding John Brennan in highly illegal international gun-running, a fact alone that should (in theory, anyway) kill Brennan in the CIA directorate conformation hearings this week in Washington DC. It’s amazing how this aspect of the story is given a back seat to a sex scandal – which makes us suspicious of this book, and its peculiar timing.
Posel also explains Stevens role as CIA gun-runner:
Author, former SEAL Brandon Webb
Author, former Ranger Jack Murphy
Chemical Weapons to Syria
The other obvious and very big aspect of this story which they also miss, is the very visible thread which first appeared in early Dec 2012 of reports ‘chemical weapons in Syria’, and these are likely to have originated in Libya – in the form of Gadaffi’s aging chemical weapons stocks being smuggled out of Libya and into the hands of the FSA in Syria… in order to blame Syria Assad government for using “chemical weapons against his own people”.
In late December, the US intelligence community, via the US General Console in Istanbul, Turkey, appears to have set-up the thread for the Assad chemical weapons story to go public, but quickly began to back track on this talking point, practically abandoning it altogether in the end.
In ‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report’, it does appear that the authors have opened up the door to some incredible and perhaps crucial insights into events surrounding Benghazigate – and their book will make a big media splash but it seems like black-ops ‘insiders’ Murphy and Webb missed the biggest story in all of this – which just happens to be the very scandal that would certainly bring down the Obama Administration in one swoop. Amazing how these events are borne out - and not borne out in the media, as the case may be.
More and more these days, we see an endless parade of ex-Navy SEAL and ex-Special Ops commando authors – who may very well have a great black book when comes to inside info but they are not journalists, and in some cases their relationship to the special operations world may be a little too close for comfort to consider them objective and independent investigators.
To authors Murphy and Webb, you cannot call it a “Definitive Report” a few months after the event. It’s a bit cock-sure, to be sure.
We’re waiting for the sequel, the book which blows the lid on the real story.
Until then, this might just be a ‘controlled media detonation’.
-
-
‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report,’ written by Brandon Webb and Jack Murphy, is published by William Morrow Company, an imprint of HarperCollins. It will be available for download in ebook format on Tuesday.
[h=2]New Report: Brennan’s ‘Black Ops’ In Libya Caused “Benghazigate”, Stevens Death[/h] By Patrick Henningsen
Global Research, February 13, 2013
21st Century Wire
Region: Middle East & North Africa
Theme: Intelligence
In-depth Report: NATO'S WAR ON LIBY
Benghazigate’ continues to unravel, and the man who’s front and center at this week’s Washington DC hearings is now being blamed for the villa siege last September…
According to a new investigative book published by two former US special operations soldiers, and serialised exclusively in yesterday’s Daily Mail, former CIA Director, David Petraeus, was blackmailed by two senior CIA officers into resigning and was made to publicly admit to his affair with intelligence operative Paula Broadwell. Of course, this angle of the story will surely drive book sales, but it’s not the most significant revelation in the story…
In their book which is due to be release tomorrow entitled, Benghazi: The Definitive Report, authors Jack Murphy (Army Green Beret) and co-author Brandon Webb (Navy SEAL and friend of Glen Doherty who died in the Benghazi siege) also revealed that ‘Drone-Master J’, John O. Brennan - President Barack Obama’s current CIA Director nominee who was the President’s own deputy NSA advisor at the time, had been authorizing covert ‘unilateral operations outside of the traditional command structure’, using the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) across Libya and North Africa. It is Brennan’s black ops that are said to have prompted retaliation inside Libya that led to the September 11 Benghazi compound siege that killed four Americans, including ‘Ambassador’ Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
It’s worth noting here that the Benghazi siege was initially blamed by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and the entire US media and the BBC at the time – on a highly deceptive YouTube film entitled, “The Innocence of Muslims”. That was the first stages of the cover-up.
So, according to the new book, it’s John O. Brennan who was the architect of events that led to the debacle known as Benghazigate? Apparently, yes, but not quite…
Murphy and Webb’s book, although very hard-hitting and well-researched, through what the authors describe as “a vast network of military insiders and intelligence officers to uncover the ‘untold’ story behind the attacks”,focuses on the Petraeus Affair, but only provides surface detail on the actual nature of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’s mission there in Libya.
Nor do the authors explain that the compound in question was not an “Embassy” in Benghazi as the Obama White House first referred to it, nor was it a “US Consulate”, or a “CIA safe house” as came to be known in later reports. Susanne Posel of OccupyCorporatism.com, reports what is more likely to be the real story:
“In Benghazi, Stevens stayed at a gated-villa, leased by the US State Department from a local man named Mohammad al-Bishari. The villa in Benghazi was not a US Embassy, diplomatic mission or extension of the embassy. In fact, the nearest US Embassy is Tripoli. This location housed Stevens where he spoke with the NTC, a defaco-government in Libya that assisted the US in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Stevens had previously been designated as a special representative to the NTC during the US-controlled Libyan revolution. To mask Stevens new role, he was given US Ambassador status by Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, and stationed in Tripoli.
Bishari has confirmed that Stevens would stay at the villa when he met with the NTC. Stevens’ mission in Benghazi was to gather intelligence for the CIA “conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city.”
Stevens had previously been designated as a special representative to the NTC during the US-controlled Libyan revolution. To mask Stevens new role, he was given US Ambassador status by Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, and stationed in Tripoli.
Bishari has confirmed that Stevens would stay at the villa when he met with the NTC. Stevens’ mission in Benghazi was to gather intelligence for the CIA “conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city.”
According to The Mail story, Petraeus’s ousters were,’high-level career officers on the CIA who got the ball rolling on the investigation’. The Mail exclusive goes on to explain how the Petraeus story unfolded and triggered a ‘palace coup’:
“The authors say that senior intelligence officers working on the 7th floor of Central Intelligence headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used their political clout to ensure that the FBI investigated the former Army general’s personal life.
They then told Petraeus that they would publicly humiliate him if he didn’t admit the affair and resign.
‘It was well known to Petraeus’s Personal Security Detachment (bodyguards) that he and Broadwell were having an affair. He wasn’t the only high-ranking Agency head or general engaged in extramarital relations, but when the 7th floor wanted Petraeus out, they cashed in their chips,’ Webb and Murphy write.
The book continues: ‘The reality of the situation is that high-ranking CIA officers had already discovered the affair by consulting with Petraeus’s PSD and then found a way to initiate an FBI investigation in order to create a string of evidence and an investigative trail that led to the information they already had—in other words, an official investigation that could be used to force Petraeus to resign.’
… Senior officials were furious over the way he had been running the agency since he was appointed in September 2011… He was turning the agency’s focus from intelligence gathering and analysis to paramilitary operations, including drone strikes.”
What they reveal about the Petraeus scandal is that the sensational extramarital affair was deployed in the media in order to keep the public distracted from the real story.They then told Petraeus that they would publicly humiliate him if he didn’t admit the affair and resign.
‘It was well known to Petraeus’s Personal Security Detachment (bodyguards) that he and Broadwell were having an affair. He wasn’t the only high-ranking Agency head or general engaged in extramarital relations, but when the 7th floor wanted Petraeus out, they cashed in their chips,’ Webb and Murphy write.
The book continues: ‘The reality of the situation is that high-ranking CIA officers had already discovered the affair by consulting with Petraeus’s PSD and then found a way to initiate an FBI investigation in order to create a string of evidence and an investigative trail that led to the information they already had—in other words, an official investigation that could be used to force Petraeus to resign.’
… Senior officials were furious over the way he had been running the agency since he was appointed in September 2011… He was turning the agency’s focus from intelligence gathering and analysis to paramilitary operations, including drone strikes.”
Chris Stevens and CIA gun-running
According to the Daily Mail, Webb and Murphy’s book does document that “Stevens likely helped consolidate as many weapons as possible after the war to safeguard them, at which point Brennan exported them overseas to start another conflict”.
Although both authors, who run a website called SOFREP.com - a news site written and edited by current and former members of the special operations community, appear to be ‘well-positioned’ to access classified insider information about events and a ‘vast network’ of contacts in the game, they could have gone a lot deeper into what are now mainstream allegations: that Chris Stevens was CIA point man for running illegal guns out of Libya via Turkey into Syria for the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Even Kentucky Senator Rand Paul challenged Hillary Clinton on these charges, but was stonewalled by the outgoing Secretary of State.
The book says that Stevens was aiding John Brennan in highly illegal international gun-running, a fact alone that should (in theory, anyway) kill Brennan in the CIA directorate conformation hearings this week in Washington DC. It’s amazing how this aspect of the story is given a back seat to a sex scandal – which makes us suspicious of this book, and its peculiar timing.
Posel also explains Stevens role as CIA gun-runner:
“Some of Stevens’ deals for arms can be realized in the artillery and weapons being funneled to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Syria who are fighting the proxy war for the US. Stevens became the “liaison” between US-sponsored terrorist factions and the movement of arms to Syria to assist the FSA.
Shipments to the FSA have come from Saudi Arabia where the Salafi terrorists originated and the Partisans of Sharia is used to further subversive interests. Thanks to the US, the Saudi government and Stevens, the FSA are the most heavily armed state-sponsored jihadist group in the Middle East.
In reality, Islamic terrorist factions that work with the US were employed by the Saudi Arabian government to take out one of Petraeus’ CIA spies. That spy’s name was J. Christopher Stevens.”
Shipments to the FSA have come from Saudi Arabia where the Salafi terrorists originated and the Partisans of Sharia is used to further subversive interests. Thanks to the US, the Saudi government and Stevens, the FSA are the most heavily armed state-sponsored jihadist group in the Middle East.
In reality, Islamic terrorist factions that work with the US were employed by the Saudi Arabian government to take out one of Petraeus’ CIA spies. That spy’s name was J. Christopher Stevens.”
Chemical Weapons to Syria
The other obvious and very big aspect of this story which they also miss, is the very visible thread which first appeared in early Dec 2012 of reports ‘chemical weapons in Syria’, and these are likely to have originated in Libya – in the form of Gadaffi’s aging chemical weapons stocks being smuggled out of Libya and into the hands of the FSA in Syria… in order to blame Syria Assad government for using “chemical weapons against his own people”.
In late December, the US intelligence community, via the US General Console in Istanbul, Turkey, appears to have set-up the thread for the Assad chemical weapons story to go public, but quickly began to back track on this talking point, practically abandoning it altogether in the end.
In ‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report’, it does appear that the authors have opened up the door to some incredible and perhaps crucial insights into events surrounding Benghazigate – and their book will make a big media splash but it seems like black-ops ‘insiders’ Murphy and Webb missed the biggest story in all of this – which just happens to be the very scandal that would certainly bring down the Obama Administration in one swoop. Amazing how these events are borne out - and not borne out in the media, as the case may be.
More and more these days, we see an endless parade of ex-Navy SEAL and ex-Special Ops commando authors – who may very well have a great black book when comes to inside info but they are not journalists, and in some cases their relationship to the special operations world may be a little too close for comfort to consider them objective and independent investigators.
To authors Murphy and Webb, you cannot call it a “Definitive Report” a few months after the event. It’s a bit cock-sure, to be sure.
We’re waiting for the sequel, the book which blows the lid on the real story.
Until then, this might just be a ‘controlled media detonation’.
-
-
‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report,’ written by Brandon Webb and Jack Murphy, is published by William Morrow Company, an imprint of HarperCollins. It will be available for download in ebook format on Tuesday.
http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_02_11/West-uses-chemical-threat-to-justify-Syria-strike-Churkin/
[h=1]West uses chemical threat to justify Syria strike - Churkin[/h]
[h=2]Some Western powers seem to be planning to attack Syria with the chemical threat as a pretext for a foreign invasion, Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin has said. Mr. Churkin said he sometimes got the feeling that someone was using chemical threat talks as a pretext to justify a military invasion into Syria.[/h]
He pointed out that the US, France and Britain were building media hype around the Syrian chemical stockpile despite the claims that they were not mulling an attack against President Assad’s regime.
The Russian envoy said the issue stood high atop the agenda at all Russian-Syrian negotiations, adding that Damascus vowed they’d never use chemical weapons.
US must rein in Syria rebels' arms suppliers
Claims that the US is providing Syrian insurgents with so-called “non-lethal” weapons don’t relieve Washington of any responsibility for murders carried out by armed anti-Assad fighters, Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin has said.
The US is an extremely powerful state that enjoys enormous authority in such countries as Qatar, the chief arms supplier of the Syrian opposition, Mr. Churkin stressed.
If the US wants to remain consistent with its policy, it should restrain those countries from providing Syrian rebels with deadly weapons, he added.
The Russian diplomat voiced Moscow’s concern over rumors of a chemical threat in Syria. “We believe there’s been too much scaremongering… which makes you feel that someone is looking for a pretext to invade Syria. We are afraid the opposition may be tempted to use chemical weapons in their interests,” he added.
Russia warns against military strike on Iran
A military attack on Iran will only strengthen the resolve and grass-root support of nuclear bomb proponents in the country, Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin has warned.
“I share the opinion that a strike [against Iran] will only play into the hand of those vying for the creation of a nuclear bomb. It would be rather an irrational and dangerous step,” Mr. Churkin said in an interview.
Russia’s UN official said he hoped that common sense would prevent the US from attacking Iran. He stressed that none of the P5+1 group members believed Tehran had made its final decision to build a nuclear bomb.
“As long as the decision isn’t final, there remains a leeway for political dialogue. A military attack will torpedo Iran talks and nullify the possibility for the renewal of political negotiations,” Mr. Churkin said.
Voice of Russia, RIA, Interfax
[h=1]West uses chemical threat to justify Syria strike - Churkin[/h]
| Vitaly Churkin | Photo: EPA |
He pointed out that the US, France and Britain were building media hype around the Syrian chemical stockpile despite the claims that they were not mulling an attack against President Assad’s regime.
The Russian envoy said the issue stood high atop the agenda at all Russian-Syrian negotiations, adding that Damascus vowed they’d never use chemical weapons.
US must rein in Syria rebels' arms suppliers
Claims that the US is providing Syrian insurgents with so-called “non-lethal” weapons don’t relieve Washington of any responsibility for murders carried out by armed anti-Assad fighters, Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin has said.
The US is an extremely powerful state that enjoys enormous authority in such countries as Qatar, the chief arms supplier of the Syrian opposition, Mr. Churkin stressed.
If the US wants to remain consistent with its policy, it should restrain those countries from providing Syrian rebels with deadly weapons, he added.
The Russian diplomat voiced Moscow’s concern over rumors of a chemical threat in Syria. “We believe there’s been too much scaremongering… which makes you feel that someone is looking for a pretext to invade Syria. We are afraid the opposition may be tempted to use chemical weapons in their interests,” he added.
Russia warns against military strike on Iran
A military attack on Iran will only strengthen the resolve and grass-root support of nuclear bomb proponents in the country, Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin has warned.
“I share the opinion that a strike [against Iran] will only play into the hand of those vying for the creation of a nuclear bomb. It would be rather an irrational and dangerous step,” Mr. Churkin said in an interview.
Russia’s UN official said he hoped that common sense would prevent the US from attacking Iran. He stressed that none of the P5+1 group members believed Tehran had made its final decision to build a nuclear bomb.
“As long as the decision isn’t final, there remains a leeway for political dialogue. A military attack will torpedo Iran talks and nullify the possibility for the renewal of political negotiations,” Mr. Churkin said.
Voice of Russia, RIA, Interfax
The NDAA and the Death of the Democratic State
By Chris Hedges
http://uruknet.info/?p=m95142&hd=&size=1&l=e
Illustration by Mr. Fish
February 11, 2013
On Wednesday a few hundred activists crowded into the courtroom of the Second Circuit, the spillover room with its faulty audio feed and dearth of chairs, and Foley Square outside the Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan where many huddled in the cold. The fate of the nation, we understood, could be decided by the three judges who will rule on our lawsuit against President Barack Obama for signing into law Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The section permits the military to detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, who "substantially support"–an undefined legal term–al-Qaida, the Taliban or "associated forces," again a term that is legally undefined. Those detained can be imprisoned indefinitely by the military and denied due process until "the end of hostilities." In an age of permanent war this is probably a lifetime. Anyone detained under the NDAA can be sent, according to Section (c)(4), to any "foreign country or entity." This is, in essence, extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens. It empowers the government to ship detainees to the jails of some of the most repressive regimes on earth.
Section 1021(b)(2) was declared invalid in September after our first trial, in the Southern District Court of New York. The Obama administration appealed the Southern District Court ruling. The appeal was heard Wednesday in the Second Circuit Court with Judges Raymond J. Lohier, Lewis A. Kaplan and Amalya L. Kearse presiding. The judges might not make a decision until the spring when the Supreme Court rules in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, another case in which I am a plaintiff. The Supreme Court case challenges the government’s use of electronic surveillance. If we are successful in the Clapper case, it will strengthen all the plaintiffs’ standing in Hedges v. Obama. The Supreme Court, if it rules against the government, will affirm that we as plaintiffs have a reasonable fear of being detained.
If we lose in Hedges v. Obama–and it seems certain that no matter the outcome of the appeal this case will reach the Supreme Court–electoral politics and our rights as citizens will be as empty as those of Nero’s Rome. If we lose, the power of the military to detain citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military prisons will become a terrifying reality. Democrat or Republican. Occupy activist or libertarian. Socialist or tea party stalwart. It does not matter. This is not a partisan fight. Once the state seizes this unchecked power, it will inevitably create a secret, lawless world of indiscriminate violence, terror and gulags. I lived under several military dictatorships during the two decades I was a foreign correspondent. I know the beast.
"The stakes are very high," said attorney Carl Mayer, who with attorney Bruce Afran brought our case to trial, in addressing a Culture Project audience in Manhattan on Wednesday after the hearing. "What our case comes down to is: Are we going to have a civil justice system in the United States or a military justice system? The civil justice system is something that is ingrained in the Constitution. It was always very important in combating tyranny and building a democratic society. What the NDAA is trying to impose is a system of military justice that allows the military to police the streets of America to detain U.S. citizens, to detain residents in the United States in military prisons. Probably the most frightening aspect of the NDAA is that it allows for detention until 'the end of hostilities.’ " [To see videos of Mayer, Afran, Hedges and others participating in the Culture Project panel discussion, click here.]
Five thousand years of human civilization has left behind innumerable ruins to remind us that the grand structures and complex societies we build, and foolishly venerate as immortal, crumble into dust. It is the descent that matters now. If the corporate state is handed the tools, as under Section 1021(b)(2) of the NDAA, to use deadly force and military power to criminalize dissent, then our decline will be one of repression, blood and suffering. No one, not least our corporate overlords, believes that our material conditions will improve with the impending collapse of globalization, the steady deterioration of the global economy, the decline of natural resources and the looming catastrophes of climate change.
But the global corporatists–who have created a new species of totalitarianism–demand, during our decay, total power to extract the last vestiges of profit from a degraded ecosystem and disempowered citizenry. The looming dystopia is visible in the skies of blighted postindustrial cities such as Flint, Mich., where drones circle like mechanical vultures. And in an era where the executive branch can draw up secret kill lists that include U.S. citizens, it would be naive to believe these domestic drones will remain unarmed.
Robert M. Loeb, the lead attorney for the government in Wednesday’s proceedings, took a tack very different from that of the government in the Southern District Court of New York before Judge Katherine B. Forrest. Forrest repeatedly asked the government attorneys if they could guarantee that the other plaintiffs and I would not be subject to detention under Section 1021(b)(2). The government attorneys in the first trial granted no such immunity. The government also claimed in the first trial that under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act (AUMF), it already had the power to detain U.S. citizens. Section 1021(b)(2), the attorneys said, did not constitute a significant change in government power. Judge Forrest in September rejected the government’s arguments and ruled Section 1021(b)(2) invalid.
The government, however, argued Wednesday that as "independent journalists" we were exempt from the law and had no cause for concern. Loeb stated that if journalists used journalism as a cover to aid the enemy, they would be seized and treated as enemy combatants. But he assured the court that I would be untouched by the new law as long as "Mr. Hedges did not start driving black vans for people we don’t like."
Loeb did not explain to the court who defines an "independent journalist." I have interviewed members of al-Qaida as well as 16 other individuals or members of groups on the State Department’s terrorism list. When I convey these viewpoints, deeply hostile to the United States, am I considered by the government to be "independent"? Could I be seen by the security and surveillance state, because I challenge the official narrative, as a collaborator with the enemy? And although I do not drive black vans for people Loeb does not like, I have spent days, part of the time in vehicles, with armed units that are hostile to the United States. These include Hamas in Gaza and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in southeastern Turkey.
I traveled frequently with armed members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador and the Sandinista army in Nicaragua during the five years I spent in Central America. Senior officials in the Reagan administration regularly denounced many of us in the press as fifth columnists and collaborators with terrorists. These officials did not view us as "independent." They viewed us as propagandists for the enemy. Section 1021(b)(2) turns this linguistic condemnation into legal condemnation.
Alexa O’Brien, another plaintiff and a co-founder of the US Day of Rage, learned after WikiLeaks released 5 million emails from Stratfor, a private security firm that does work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, that Stratfor operatives were trying to link her and her organization to Islamic radicals, including al-Qaida, and sympathetic websites as well as jihadist ideology. If that link were made, she and those in her organization would not be immune from detention.
Afran said at the Culture Project discussion that he once gave a donation at a fundraising dinner to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish Catholic organization. A few months later, to his surprise, he received a note of thanks from Sinn Féin. "I didn’t expect to be giving money to a group that maintains a paramilitary terrorist organization, as some people say," Afran said. "This is the danger. You can easily find yourself in a setting that the government deems worthy of incarceration. This is why people cease to speak out."
The government attempted in court last week to smear Sami Al-Hajj, a journalist for the Al-Jazeera news network who was picked up by the U.S. military and imprisoned for nearly seven years in Guantanamo. This, for me, was one of the most chilling moments in the hearing.
"Just calling yourself a journalist doesn’t make you a journalist, like Al-Hajj," Loeb told the court. "He used journalism as a cover. He was a member of al-Qaida and provided Stinger missiles to al-Qaida."
Al-Hajj, despite Loeb’s assertions, was never charged with any crimes. And the slander by Loeb only highlighted the potential for misuse of this provision of the NDAA if it is not struck down.
The second central argument by the government was even more specious. Loeb claimed that Subsection 1021(e) of the NDAA exempts citizens from detention. Section 1021(e) states: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."
Afran countered Loeb by saying that Subsection 1021(e) illustrated that the NDAA assumed that U.S. citizens would be detained by the military, overturning two centuries of domestic law that forbids the military to carry out domestic policing. And military detention of citizens, Afran noted, is not permitted under the Constitution.
Afran quoted the NDAA bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who said on the floor of the Senate: "In the case where somebody is worried about being picked up by a rogue executive branch because they went to the wrong political rally, they don’t have to worry very long, because our federal courts have the right and the obligation to make sure the government proves their case that you are a member of al-Qaida and didn’t [just] go to a political rally."
Afran told the court that Graham’s statement implicitly acknowledged that U.S. citizens could be detained by the military under 1021(b)(2). "There is no reason for the sponsor to make that statement if he does not realize that the statute causes that chilling fear," Afran told the judges.
After the hearing Afran explained: "If the senator who sponsored and managed the bill believed people would be afraid of the law, then the plaintiffs obviously have a reasonably objective basis to fear the statute."
In speaking to the court Afran said of 1021(e): "It says it is applied to people in the United States. It presumes that they are going to be detained under some law. The only law we know of is this law. What other laws, before this one, allowed the military to detain people in this country?"
This was a question Judge Lohier, at Afran’s urging, asked Loeb during the argument. Loeb concurred that the NDAA was the only law he knew of that permitted the military to detain and hold U.S. citizens.
By Chris Hedges
http://uruknet.info/?p=m95142&hd=&size=1&l=e
Illustration by Mr. Fish
February 11, 2013
On Wednesday a few hundred activists crowded into the courtroom of the Second Circuit, the spillover room with its faulty audio feed and dearth of chairs, and Foley Square outside the Thurgood Marshall U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan where many huddled in the cold. The fate of the nation, we understood, could be decided by the three judges who will rule on our lawsuit against President Barack Obama for signing into law Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The section permits the military to detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, who "substantially support"–an undefined legal term–al-Qaida, the Taliban or "associated forces," again a term that is legally undefined. Those detained can be imprisoned indefinitely by the military and denied due process until "the end of hostilities." In an age of permanent war this is probably a lifetime. Anyone detained under the NDAA can be sent, according to Section (c)(4), to any "foreign country or entity." This is, in essence, extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens. It empowers the government to ship detainees to the jails of some of the most repressive regimes on earth.
Section 1021(b)(2) was declared invalid in September after our first trial, in the Southern District Court of New York. The Obama administration appealed the Southern District Court ruling. The appeal was heard Wednesday in the Second Circuit Court with Judges Raymond J. Lohier, Lewis A. Kaplan and Amalya L. Kearse presiding. The judges might not make a decision until the spring when the Supreme Court rules in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA, another case in which I am a plaintiff. The Supreme Court case challenges the government’s use of electronic surveillance. If we are successful in the Clapper case, it will strengthen all the plaintiffs’ standing in Hedges v. Obama. The Supreme Court, if it rules against the government, will affirm that we as plaintiffs have a reasonable fear of being detained.
If we lose in Hedges v. Obama–and it seems certain that no matter the outcome of the appeal this case will reach the Supreme Court–electoral politics and our rights as citizens will be as empty as those of Nero’s Rome. If we lose, the power of the military to detain citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military prisons will become a terrifying reality. Democrat or Republican. Occupy activist or libertarian. Socialist or tea party stalwart. It does not matter. This is not a partisan fight. Once the state seizes this unchecked power, it will inevitably create a secret, lawless world of indiscriminate violence, terror and gulags. I lived under several military dictatorships during the two decades I was a foreign correspondent. I know the beast.
"The stakes are very high," said attorney Carl Mayer, who with attorney Bruce Afran brought our case to trial, in addressing a Culture Project audience in Manhattan on Wednesday after the hearing. "What our case comes down to is: Are we going to have a civil justice system in the United States or a military justice system? The civil justice system is something that is ingrained in the Constitution. It was always very important in combating tyranny and building a democratic society. What the NDAA is trying to impose is a system of military justice that allows the military to police the streets of America to detain U.S. citizens, to detain residents in the United States in military prisons. Probably the most frightening aspect of the NDAA is that it allows for detention until 'the end of hostilities.’ " [To see videos of Mayer, Afran, Hedges and others participating in the Culture Project panel discussion, click here.]
Five thousand years of human civilization has left behind innumerable ruins to remind us that the grand structures and complex societies we build, and foolishly venerate as immortal, crumble into dust. It is the descent that matters now. If the corporate state is handed the tools, as under Section 1021(b)(2) of the NDAA, to use deadly force and military power to criminalize dissent, then our decline will be one of repression, blood and suffering. No one, not least our corporate overlords, believes that our material conditions will improve with the impending collapse of globalization, the steady deterioration of the global economy, the decline of natural resources and the looming catastrophes of climate change.
But the global corporatists–who have created a new species of totalitarianism–demand, during our decay, total power to extract the last vestiges of profit from a degraded ecosystem and disempowered citizenry. The looming dystopia is visible in the skies of blighted postindustrial cities such as Flint, Mich., where drones circle like mechanical vultures. And in an era where the executive branch can draw up secret kill lists that include U.S. citizens, it would be naive to believe these domestic drones will remain unarmed.
Robert M. Loeb, the lead attorney for the government in Wednesday’s proceedings, took a tack very different from that of the government in the Southern District Court of New York before Judge Katherine B. Forrest. Forrest repeatedly asked the government attorneys if they could guarantee that the other plaintiffs and I would not be subject to detention under Section 1021(b)(2). The government attorneys in the first trial granted no such immunity. The government also claimed in the first trial that under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act (AUMF), it already had the power to detain U.S. citizens. Section 1021(b)(2), the attorneys said, did not constitute a significant change in government power. Judge Forrest in September rejected the government’s arguments and ruled Section 1021(b)(2) invalid.
The government, however, argued Wednesday that as "independent journalists" we were exempt from the law and had no cause for concern. Loeb stated that if journalists used journalism as a cover to aid the enemy, they would be seized and treated as enemy combatants. But he assured the court that I would be untouched by the new law as long as "Mr. Hedges did not start driving black vans for people we don’t like."
Loeb did not explain to the court who defines an "independent journalist." I have interviewed members of al-Qaida as well as 16 other individuals or members of groups on the State Department’s terrorism list. When I convey these viewpoints, deeply hostile to the United States, am I considered by the government to be "independent"? Could I be seen by the security and surveillance state, because I challenge the official narrative, as a collaborator with the enemy? And although I do not drive black vans for people Loeb does not like, I have spent days, part of the time in vehicles, with armed units that are hostile to the United States. These include Hamas in Gaza and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in southeastern Turkey.
I traveled frequently with armed members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador and the Sandinista army in Nicaragua during the five years I spent in Central America. Senior officials in the Reagan administration regularly denounced many of us in the press as fifth columnists and collaborators with terrorists. These officials did not view us as "independent." They viewed us as propagandists for the enemy. Section 1021(b)(2) turns this linguistic condemnation into legal condemnation.
Alexa O’Brien, another plaintiff and a co-founder of the US Day of Rage, learned after WikiLeaks released 5 million emails from Stratfor, a private security firm that does work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, that Stratfor operatives were trying to link her and her organization to Islamic radicals, including al-Qaida, and sympathetic websites as well as jihadist ideology. If that link were made, she and those in her organization would not be immune from detention.
Afran said at the Culture Project discussion that he once gave a donation at a fundraising dinner to the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish Catholic organization. A few months later, to his surprise, he received a note of thanks from Sinn Féin. "I didn’t expect to be giving money to a group that maintains a paramilitary terrorist organization, as some people say," Afran said. "This is the danger. You can easily find yourself in a setting that the government deems worthy of incarceration. This is why people cease to speak out."
The government attempted in court last week to smear Sami Al-Hajj, a journalist for the Al-Jazeera news network who was picked up by the U.S. military and imprisoned for nearly seven years in Guantanamo. This, for me, was one of the most chilling moments in the hearing.
"Just calling yourself a journalist doesn’t make you a journalist, like Al-Hajj," Loeb told the court. "He used journalism as a cover. He was a member of al-Qaida and provided Stinger missiles to al-Qaida."
Al-Hajj, despite Loeb’s assertions, was never charged with any crimes. And the slander by Loeb only highlighted the potential for misuse of this provision of the NDAA if it is not struck down.
The second central argument by the government was even more specious. Loeb claimed that Subsection 1021(e) of the NDAA exempts citizens from detention. Section 1021(e) states: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."
Afran countered Loeb by saying that Subsection 1021(e) illustrated that the NDAA assumed that U.S. citizens would be detained by the military, overturning two centuries of domestic law that forbids the military to carry out domestic policing. And military detention of citizens, Afran noted, is not permitted under the Constitution.
Afran quoted the NDAA bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who said on the floor of the Senate: "In the case where somebody is worried about being picked up by a rogue executive branch because they went to the wrong political rally, they don’t have to worry very long, because our federal courts have the right and the obligation to make sure the government proves their case that you are a member of al-Qaida and didn’t [just] go to a political rally."
Afran told the court that Graham’s statement implicitly acknowledged that U.S. citizens could be detained by the military under 1021(b)(2). "There is no reason for the sponsor to make that statement if he does not realize that the statute causes that chilling fear," Afran told the judges.
After the hearing Afran explained: "If the senator who sponsored and managed the bill believed people would be afraid of the law, then the plaintiffs obviously have a reasonably objective basis to fear the statute."
In speaking to the court Afran said of 1021(e): "It says it is applied to people in the United States. It presumes that they are going to be detained under some law. The only law we know of is this law. What other laws, before this one, allowed the military to detain people in this country?"
This was a question Judge Lohier, at Afran’s urging, asked Loeb during the argument. Loeb concurred that the NDAA was the only law he knew of that permitted the military to detain and hold U.S. citizens.
http://www.naturalnews.com/039046_military_drones_American_citizens_murder.html
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/039046_military_drones_American_citizens_murder.html#ixzz2KoP29IuO
Monday, February 11, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/039046_military_drones_American_citizens_murder.html#ixzz2KoOyrKRP
(NaturalNews) President Obama plans to use military drones in the skies over the United States to assassinate journalists, patriots and critics of his administration. That's the inescapable conclusion from the emerging pattern of evidence now publicly available -- keep reading for details.
Front and center in this pattern of evidence is the 16-page memo that was just released by Obama's lawyers in the Department of Justice. This memo puts forth a "legal justification" for the President to order the drone assassination of any American citizen he names -- anytime, anywhere, for any reason. This new power claimed by the President has no basis in federal law or the Constitution. It is an invented power of absolute tyranny that puts the power to decide who lives and who dies in the hands of one man. This document essentially legalizes the President acting as a serial murderer.
It is claimed that the purpose of this new power to simply name any American the President doesn't like and immediately have them struck by a Hellfire missile launched from a drone is designed to "protect America." Yet the 16-page memo that claims to justify all this was intentionally written to include Americans on U.S. soil as potential targets.
As Judge Andrew Napolitano explained just a few days ago on Fox News:
"This 16-page white paper is written so vaguely that the logic from it could... permit the President to kill Americans here in the United States."
That's the whole point, actually. If Americans on U.S. soil were to be excluded from such drone assassinations, such language would have been made readily apparent in the memo. But no such language is found in the memo. In fact, the tone of the document quite clearly states that the President has the authority to order drone killings of U.S. citizens anywhere in the world, under any circumstances.
This legal manipulation even has U.S. Senators worried. Democrat Senator Patrick J Leahy and Senator Charles Grassley sent a letter to Obama on Friday, stating, "The deliberate killing of a United States citizen pursuant to a targeted operation authorized or aided by our government raises significant constitutional and legal concerns."
That's the understatement of the year.
U.S. Senators are trying to create an "oversight committee" so that a few of them are part of the illegal, unconstitutional decision process of which Americans the U.S. government should murder next. As Kurt Nimmo reports with InfoWars.com:
Feinstein has proposed "legislation to ensure that drone strikes are carried out in a manner consistent with our values, and the proposal to create an analogue of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review the conduct of such strikes," in other words a secret tribunal that will hand down kill orders for Americans the government believes are "suspected militants."
If drones are to be unleashed under the values of Feinstein -- an outright traitor to the nation and a serial violator of the U.S. Constitution -- then God help us all. Remember, Feinstein is the Senator who has already said she wants all Americans to turn all their guns in. She literally wants the entire U.S. civilian population disarmed so that government has all the weapons, including drones which Feinstein wants flying over U.S. cities, ready to strike named American citizens at any moment.
[h=1]The American "battlefield" doctrine and the NDAA[/h]In defending the drone assassination powers of the President, you might hear language used that says drones will "only be used on the battlefield." That seems to imply they will only be used in the Middle East, right?
Wrong. The USA has been legally defined as the new "battlefield" by the NDAA. That's the National Defense Authorization Act which also allows for the arrest and indefinite detention of American citizens without trial, without legal representation and even without them ever being charged.
The USA is the new "battlefield," and when you combine the NDAA and the DOJ's new drone killing justification memo, you now have the claimed legal framework for any American on U.S. soil to be arrested, detained, tortured or blown to bits without warning and without even a single shred of evidence being presented against him.
Yes, this is America today. Right now. You are living under a military dictatorship and most of you don't even realize it yet. Even liberals and progressives are starting to wake up to Obama's tyranny, by the way. On Democracy Now, Daniel Ellsberg recently described Obama's actions as a "systematic assault on the Constitution."
[h=1]Who are the terrorists?[/h]Of course, anyone who raises these points will be immediately dismissed with the claim that all this new power in the hands of the President will only be used "against terrorists."
Okay, then who are the terrorists, exactly? It turns out they are YOU!
As Judge Napolitano recently explained:
The [Janet Napolitano DHS] memorandum said that people who are pro-life, people who believe in the right to keep and bear arms, returning veterans, people who think the government is too big and the IRS is too powerful, could be characterized as domestic terrorists. That could characterize two-thirds of the country. (Click here to see related video.)
Another DHS report named as terrorists anyone who opposes illegal immigration, abortion or federal taxes.
[h=1]The pieces of the puzzle[/h]So now it all becomes clear:
1) The NDAA legalized the federal government arresting, detaining and torturing American citizens if they were classified as "terrorists."
2) The DOJ drone-killing memo legalized the President murdering anyone he names by simply claiming they might be associated with "terrorists."
3) The DHS announces that anyone who isn't an absolutely Big Government boot-licker and Obama worshipper IS A TERRORIST.
And there you have it: The full circle of justification to use military drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. Simply call them terrorists, and the rest of the legal framework backs you up.
I repeat: All that is necessary to justify the murder of American citizens without trial is labeling them "terrorists" even with no evidence to support such a claim. The drone killings require no evidence. They only require the signature of one man.
[h=1]Who is likely on the drone strike target list in the USA[/h]So who is most likely to be assassinated by President Obama once drone strikes are fully unleashed in the USA?
• Journalists.
• Political opponents.
• Anti-government protesters. (One Hellfire missile takes 'em all out.)
• Online activists.
• Veterans.
• Gun owners and gun shops.
• Constitutionalists and libertarians.
Drone strikes are completely silent because the Hellfire missiles arrive faster than the speed of sound. You don't even hear the missile until after the explosion. The blast radius of a Hellfire missile is 15 - 20 meters, and everything inside that radius is completely obliterated. This is more than enough to destroy entire homes, apartments and office buildings, not to mention vehicles and even light bunkers.
World Net Daily editor Joseph Farah actually voiced his concern about Obama being reelected, saying that he believed Obama would "kill journalists" if he won a second term. Farah is not being paranoid. He's right on the money with where this is going. Click here to read his article published right before the 2012 election.
[h=1]Drones are weapons of tyranny[/h]In the history of America, rifles are the weapons of liberty, and in any war limited to just rifles and similar weapons, the People will always achieve victory over tyranny.
But tyrannies tend to rise up when specialized, highly-complex weapons come onto the scene, creating an imbalance of military power that suppresses the People. Drones are that new weapon: There is virtually no citizen defense against drones, and drones can strike targets anyone in the country with zero warning. You do not get called to appear in court, you do not get arrested, and you do not receive a warning. You're simply murdered by the U.S. President without warning and without a trial. That's the new America.
The cover story: Drone strikes that actually take out the homes of Obama's political enemies can even be explained away as "bombings" using conventional explosives. A convenient cover story can keep drones out of the news, even while drone strikes are taking out journalists, activists and critics of the criminal Obama regime.
You might wonder, then, what is the strategy for defending against drones? It all comes down to men with rifles raiding drone airfields and taking them over. Once again, rifles become the single most important tool of resistance in the face of tyranny, which is exactly why the government is right now desperately seeking to register and confiscate all rifles in the hands of U.S. citizens. The MQ-1C Warrior drone has an operational range of 675 miles, meaning that drone airfields must be relatively close to intended targets. The airfields are the weak link, and this is what Americans must take back if drone mass murder is unleashed against American citizens (by any president, now or in the future).
There are also some high-tech defenses against drones. Iran appears to have hacked a drone by feeding it false GPS signals, guiding it to land on an Iranian runway where it was then taken into custody by the government there. This sort of GPS hacking appears to be relatively simple to accomplish, but the technique has never been proven in an actual military conflict.
Another defense against drones is to stay on the move. Don't hole up in fixed locations for long periods of time. Drone strikes are only effective if the intended target's location is known with certainty. In a resistance war against a tyrannical government, resistance forces will of course remain very mobile and unpredictable in their locations and movements. This will cause the government to waste lots of Hellfire missiles blowing up empty houses and likely killing the wrong people.
Every drone strike against U.S. targets will, of course, enrage the population even further, resulting in yet another mass wave of recruitment into the resistance. The more Americans Obama (or another president) kills with drones, the more powerful the resistance becomes. This spiral continues until there is either a violent armed overthrow of the government or the entire resistance movement is mass murdered by the government itself. In the case of the latter, that's how we end up with Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other dictatorial tyrants who assume power in the aftermath of blood running in the streets.
[h=1]Stop being so naive -- this is happening NOW![/h]If you think any of this seems outlandish, you aren't paying attention. The 16-page drone assassination memo has already been published. The NDAA is federal law. The DHS memos are real. All of us who question government, who own firearms, and who believe in the Bill of Rights have already been named terrorists.
The stage is being set to wage an all-out war with the American people. That's the reason DHS has purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammo. It's the reason DHS is buying 7,000 full-auto assault rifles. All these weapons and ammo are for exclusive use inside the United States of America, on U.S. soil.
This is why thousands of bulletproof roadside checkpoints have been purchased by DHS. It's why steel cable dividers are being installed on highways, so that you can't turn around when approaching a TSA checkpoint. This is why talk of shooting gun owners is openly tolerated and even encouraged in the mainstream media and on social networks.
We are witnessing a full-on ramping up toward total war with the American people. This war will be caused (false-flagged) by the government itself, and it will be waged on U.S. soil, using drone assassinations, nationwide gun confiscation, FEMA camps and of course a declaration of Martial Law to justify it all.
The end game is a complete takeover of America by socialist / communist / fascist forces and the outright abolition of liberties and firearms in the hands of citizens. America is scheduled for termination, and people like Obama have been placed in power precisely because he can fool enough people for a sufficient amount of time to get this plan underway without popular resistance. Obama is seductive and hypnotic, so his followers will think he's helping America even while he's actually destroying it by design.
Drones are terminators in the sky, controlled by one man -- a tyrant who sits in the Oval Office and respects no boundaries of either the Constitution or federal law. He makes law up as he goes along, betraying his oath of office and violating the very tenants of justice upon which this country was founded.
Obama is a traitor to America and a danger to us all. For the sake of America's future, he must be impeached, thrown out of office and replaced with a President who actually upholds the Constitution and respects the laws of the land.
Sources for this story include:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/5/daniel_ellsberg_ndaa_indefinite_...
http://www.infowars.com/it-has-happened-here/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwJb5pbWhe4
http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/obamas-2nd-term-war-on-domestic-opposition...
| [h=1]Obama plans to use military drones against American journalists, freedom activists and critics of government[/h] |
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/039046_military_drones_American_citizens_murder.html#ixzz2KoP29IuO
Monday, February 11, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/039046_military_drones_American_citizens_murder.html#ixzz2KoOyrKRP
(NaturalNews) President Obama plans to use military drones in the skies over the United States to assassinate journalists, patriots and critics of his administration. That's the inescapable conclusion from the emerging pattern of evidence now publicly available -- keep reading for details.
Front and center in this pattern of evidence is the 16-page memo that was just released by Obama's lawyers in the Department of Justice. This memo puts forth a "legal justification" for the President to order the drone assassination of any American citizen he names -- anytime, anywhere, for any reason. This new power claimed by the President has no basis in federal law or the Constitution. It is an invented power of absolute tyranny that puts the power to decide who lives and who dies in the hands of one man. This document essentially legalizes the President acting as a serial murderer.
It is claimed that the purpose of this new power to simply name any American the President doesn't like and immediately have them struck by a Hellfire missile launched from a drone is designed to "protect America." Yet the 16-page memo that claims to justify all this was intentionally written to include Americans on U.S. soil as potential targets.
As Judge Andrew Napolitano explained just a few days ago on Fox News:
"This 16-page white paper is written so vaguely that the logic from it could... permit the President to kill Americans here in the United States."
That's the whole point, actually. If Americans on U.S. soil were to be excluded from such drone assassinations, such language would have been made readily apparent in the memo. But no such language is found in the memo. In fact, the tone of the document quite clearly states that the President has the authority to order drone killings of U.S. citizens anywhere in the world, under any circumstances.
This legal manipulation even has U.S. Senators worried. Democrat Senator Patrick J Leahy and Senator Charles Grassley sent a letter to Obama on Friday, stating, "The deliberate killing of a United States citizen pursuant to a targeted operation authorized or aided by our government raises significant constitutional and legal concerns."
That's the understatement of the year.
U.S. Senators are trying to create an "oversight committee" so that a few of them are part of the illegal, unconstitutional decision process of which Americans the U.S. government should murder next. As Kurt Nimmo reports with InfoWars.com:
Feinstein has proposed "legislation to ensure that drone strikes are carried out in a manner consistent with our values, and the proposal to create an analogue of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review the conduct of such strikes," in other words a secret tribunal that will hand down kill orders for Americans the government believes are "suspected militants."
If drones are to be unleashed under the values of Feinstein -- an outright traitor to the nation and a serial violator of the U.S. Constitution -- then God help us all. Remember, Feinstein is the Senator who has already said she wants all Americans to turn all their guns in. She literally wants the entire U.S. civilian population disarmed so that government has all the weapons, including drones which Feinstein wants flying over U.S. cities, ready to strike named American citizens at any moment.
[h=1]The American "battlefield" doctrine and the NDAA[/h]In defending the drone assassination powers of the President, you might hear language used that says drones will "only be used on the battlefield." That seems to imply they will only be used in the Middle East, right?
Wrong. The USA has been legally defined as the new "battlefield" by the NDAA. That's the National Defense Authorization Act which also allows for the arrest and indefinite detention of American citizens without trial, without legal representation and even without them ever being charged.
The USA is the new "battlefield," and when you combine the NDAA and the DOJ's new drone killing justification memo, you now have the claimed legal framework for any American on U.S. soil to be arrested, detained, tortured or blown to bits without warning and without even a single shred of evidence being presented against him.
Yes, this is America today. Right now. You are living under a military dictatorship and most of you don't even realize it yet. Even liberals and progressives are starting to wake up to Obama's tyranny, by the way. On Democracy Now, Daniel Ellsberg recently described Obama's actions as a "systematic assault on the Constitution."
[h=1]Who are the terrorists?[/h]Of course, anyone who raises these points will be immediately dismissed with the claim that all this new power in the hands of the President will only be used "against terrorists."
Okay, then who are the terrorists, exactly? It turns out they are YOU!
As Judge Napolitano recently explained:
The [Janet Napolitano DHS] memorandum said that people who are pro-life, people who believe in the right to keep and bear arms, returning veterans, people who think the government is too big and the IRS is too powerful, could be characterized as domestic terrorists. That could characterize two-thirds of the country. (Click here to see related video.)
Another DHS report named as terrorists anyone who opposes illegal immigration, abortion or federal taxes.
[h=1]The pieces of the puzzle[/h]So now it all becomes clear:
1) The NDAA legalized the federal government arresting, detaining and torturing American citizens if they were classified as "terrorists."
2) The DOJ drone-killing memo legalized the President murdering anyone he names by simply claiming they might be associated with "terrorists."
3) The DHS announces that anyone who isn't an absolutely Big Government boot-licker and Obama worshipper IS A TERRORIST.
And there you have it: The full circle of justification to use military drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. Simply call them terrorists, and the rest of the legal framework backs you up.
I repeat: All that is necessary to justify the murder of American citizens without trial is labeling them "terrorists" even with no evidence to support such a claim. The drone killings require no evidence. They only require the signature of one man.
[h=1]Who is likely on the drone strike target list in the USA[/h]So who is most likely to be assassinated by President Obama once drone strikes are fully unleashed in the USA?
• Journalists.
• Political opponents.
• Anti-government protesters. (One Hellfire missile takes 'em all out.)
• Online activists.
• Veterans.
• Gun owners and gun shops.
• Constitutionalists and libertarians.
Drone strikes are completely silent because the Hellfire missiles arrive faster than the speed of sound. You don't even hear the missile until after the explosion. The blast radius of a Hellfire missile is 15 - 20 meters, and everything inside that radius is completely obliterated. This is more than enough to destroy entire homes, apartments and office buildings, not to mention vehicles and even light bunkers.
World Net Daily editor Joseph Farah actually voiced his concern about Obama being reelected, saying that he believed Obama would "kill journalists" if he won a second term. Farah is not being paranoid. He's right on the money with where this is going. Click here to read his article published right before the 2012 election.
[h=1]Drones are weapons of tyranny[/h]In the history of America, rifles are the weapons of liberty, and in any war limited to just rifles and similar weapons, the People will always achieve victory over tyranny.
But tyrannies tend to rise up when specialized, highly-complex weapons come onto the scene, creating an imbalance of military power that suppresses the People. Drones are that new weapon: There is virtually no citizen defense against drones, and drones can strike targets anyone in the country with zero warning. You do not get called to appear in court, you do not get arrested, and you do not receive a warning. You're simply murdered by the U.S. President without warning and without a trial. That's the new America.
The cover story: Drone strikes that actually take out the homes of Obama's political enemies can even be explained away as "bombings" using conventional explosives. A convenient cover story can keep drones out of the news, even while drone strikes are taking out journalists, activists and critics of the criminal Obama regime.
You might wonder, then, what is the strategy for defending against drones? It all comes down to men with rifles raiding drone airfields and taking them over. Once again, rifles become the single most important tool of resistance in the face of tyranny, which is exactly why the government is right now desperately seeking to register and confiscate all rifles in the hands of U.S. citizens. The MQ-1C Warrior drone has an operational range of 675 miles, meaning that drone airfields must be relatively close to intended targets. The airfields are the weak link, and this is what Americans must take back if drone mass murder is unleashed against American citizens (by any president, now or in the future).
There are also some high-tech defenses against drones. Iran appears to have hacked a drone by feeding it false GPS signals, guiding it to land on an Iranian runway where it was then taken into custody by the government there. This sort of GPS hacking appears to be relatively simple to accomplish, but the technique has never been proven in an actual military conflict.
Another defense against drones is to stay on the move. Don't hole up in fixed locations for long periods of time. Drone strikes are only effective if the intended target's location is known with certainty. In a resistance war against a tyrannical government, resistance forces will of course remain very mobile and unpredictable in their locations and movements. This will cause the government to waste lots of Hellfire missiles blowing up empty houses and likely killing the wrong people.
Every drone strike against U.S. targets will, of course, enrage the population even further, resulting in yet another mass wave of recruitment into the resistance. The more Americans Obama (or another president) kills with drones, the more powerful the resistance becomes. This spiral continues until there is either a violent armed overthrow of the government or the entire resistance movement is mass murdered by the government itself. In the case of the latter, that's how we end up with Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other dictatorial tyrants who assume power in the aftermath of blood running in the streets.
[h=1]Stop being so naive -- this is happening NOW![/h]If you think any of this seems outlandish, you aren't paying attention. The 16-page drone assassination memo has already been published. The NDAA is federal law. The DHS memos are real. All of us who question government, who own firearms, and who believe in the Bill of Rights have already been named terrorists.
The stage is being set to wage an all-out war with the American people. That's the reason DHS has purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammo. It's the reason DHS is buying 7,000 full-auto assault rifles. All these weapons and ammo are for exclusive use inside the United States of America, on U.S. soil.
This is why thousands of bulletproof roadside checkpoints have been purchased by DHS. It's why steel cable dividers are being installed on highways, so that you can't turn around when approaching a TSA checkpoint. This is why talk of shooting gun owners is openly tolerated and even encouraged in the mainstream media and on social networks.
We are witnessing a full-on ramping up toward total war with the American people. This war will be caused (false-flagged) by the government itself, and it will be waged on U.S. soil, using drone assassinations, nationwide gun confiscation, FEMA camps and of course a declaration of Martial Law to justify it all.
The end game is a complete takeover of America by socialist / communist / fascist forces and the outright abolition of liberties and firearms in the hands of citizens. America is scheduled for termination, and people like Obama have been placed in power precisely because he can fool enough people for a sufficient amount of time to get this plan underway without popular resistance. Obama is seductive and hypnotic, so his followers will think he's helping America even while he's actually destroying it by design.
Drones are terminators in the sky, controlled by one man -- a tyrant who sits in the Oval Office and respects no boundaries of either the Constitution or federal law. He makes law up as he goes along, betraying his oath of office and violating the very tenants of justice upon which this country was founded.
Obama is a traitor to America and a danger to us all. For the sake of America's future, he must be impeached, thrown out of office and replaced with a President who actually upholds the Constitution and respects the laws of the land.
Sources for this story include:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/5/daniel_ellsberg_ndaa_indefinite_...
http://www.infowars.com/it-has-happened-here/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwJb5pbWhe4
http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/obamas-2nd-term-war-on-domestic-opposition...
Daniel Ellsberg who released the pentagon papers in the 70's has spoken out saying that the US government is treating its own people as the enemy:
[video=youtube;67Esmi1thUM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Esmi1thUM&feature=player_embedded#![/video]
[video=youtube;67Esmi1thUM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Esmi1thUM&feature=player_embedded#![/video]
http://www.infowars.com/why-the-banking-elite-wants-riots-in-america/
[h=1]Why The Banking Elite Want Riots in America[/h]
Civil War 2: The economic imperative for mass social unrest
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Infowars.com
February 11, 2013
[h=1]Why The Banking Elite Want Riots in America[/h]
Civil War 2: The economic imperative for mass social unrest
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Infowars.com
February 11, 2013
Every indication clearly suggests that authorities in the United States are preparing for widespread civil unrest. This trend has not emerged by accident – it is part of a tried and tested method used by the banking elite to seize control of nations, strip them of their assets, and absorb them into the new world order.
There is a crucial economic imperative as to why the elite is seeking to engineer and exploit social unrest.
As respected investigative reporter Greg Palast exposed in 2001, the global banking elite, namely the World Bank and the IMF, have honed a technique that has allowed them to asset-strip numerous other countries in the past – that technique has come to be known at the “IMF riot.”
In April 2001, Palast obtained leaked World Bank documents that outlined a four step process on how to loot nations of their wealth and infrastructure, placing control of resources into the hands of the banking elite.
One of the final steps of the process, the “IMF riot,” detailed how the elite would plan for mass civil unrest ahead of time that would have the effect of scaring off investors and causing government bankruptcies.
“This economic arson has its bright side – for foreigners, who can then pick off remaining assets at fire sale prices,” writes Palast, adding, “A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers but the clear winners seem to be the western banks and US Treasury.”
In other words, the banking elite creates the very economic environment – soaring interest rates, spiraling food prices, poverty, lower standards of living – that precipitates civil unrest – and then like a vulture swoops down to devour what remains of the country’s assets on the cheap.
We have already seen this process unfold in places like Bolivia, Ecuador, Indonesia, Greece and Argentina. Next on the chopping block are Spain, Italy, Britain and France – all of which have seen widespread riots over the last two years.
As Ha-Joon Chang explains in the Guardian, the roots of Europe’s riots were sparked by “governments inflicting an old-IMF-style programme on their own populations,” namely the same programs of “austerity, privatisation and deregulation,” that caused the riots of the 80′s and 90′s in poorer countries.
Although the likes of the IMF and the World Bank have pillaged half of the globe with their economic terrorism, America remains the ultimate prize. The first step of the four step process for bankster seizure of a country – privatization of state-owned assets – is already well under way in America, with infrastructure being sold off to foreign corporations, with the aid of Goldman Sachs, at a frightening pace.
A key component of the banking elite’s insidious agenda to bring about an economic collapse in America by design also centers around the process of de-industrializing the country, eviscerating the nation’s platform for self-sufficiency and replacing it with dependence on banker bailouts. This has already been largely achieved in Europe – with just about every major economy on the continent run by Goldman Sachs-affiliated technocrats.
In the United States, 32 per cent of manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000, while 56,000 manufacturing facilities have been mothballed since 2001. The Obama administration has also declared war on the coal industry, with Obama himself promising to “bankrupt” anyone who tries to build a new coal plant. Meanwhile, China builds a new coal plant every two weeks.
Given the clear economic motive for stirring unrest in the United States, we’d expect to see preparations for domestic disorder in numerous different guises – and indeed the signs are everywhere.
National Defense Authorization Act
The Obama administration’s passage of NDAA legislation that authorizes kidnapping and indefinite detention without trial of American citizens on U.S. soil serves to create the framework for mass arrests of protesters and journalists in a time of declared national emergency.
Obama’s War on Whistleblowers
The Obama administration’s brazen and aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers for divulging government corruption in the public interest is clearly a device designed to intimidate whistleblowers from speaking out when the proverbial hits the fan.
Spying on Social Media for Signs of Unrest
The Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies are actively engaged in spying on social media as well as news websites to look for reports or comments that “reflect adversely on the U.S. government and the DHS.” The government is on the lookout for the ‘tipping point’ when heated online rhetoric spills onto the streets in the form of unrest.
Building Huge Spy Centers to Track Unrest
The NSA is building the country’s biggest spy center in the middle of the Utah desert. The purpose of the data facility is to intercept, “all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”
By creating a gigantic database of every communication imaginable, the NSA hopes to monitor and pre-empt the spread of mass civil unrest in America.
Preparing Drones for Domestic Oppression
Last week, the Justice Department re-affirmed its position that the Obama administration can use armed drones to assassinate Americans. Under the NDAA, the whole of the United States has been declared a “battlefield,” meaning that drones may soon be used to execute American citizens on U.S. soil.
A government that resorts to killing its own citizens without any legal process whatsoever is clearly a dictatorship engaged in domestic oppression. The only imaginable scenario under which this program would be justifiable was if the U.S. was under a state of martial law and the government was on the verge of collapse.
Preparing for Martial Law
The Department of Homeland Security has purchased over 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition in the last 10 months alone. At the height of combat operations in Iraq, the U.S. Army only used 5.5 million bullets a month. Why has the DHS stockpiled enough bullets for a 30 year war if it is not preparing for some form of domestic disorder?
Preparation for martial law can be seen in numerous different guises, but perhaps the most chilling is a nationwide FEMA program which is training pastors and other religious representatives to become secret police enforcers who teach their congregations to “obey the government” in preparation for the implementation of martial law, property and firearm seizures, mass vaccination programs and forced relocation.
Characterizing the American People as the New Target of the War on Terror
The U.S. Army’s Operating Concept 2016-2028 dictates that the military’s “full spectrum operations” will include “operations within American borders.” Scenarios where Americans form into militia groups and become “insurrectionists” as a result of an economic collapse and have to be eliminated by the U.S. Army have already been mapped out by military planners.
A leaked U.S. Army manual also reveals plans for the military to carry out “Civil Disturbance Operations” during which troops will be used domestically to quell riots, confiscate firearms and even kill Americans on U.S. soil during mass civil unrest.
The Department of Homeland Security’s ‘See Something, Say Something’ program habitually portrays middle class Americans as terrorists. In addition, numerous DHS-funded reports have characterized “liberty lovers” and other constitutionalists as domestic terrorists.
Every indication presents us with the inescapable reality that the US government is preparing for mass civil unrest at some point over the next five to ten years. When we look at the recent history of nations that have suffered financial collapse, domestic disorder is clearly a key component of a deliberate agenda on behalf of the banking elite to undermine and loot economies – confiscating national sovereignty in the process.
In Part 2, we’ll explore why the elite, although keen on provoking mass social unrest and even civil war, are destined to lose the battle.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.
How do you explain drone killings? With post-Orwellian “Newspeak”
By Andrew O'Hehir
http://uruknet.info/?p=m95111&hd=&size=1&l=e
(Credit: Reuters/Jason Reed)
In the logic of perma-war, "imminent threat" is everywhere and drone attacks on Americans are no problem
February 10, 2013
John Brennan’s confirmation hearing on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee struck many observers as a small but significant step in the direction of openness, a chink in the armor of secrecy that the last two presidential administrations have erected around the "war on terror." Maybe that will turn out to be correct, and the incoming CIA director – the principal architect of President Obama’s drone war, and until recently a defender of rendition and "enhanced interrogation" – will launch a new era of transparency in Langley. While we wait for that, would you like to see this bridge I’ve got for sale in Brooklyn?
Indeed, watching the Brennan hearing, and then struggling through the troubling Justice Department "white paper" spelling out the legal justification for the drone killings of American citizens (which was recently acquired and released by NBC News), left me with quite a different feeling. In large part, this was the feeling that our government’s imperial creep continues uninterrupted, that most people simply don’t care (irrespective of their supposed political views) and that almost everyone involved in this charade, especially those of us in the media who are supposed to serve as the watchdogs, has agreed to ignore the most obvious and glaring questions.
Beyond all that, and to a large extent underlying it, there is also the post-Orwellian creep of our language, and of all public discourse, towards emptiness. What Orwell described was a phenomenon distinct to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, the abrupt replacement of ordinary language with a propagandistic and bureaucratic Newspeak designed to make ideological resistance impossible. In the electoral dictatorship now developing in the United States – and no, that isn’t a contradiction in terms – you can find sterling examples of such Newspeak and doublethink. But the most prominent American version, which I’m calling post-Orwellian, is subtler: Ordinary words whose meanings seem clear enough on the surface, such as "war" or "enemy" or "self-defense" or "imminent" (not to mention the ever-fraught "terrorism") turn out not to mean anything at all, or to be legalistic terms of art with endlessly expansive frames of reference.
If this is starting to sound too much like a graduate seminar in literary theory, let’s remember that the real subject here is an amorphous 12-year war conducted largely in secret by two presidential administrations from opposing parties. Its result, if not its true purpose, has been the creation of an invisible and unaccountable national-security state apparatus and the consolidation of immense and unprecedented power in the executive branch. If the Bush administration claimed the right to detain and torture anyone it wanted to at "black sites" in insalubrious parts of the world, the Obama administration has arguably gone even further, claiming the right to kill anyone anywhere whom it deems to be an enemy combatant, including United States citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son, with long-range drone strikes piloted from afar.
Historians, political scientists and policy analysts will be hashing out the rights and wrongs of these issues for years to come, and there’s no denying that one reason we elect presidents is to entrust them with decisions that cannot realistically be made in public. But the combination of imperial creep and linguistic creep, and the reflexive America-first jingoism of almost all public discourse, even among so-called liberals, makes it difficult even to ask certain kinds of questions without seeming dim or embarrassing. Why, for instance, does the United States, and only the United States, possess the authority to treat the entire developing world as a war zone and rain high-tech death from above on villages in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and other places so classified we don’t know about them yet? (Some sources suggest that upwards of 3,000 alleged al-Qaida militants have been killed by drone strikes in those places during Obama’s presidency, along with several hundred civilians.)
I suppose to some people the answer seems self-evident, and I don’t want to sound hopelessly naïve: Yes, the U.S. is the world’s only military superpower at the moment, yada yada. But, seriously, try to imagine what would happen if the Chinese or the Iranians started routinely blowing up people they didn’t like in countries thousands of miles away, randomly killing civilians by the dozens along the way. Every senator on that committee would give birth to multiple litters of kittens, call for the launching of World War III, and immediately pass laws granting the president unlimited war powers into the indefinite future. (OK, they already did that, pretty much.) The rhetoric of American exceptionalism, and in particular the idea that American military force is indispensable to world order and no longer needs to respect old-fashioned ideas about national sovereignty or what a war is or how we define the enemy – none of that is ever questioned, or even comes up.
A long time ago in a different context, Joan Didion observed that the reporter’s job was to "observe the observable." What I observed on Thursday was that Brennan’s appearance before the committee, and his garrulous New Jerseyite act, made for effective political theater, but that its effectiveness had more to do with the semiotics of the event than with what was actually said. (I’m definitely never playing cards for money with that guy.) Specifically, the hearing was a show of faux-deference to legislative authority by an emissary from the imperial palace, which left the senators almost cravenly grateful for a few scraps of information and noncommittal promises of future cooperation. (I didn’t register which Republican senator used up his time by chatting about Chris Christie and complimenting Brennan’s wife.) Sure, a few of them complained, but everybody in that room understood that once Brennan is confirmed, the committee will be lucky to get a Hallmark card out of him next Christmas.
Brennan gave a cool performance, in both the ordinary sense and the Marshall McLuhan sense, and remained unflappable in the face of "hot" Code Pink protesters who disrupted the proceedings, calling him a war criminal and listing the names of children killed by drones. While the protesters rapidly became part of the spectacle’s colorful background, Brennan stuck to the leading role of a grownup who understands the nature of reality when others do not. You could even say he was there to define reality, an ultimate exercise in imperial power. Sounding eerily like Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara circa 1969, Brennan calmly explained that many of us misunderstood the CIA’s good intentions, and failed to appreciate "the care we take, the agony we go through, to make sure we do not have any collateral injuries and deaths."
In fairness, we heard a few extraordinary things said about topics that are almost never discussed in open congressional session. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., almost the only Senate Democrat willing to criticize President Obama on civil liberties, told Brennan, "Every American has the right to know when their government believes it’s allowed to kill them." (The director-designate did not respond directly.) Newly elected Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, suggested that the CIA’s drone-targeting decisions should be subject to judicial review, as espionage warrants are. King’s Maine colleague Susan Collins, arguably the Senate’s last moderate Republican, actually challenged the effectiveness, if not the underlying morality, of the drone war: "If the cancer of al-Qaida is metastasizing, do we need a new treatment?"
By now Collins, King, Wyden and the rest of the House and Senate intelligence committees may have gotten a chance to read the secret Justice Department evidence and arguments used to justify the targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al-Qaida imam who was killed by a drone in Yemen in September 2011. Whether those memos, released to the committees a day before the Brennan hearing, answer the questions surrounding Awlaki’s death is something you and I may never know. We can, however, read the long-winded and repetitious DOJ "white paper" disclosed by NBC, which is supposed to supply a legal framework for cases like Awlaki’s, and to answer Wyden’s question about when the government can kill its own citizens. (That document wasn’t intended for public consumption either, but it was not classified and publishing or reading it is presumably not a crime.)
I would say that this white paper is a masterwork of ex post facto reasoning, or arguing from conclusions, except that it really isn’t. Even to the non-legal eye, some of it is pretty weak, such as the argument that attacking and killing a U.S. citizen in a foreign country does not necessarily violate that person’s constitutional rights, or specific federal laws against murder and manslaughter committed overseas. The key concepts repeated throughout the document, over and over again, are these: If the targeted person is "a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaida or an associated force," and if "an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States," and if the person’s "capture is infeasible," and if the operation is to be conducted in accordance with "applicable law of war principles," then it’s OK to kill that person.
None of these reasonable-sounding terms are ever satisfactorily defined, and the basic mode of argumentation is to repeat them over and over again until all meaning and sense disappear. We are offered no clues about how someone is defined as a "senior operational leader," or what constitutes an "associated force" of al-Qaida. (Or exactly what al-Qaida is, a name that has been borrowed by disconnected people all over the Islamic world.) Is every loser in Somalia with a few Kalashnikovs who decides he’s a jihadi an "associated force"? Nor are we enlightened as to which "informed, high-level official" gets to decide that someone is an imminent threat, or that capturing him is "infeasible." (Brennan assured the senators on Thursday that accused terrorists always have the right to surrender, though I’m not sure a drone is equipped to handle that.)
The more you read this damn thing, in fact, the less illuminating it becomes. The war against al-Qaida, we are told, is a borderless and indefinite global struggle, "a non-international armed conflict" with "a transnational non-state actor," and the government recognizes no "strict geographical limit on [its] permissible scope." In other words, a potential enemy combatant, and the substitution of the laws of war for normal international law, may be found anywhere at any time – potentially within the United States itself, although that possibility is not mentioned.
While the phrase "imminent threat of violent attack" is repeated many times as a central mantra of justification, as if to conjure up ticking-bomb scenarios, it takes the authors some time to flesh it out – and there turns out to be a good reason for that. At his hearing, Brennan sought to reassure politicians, protesters and the public that the U.S. did not use drones to punish terrorists for past misdeeds, only to prevent them from committing future carnage. Yet the white paper casts things in a somewhat different light, ultimately making clear that "imminent" does not actually mean, you know, imminent:
"First, the condition that an operational leader present an 'imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future." Well, OK then! Al-Qaida leaders, by definition, are "continually planning to kill Americans," and the group "would engage in such attacks regularly to the extent it were able to do so." Since "the U.S. government may not be aware of all al-Qaida plots as they are developing and thus cannot be confident that none is about to occur," the threat demands "a broader concept of imminence," which apparently resolves to the notion that "the nation may have a limited window of opportunity within which to strike."
If I’m reading this correctly, the legal concept of an "imminent threat" is necessary here because it turns these drone attacks into urgent and justifiable acts of war rather than targeted assassinations of political or ideological opponents, which would be illegal under both American and international law. Since there is no specific, identifiable threat to Americans in most of these cases involving random people on the other side of the world, al-Qaida members and their fellow travelers are to be defined as presenting a permanent and chronic "imminent threat." The "broader concept of imminence" makes it permissible to kill them whenever we get the chance.
Those of us outside the government-intelligence complex, as I said earlier, have no way of evaluating the case for taking out Awlaki or his 16-year-old son (who may have been collateral damage in an attack on someone else). If we imagine that he was about to send a posse of suicide bombers to a shopping mall in his native New Mexico, we might concede the point that his "citizenship would not immunize him from a lethal operation," in the white paper’s phrase. But if I’m reading between the lines accurately, the real evidence against Awlaki was much more nebulous than that. They got a shot at him and they took it, and then maybe they started worrying about the legal ramifications of his birth certificate.
We have no choice, for the moment, but to fall back on the idea that the president appears to be a thoughtful person and to take his decision to kill his own citizens on trust. But let’s quit pretending that putting our faith in the goodness of Caesar has anything to do with democracy. We can also hope that a few of the legislators entrusted with constitutional oversight will continue to ask questions. It’s not an inspiring prospect, given the dysfunctional character of Washington, the public apathy about war policy and the near-imperial power of the executive branch, which will outlive this president as it did the last one. As the white paper and the Brennan hearings demonstrate, the language of government contains ever less signal, and ever more noise. The words used by our rulers have become like drones driven by Langley flyboys, flying deep into hostile territories of non-meaning; they hover above us day and night, driving away all thought with their disconcerting buzz.
By Andrew O'Hehir
http://uruknet.info/?p=m95111&hd=&size=1&l=e
(Credit: Reuters/Jason Reed)
In the logic of perma-war, "imminent threat" is everywhere and drone attacks on Americans are no problem
February 10, 2013
John Brennan’s confirmation hearing on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee struck many observers as a small but significant step in the direction of openness, a chink in the armor of secrecy that the last two presidential administrations have erected around the "war on terror." Maybe that will turn out to be correct, and the incoming CIA director – the principal architect of President Obama’s drone war, and until recently a defender of rendition and "enhanced interrogation" – will launch a new era of transparency in Langley. While we wait for that, would you like to see this bridge I’ve got for sale in Brooklyn?
Indeed, watching the Brennan hearing, and then struggling through the troubling Justice Department "white paper" spelling out the legal justification for the drone killings of American citizens (which was recently acquired and released by NBC News), left me with quite a different feeling. In large part, this was the feeling that our government’s imperial creep continues uninterrupted, that most people simply don’t care (irrespective of their supposed political views) and that almost everyone involved in this charade, especially those of us in the media who are supposed to serve as the watchdogs, has agreed to ignore the most obvious and glaring questions.
Beyond all that, and to a large extent underlying it, there is also the post-Orwellian creep of our language, and of all public discourse, towards emptiness. What Orwell described was a phenomenon distinct to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, the abrupt replacement of ordinary language with a propagandistic and bureaucratic Newspeak designed to make ideological resistance impossible. In the electoral dictatorship now developing in the United States – and no, that isn’t a contradiction in terms – you can find sterling examples of such Newspeak and doublethink. But the most prominent American version, which I’m calling post-Orwellian, is subtler: Ordinary words whose meanings seem clear enough on the surface, such as "war" or "enemy" or "self-defense" or "imminent" (not to mention the ever-fraught "terrorism") turn out not to mean anything at all, or to be legalistic terms of art with endlessly expansive frames of reference.
If this is starting to sound too much like a graduate seminar in literary theory, let’s remember that the real subject here is an amorphous 12-year war conducted largely in secret by two presidential administrations from opposing parties. Its result, if not its true purpose, has been the creation of an invisible and unaccountable national-security state apparatus and the consolidation of immense and unprecedented power in the executive branch. If the Bush administration claimed the right to detain and torture anyone it wanted to at "black sites" in insalubrious parts of the world, the Obama administration has arguably gone even further, claiming the right to kill anyone anywhere whom it deems to be an enemy combatant, including United States citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son, with long-range drone strikes piloted from afar.
Historians, political scientists and policy analysts will be hashing out the rights and wrongs of these issues for years to come, and there’s no denying that one reason we elect presidents is to entrust them with decisions that cannot realistically be made in public. But the combination of imperial creep and linguistic creep, and the reflexive America-first jingoism of almost all public discourse, even among so-called liberals, makes it difficult even to ask certain kinds of questions without seeming dim or embarrassing. Why, for instance, does the United States, and only the United States, possess the authority to treat the entire developing world as a war zone and rain high-tech death from above on villages in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and other places so classified we don’t know about them yet? (Some sources suggest that upwards of 3,000 alleged al-Qaida militants have been killed by drone strikes in those places during Obama’s presidency, along with several hundred civilians.)
I suppose to some people the answer seems self-evident, and I don’t want to sound hopelessly naïve: Yes, the U.S. is the world’s only military superpower at the moment, yada yada. But, seriously, try to imagine what would happen if the Chinese or the Iranians started routinely blowing up people they didn’t like in countries thousands of miles away, randomly killing civilians by the dozens along the way. Every senator on that committee would give birth to multiple litters of kittens, call for the launching of World War III, and immediately pass laws granting the president unlimited war powers into the indefinite future. (OK, they already did that, pretty much.) The rhetoric of American exceptionalism, and in particular the idea that American military force is indispensable to world order and no longer needs to respect old-fashioned ideas about national sovereignty or what a war is or how we define the enemy – none of that is ever questioned, or even comes up.
A long time ago in a different context, Joan Didion observed that the reporter’s job was to "observe the observable." What I observed on Thursday was that Brennan’s appearance before the committee, and his garrulous New Jerseyite act, made for effective political theater, but that its effectiveness had more to do with the semiotics of the event than with what was actually said. (I’m definitely never playing cards for money with that guy.) Specifically, the hearing was a show of faux-deference to legislative authority by an emissary from the imperial palace, which left the senators almost cravenly grateful for a few scraps of information and noncommittal promises of future cooperation. (I didn’t register which Republican senator used up his time by chatting about Chris Christie and complimenting Brennan’s wife.) Sure, a few of them complained, but everybody in that room understood that once Brennan is confirmed, the committee will be lucky to get a Hallmark card out of him next Christmas.
Brennan gave a cool performance, in both the ordinary sense and the Marshall McLuhan sense, and remained unflappable in the face of "hot" Code Pink protesters who disrupted the proceedings, calling him a war criminal and listing the names of children killed by drones. While the protesters rapidly became part of the spectacle’s colorful background, Brennan stuck to the leading role of a grownup who understands the nature of reality when others do not. You could even say he was there to define reality, an ultimate exercise in imperial power. Sounding eerily like Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara circa 1969, Brennan calmly explained that many of us misunderstood the CIA’s good intentions, and failed to appreciate "the care we take, the agony we go through, to make sure we do not have any collateral injuries and deaths."
In fairness, we heard a few extraordinary things said about topics that are almost never discussed in open congressional session. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., almost the only Senate Democrat willing to criticize President Obama on civil liberties, told Brennan, "Every American has the right to know when their government believes it’s allowed to kill them." (The director-designate did not respond directly.) Newly elected Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, suggested that the CIA’s drone-targeting decisions should be subject to judicial review, as espionage warrants are. King’s Maine colleague Susan Collins, arguably the Senate’s last moderate Republican, actually challenged the effectiveness, if not the underlying morality, of the drone war: "If the cancer of al-Qaida is metastasizing, do we need a new treatment?"
By now Collins, King, Wyden and the rest of the House and Senate intelligence committees may have gotten a chance to read the secret Justice Department evidence and arguments used to justify the targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al-Qaida imam who was killed by a drone in Yemen in September 2011. Whether those memos, released to the committees a day before the Brennan hearing, answer the questions surrounding Awlaki’s death is something you and I may never know. We can, however, read the long-winded and repetitious DOJ "white paper" disclosed by NBC, which is supposed to supply a legal framework for cases like Awlaki’s, and to answer Wyden’s question about when the government can kill its own citizens. (That document wasn’t intended for public consumption either, but it was not classified and publishing or reading it is presumably not a crime.)
I would say that this white paper is a masterwork of ex post facto reasoning, or arguing from conclusions, except that it really isn’t. Even to the non-legal eye, some of it is pretty weak, such as the argument that attacking and killing a U.S. citizen in a foreign country does not necessarily violate that person’s constitutional rights, or specific federal laws against murder and manslaughter committed overseas. The key concepts repeated throughout the document, over and over again, are these: If the targeted person is "a U.S. citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaida or an associated force," and if "an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States," and if the person’s "capture is infeasible," and if the operation is to be conducted in accordance with "applicable law of war principles," then it’s OK to kill that person.
None of these reasonable-sounding terms are ever satisfactorily defined, and the basic mode of argumentation is to repeat them over and over again until all meaning and sense disappear. We are offered no clues about how someone is defined as a "senior operational leader," or what constitutes an "associated force" of al-Qaida. (Or exactly what al-Qaida is, a name that has been borrowed by disconnected people all over the Islamic world.) Is every loser in Somalia with a few Kalashnikovs who decides he’s a jihadi an "associated force"? Nor are we enlightened as to which "informed, high-level official" gets to decide that someone is an imminent threat, or that capturing him is "infeasible." (Brennan assured the senators on Thursday that accused terrorists always have the right to surrender, though I’m not sure a drone is equipped to handle that.)
The more you read this damn thing, in fact, the less illuminating it becomes. The war against al-Qaida, we are told, is a borderless and indefinite global struggle, "a non-international armed conflict" with "a transnational non-state actor," and the government recognizes no "strict geographical limit on [its] permissible scope." In other words, a potential enemy combatant, and the substitution of the laws of war for normal international law, may be found anywhere at any time – potentially within the United States itself, although that possibility is not mentioned.
While the phrase "imminent threat of violent attack" is repeated many times as a central mantra of justification, as if to conjure up ticking-bomb scenarios, it takes the authors some time to flesh it out – and there turns out to be a good reason for that. At his hearing, Brennan sought to reassure politicians, protesters and the public that the U.S. did not use drones to punish terrorists for past misdeeds, only to prevent them from committing future carnage. Yet the white paper casts things in a somewhat different light, ultimately making clear that "imminent" does not actually mean, you know, imminent:
"First, the condition that an operational leader present an 'imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future." Well, OK then! Al-Qaida leaders, by definition, are "continually planning to kill Americans," and the group "would engage in such attacks regularly to the extent it were able to do so." Since "the U.S. government may not be aware of all al-Qaida plots as they are developing and thus cannot be confident that none is about to occur," the threat demands "a broader concept of imminence," which apparently resolves to the notion that "the nation may have a limited window of opportunity within which to strike."
If I’m reading this correctly, the legal concept of an "imminent threat" is necessary here because it turns these drone attacks into urgent and justifiable acts of war rather than targeted assassinations of political or ideological opponents, which would be illegal under both American and international law. Since there is no specific, identifiable threat to Americans in most of these cases involving random people on the other side of the world, al-Qaida members and their fellow travelers are to be defined as presenting a permanent and chronic "imminent threat." The "broader concept of imminence" makes it permissible to kill them whenever we get the chance.
Those of us outside the government-intelligence complex, as I said earlier, have no way of evaluating the case for taking out Awlaki or his 16-year-old son (who may have been collateral damage in an attack on someone else). If we imagine that he was about to send a posse of suicide bombers to a shopping mall in his native New Mexico, we might concede the point that his "citizenship would not immunize him from a lethal operation," in the white paper’s phrase. But if I’m reading between the lines accurately, the real evidence against Awlaki was much more nebulous than that. They got a shot at him and they took it, and then maybe they started worrying about the legal ramifications of his birth certificate.
We have no choice, for the moment, but to fall back on the idea that the president appears to be a thoughtful person and to take his decision to kill his own citizens on trust. But let’s quit pretending that putting our faith in the goodness of Caesar has anything to do with democracy. We can also hope that a few of the legislators entrusted with constitutional oversight will continue to ask questions. It’s not an inspiring prospect, given the dysfunctional character of Washington, the public apathy about war policy and the near-imperial power of the executive branch, which will outlive this president as it did the last one. As the white paper and the Brennan hearings demonstrate, the language of government contains ever less signal, and ever more noise. The words used by our rulers have become like drones driven by Langley flyboys, flying deep into hostile territories of non-meaning; they hover above us day and night, driving away all thought with their disconcerting buzz.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/...table-central-bank-of-the-world-secretly-does
Who Controls The Money? An Unelected, Unaccountable Central Bank Of The World Secretly Does
By Michael, on February 5th, 2013
An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that "it is not accountable to any single national government." The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another "Global Economy Meeting". During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system. It is imperative that we get people educated about what this organization is and where it plans to take the global economy. Sadly, only a very small percentage of people actually know what the Bank for International Settlements is, and even fewer people are aware of the Global Economy Meetings that take place in Basel on a bi-monthly basis.
These Global Economy Meetings were discussed in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal...
That certainly does not sound very "democratic".
But this is the direction that "global governance" is taking us. The elite believe that the "big decisions" are far too important to be left "to the people", and so most of the "international institutions" that have been established by the elite operate independently of the democratic process.
Sadly, the truth is that all of this has been planned for a very long time.
In a recent article entitled "Who Runs The World? Solid Proof That A Core Group Of Wealthy Elitists Is Pulling The Strings", I included a quote from Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley from a book that he wrote all the way back in 1966 in which he discussed the big plans that the elite had for the Bank for International Settlements...
But many of these elitists are entirely convinced that "global governance" is what humanity desperately needs. They even publicly tell us what they plan to do, but most people are not listening.
For example, the following is an excerpt from a speech that former president of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet delivered to the Council On Foreign Relations in New York...
If you go to the official BIS website, the purposes of the organization sound fairly innocent and quite boring...
So exactly how does the BIS achieve "monetary and financial stability"? An article posted on investorsinsight.com described how this is accomplished...
When Barack Obama speaks, the markets usually move very little.
When Ben Bernanke speaks, the markets often respond with wild gyrations.
A recent CNBC article entitled "Central Banks: How They Are Ruling the Financial World" detailed the enormous impact that central banks had on the global financial system during 2012...
The central banks of the world do.
And who controls those central banks?
The Bank for International Settlements does.
If we don't like what the Bank for International Settlements is doing, can we do anything about it?
Nope. The Bank for International Settlements is above the law...
If the BIS wants to bail out big banks or even entire nations, they simply just do it.
The BIS reminds me of this old joke...
Q: Where does an 800 pound gorilla sit?
A: Anywhere it wants to.
So what is next for the Bank for International Settlements?
Well, many have speculated that eventually the goal is to have just a single global currency which will be administered by a single global central bank. The BIS is already using Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which are considered to be a precursor to the coming global currency. The BIS played a big role in the adoption of the euro, and more currency integration is almost certainly on the way in future years...
When someone else controls your money, it doesn't really matter that much who makes the laws.
Unfortunately, the global elite seem absolutely obsessed with the idea of a global currency, a one world economic system and a global government.
None of those things will happen this year, but that is where we are moving. With each new crisis that arises, the solutions that we will be given will always involve more centralization and more globalization.
So what do you think about all of this?
Please feel free to share your thoughts by leaving a comment below...
Who Controls The Money? An Unelected, Unaccountable Central Bank Of The World Secretly Does
An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that "it is not accountable to any single national government." The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another "Global Economy Meeting". During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system. It is imperative that we get people educated about what this organization is and where it plans to take the global economy. Sadly, only a very small percentage of people actually know what the Bank for International Settlements is, and even fewer people are aware of the Global Economy Meetings that take place in Basel on a bi-monthly basis.
These Global Economy Meetings were discussed in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal...
Every two months, more than a dozen bankers meet here on Sunday evenings to talk and dine on the 18th floor of a cylindrical building looking out on the Rhine.
The dinner discussions on money and economics are more than academic. At the table are the chiefs of the world's biggest central banks, representing countries that annually produce more than $51 trillion of gross domestic product, three-quarters of the world's economic output.
The article goes on to describe the room that these Global Economy Meetings are held in. It sounds like something out of a novel...The dinner discussions on money and economics are more than academic. At the table are the chiefs of the world's biggest central banks, representing countries that annually produce more than $51 trillion of gross domestic product, three-quarters of the world's economic output.
The Bank of England's Mr. King leads the dinner discussions in a room decorated by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, which designed the "Bird's Nest" stadium for the Beijing Olympics. The men have designated seats at a round table in a dining area scented by white orchids and framed by white walls, a black ceiling and panoramic views.
The central bankers that gather for these meetings are not there just to socialize. No staff members are allowed into these meetings, and they are conducted in an atmosphere of absolute secrecy...
Serious matters follow appetizers, wine and small talk, according to people familiar with the dinners. Mr. King typically asks his colleagues to talk about the outlook in their respective countries. Others ask follow-up questions. The gatherings yield no transcripts or minutes. No staff is allowed.
So the fate of the world economy is determined by unelected central bankers in secret meetings that nobody ever hears about?
That certainly does not sound very "democratic".
But this is the direction that "global governance" is taking us. The elite believe that the "big decisions" are far too important to be left "to the people", and so most of the "international institutions" that have been established by the elite operate independently of the democratic process.
Sadly, the truth is that all of this has been planned for a very long time.
In a recent article entitled "Who Runs The World? Solid Proof That A Core Group Of Wealthy Elitists Is Pulling The Strings", I included a quote from Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley from a book that he wrote all the way back in 1966 in which he discussed the big plans that the elite had for the Bank for International Settlements...
[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.
Back then, the Bank for International Settlements was only just starting to play a major role in global affairs. But over the years the BIS began to become increasingly important. The following is an excerpt from an article by Ellen Brown...
For many years the BIS kept a very low profile, operating behind the scenes in an abandoned hotel. It was here that decisions were reached to devalue or defend currencies, fix the price of gold, regulate offshore banking, and raise or lower short-term interest rates. In 1977, however, the BIS gave up its anonymity in exchange for more efficient headquarters. The new building has been described as “an eighteen story-high circular skyscraper that rises above the medieval city like some misplaced nuclear reactor.” It quickly became known as the “Tower of Basel.” Today the BIS has governmental immunity, pays no taxes, and has its own private police force. It is, as Mayer Rothschild envisioned, above the law.
Yes, it most definitely does bear a striking resemblance to the Tower of Babel as you can see from the photo in this article. Once again the global elite are trying to unite humanity under a single system, and that is most definitely not a good thing.
But many of these elitists are entirely convinced that "global governance" is what humanity desperately needs. They even publicly tell us what they plan to do, but most people are not listening.
For example, the following is an excerpt from a speech that former president of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet delivered to the Council On Foreign Relations in New York...
In the area of central bank cooperation, the main forum is the Global Economy Meeting (GEM), which gathers at the BIS headquarters in Basel. Over the past few years, this forum has included 31 governors as permanent members plus a number of other governors attending on a rotating basis. The GEM, in which all systemic emerging economies’ Central Bank governors are fully participating, has become the prime group for global governance among central banks.
The speech was entitled "Global Governance Today", and you can find the full transcript right here. But most people have never even heard that such a thing as a "Global Economy Meeting" even exists because the mainstream media rarely discusses these sorts of things. They are too busy focusing on the latest celebrity scandal or the latest cat fights between the Republicans and the Democrats.
If you go to the official BIS website, the purposes of the organization sound fairly innocent and quite boring...
The mission of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is to serve central banks in their pursuit of monetary and financial stability, to foster international cooperation in those areas and to act as a bank for central banks.
In broad outline, the BIS pursues its mission by:
But when you start looking into the details, things get much more interesting.In broad outline, the BIS pursues its mission by:
- promoting discussion and facilitating collaboration among central banks;
- supporting dialogue with other authorities that are responsible for promoting financial stability;
- conducting research on policy issues confronting central banks and financial supervisory authorities;
- acting as a prime counterparty for central banks in their financial transactions; and
- serving as an agent or trustee in connection with international financial operations.
So exactly how does the BIS achieve "monetary and financial stability"? An article posted on investorsinsight.com described how this is accomplished...
It accomplishes this through control of currencies. It currently holds 7% of the world's available foreign exchange funds, whose unit of account was switched in March of 2003 from the Swiss gold franc to Special Drawing Rights (SDR), an artificial fiat "money" with a value based on a basket of currencies (44% U.S. dollar, 34% euro, 11% Japanese yen, 11% pound sterling).
The bank also controls a huge amount of gold, which it both stores and lends out, giving it great leverage over the metal's price and the marketplace power that brings, since gold is still the only universal currency. BIS gold reserves were listed on its 2005 annual report (the most recent) as 712 tons. How that breaks down into member banks' deposits and the BIS personal stash is unknown.
By controlling foreign exchange currency, plus gold, the BIS can go a long way toward determining the economic conditions in any given country. Remember that the next time Ben Bernanke or European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet announces an interest rate hike. You can bet it didn't happen without the concurrence of the BIS Board.
In recent years, it has become increasingly obvious who really has power over our economy.The bank also controls a huge amount of gold, which it both stores and lends out, giving it great leverage over the metal's price and the marketplace power that brings, since gold is still the only universal currency. BIS gold reserves were listed on its 2005 annual report (the most recent) as 712 tons. How that breaks down into member banks' deposits and the BIS personal stash is unknown.
By controlling foreign exchange currency, plus gold, the BIS can go a long way toward determining the economic conditions in any given country. Remember that the next time Ben Bernanke or European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet announces an interest rate hike. You can bet it didn't happen without the concurrence of the BIS Board.
When Barack Obama speaks, the markets usually move very little.
When Ben Bernanke speaks, the markets often respond with wild gyrations.
A recent CNBC article entitled "Central Banks: How They Are Ruling the Financial World" detailed the enormous impact that central banks had on the global financial system during 2012...
In all, 13 other central banks in the world have followed the Fed's lead and set interest rates at or near zero in an effort to keep the liquidity spigots open and prop up their ailing economies. Those 14 economies represent a staggering $65 trillion in combined equity and bond market capitalizations, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Later on in that same article, the author discussed the enormous amounts of money that global central banks were creating out of thin air...
"When you add up all the central banks in the world, it's going to be over $9 trillion," said Marc Doss, regional chief investment officer for Wells Fargo Private Bank. "That's like creating the second-largest economy in the world out of thin air."
Indeed, central banking has become an economy unto itself, a multi-trillion-dollar empire that massages and manipulates markets, which respond to the slightest news out of the respective entities' policy making committees.
So who controls the money?Indeed, central banking has become an economy unto itself, a multi-trillion-dollar empire that massages and manipulates markets, which respond to the slightest news out of the respective entities' policy making committees.
The central banks of the world do.
And who controls those central banks?
The Bank for International Settlements does.
If we don't like what the Bank for International Settlements is doing, can we do anything about it?
Nope. The Bank for International Settlements is above the law...
Maybe we'd feel better about the BIS if it were more transparent, but most everything about it, including its bi-monthly member and board meetings, is shrouded in secrecy. And perhaps more worrisome is that the BIS is free from oversight. By rights granted under its agreement with the Swiss Federal Council, all of the bank's archives, documents and "any data media" are "inviolable at all times and in all places." Furthermore, officers and employees of BIS "enjoy immunity from criminal and administrative jurisdiction, save to the extent that such immunity is formally waived . . . even after such persons have ceased to be Officials of the Bank." Finally, no claims against BIS or its deposits may be enforced "without the prior agreement of the Bank."
In other words they can do whatever they want, without consequences. How's that for a leak-proof legal umbrella?
If the BIS wants to "intervene" in the financial markets, they simply just do it.In other words they can do whatever they want, without consequences. How's that for a leak-proof legal umbrella?
If the BIS wants to bail out big banks or even entire nations, they simply just do it.
The BIS reminds me of this old joke...
Q: Where does an 800 pound gorilla sit?
A: Anywhere it wants to.
So what is next for the Bank for International Settlements?
Well, many have speculated that eventually the goal is to have just a single global currency which will be administered by a single global central bank. The BIS is already using Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which are considered to be a precursor to the coming global currency. The BIS played a big role in the adoption of the euro, and more currency integration is almost certainly on the way in future years...
But in the end, how you feel about the BIS may come down to how you feel about a one-world currency. The bank was a major player promoting the adoption of the euro as Europe's common currency. There are rumors that its next project is persuading the U.S., Canada and Mexico to switch to a similar regional money, perhaps to be called the "amero," and it's logical to assume the bank's ultimate goal is a single world currency. That would simplify transactions and really solidify the bank's control of the planetary economy.
But if the United States ever did give up the U.S. dollar, it would be a massive blow to our national sovereignty.
When someone else controls your money, it doesn't really matter that much who makes the laws.
Unfortunately, the global elite seem absolutely obsessed with the idea of a global currency, a one world economic system and a global government.
None of those things will happen this year, but that is where we are moving. With each new crisis that arises, the solutions that we will be given will always involve more centralization and more globalization.
So what do you think about all of this?
Please feel free to share your thoughts by leaving a comment below...
Nah, they are too loud. Haven't you seen the walking dead? a crossbow is much better.
If they are modern fast zombies then a crossbow is not going to help you.
Think about it - zombies are more likely to be the pissed off mutant type rather than the voodoo undead type.
Heard where a LEO shot several people because he was fired, or something like that. Maybe Obama will go after LE guns so the criminals and the government can have complete control. The zombies are starting to look like those confused about guns. Here they come.
Once again, you will still be able to build your arsenal... you just won't be able to stock it with military-style semi-automatic assault rifles. How does this keep escaping people? All this talk about 'criminals'-which I assume means career criminals and not people without records who could potentially kill people-- and somehow it's a bad thing that these people are going to be screened. Sure they can get guns illegally but so can everyone else right now... the outrage just seems like children whining to me.
Where are you getting your numbers to determine the likely hood of mutant v undead zombie occurrence?