10 Fast and Easy Steps from Freedom to Fascism

10 Fast and Easy Steps from Freedom to Fascism

By F. Vyan Walton

During her little noticed appearance on The Colbert Report this week author Naomi Wolf mentioned a list of ten specific steps that can and will lead a country from Democracy and Freedom into Totalitarian Fascism - and unfortunately it appears that we've already ticked our way past all but one of those goalposts while hardly blinking an eye.

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

The old analogy of the frog in the frying pan clearly applies here. It's only by very slowly and gradually increasing the heat that we are lulled into believing everything is just fine - meanwhile our skin is peeling off.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognize the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realize.

Naomi makes an excellent point, but what is even more chilling is the fact that it has happened before - TO US!

Step 1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

As was done after the Reichstag Fire and the Attack on Pearl Harbor a new and enduring enemy of the state has been identified, both within and without - both real and imagined. In Germany the imagined enemy were the Jews, Gypsies and Gays, in America it was the interned Japanese-Americans, the dreaded "Fifth Column" and later The Reds and Commies.

As the Reichstag Fire was followed by the Enabling Act which supplanted constitutional law with a perpetual state of emergency, we have seen Sept 11th followed by the Patriot Act, the (toothless) Detainee Treatment Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Act - all of whom have continued to trade freedom and protections against the overreaching of the state for the pyrite of "Security" in a deal so naked in it's lopsidedness it would make Beelzebulb blush with envy.

Today the real threat is indeed al Qeada, albeit a far less deadly and damaging threat than the one which wiped most of New Orleans from the map, while the imagined one are those damn filthy Liberals who just about seem to be to blame for everything. Especially those mouthy Liberals who would rail against the slow loss of liberty and our national moral standing. Pity those who dare to stand firm against the juggernaut of fear and loathing, they who will become nothing more than grease upon it's wheels.

Step 2. Create a Gulag

As we've seen under Stalin once you have identified your enemies - you need a dank dark place to put them. Permanently. And of course, like a little butter to make this bitter pill go down - you need a sham kangaroo court to make your Secret Prisons and Detention Centers seem completely legitimate.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offenses, and were subjected to show trials.

Today people such Abu Omar, Maher Arar and Pulitzer Prize winning AP photographer Bilial Hussein have been literally snatched off the street by U.S. forces and agents, kidnapped, transported across international lines against their will and in several cases tortured by our "allies" only to be later to have been found as Omar and Ahar have been - to be completely innocent. Most of those held at Abu Ghraib were innocent of any real charge, and had no connections to insurgents or terrorists - yet they have remained.

Meanwhile the American public has hardly lifted a voice in protest, let alone a finger. Just as they remained silent during the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the blacklisting of suspected "Pinkos" in decades past.

3. Develop a thug caste.

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorize citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

Today we have private military firms such as Triple Canopy, and of course Black Water. These firms not only roam the streets of Baghdad, but have already roamed the streets of New Orleans. Accountable to no one except their share-holders, these firms employ their on mercenary army with their own rules of engagement and a history of shooting civilians for sport as Triple Canopy was accused of in 2006.

WASHINGTON - Shane Schmidt was a U.S. Marine for seven years, the leader of a sniper unit. Chuck Shepard spent seven years in the U.S. Army. After leaving the military, each found his way into the legions of heavily armed private security contractors working in Iraq.

The two were working together on July 8, 2006, when they claim they witnessed what they believe was a crime. They say another American fired, unprovoked, into two Iraqi civilian vehicles. They say it started during a mission to Baghdad International Airport, when their supervisor, who was leaving Iraq the next day and was in the vehicle with them, made a troubling remark.

"He'd made a comment that he was going to kill somebody today," says Schmidt. "Kill someone."

This week after an allegedly unprovoked shooting that killed nearly a dozen innocent Iraqi civilians, Black Water was asked to leave Iraq by their prime minister - yet they remain and have continued their duties.

This new generation of Brownshirts are now all powerful and completely immune to U.S. Law and Iraqi Law as Ms. Wolf points out.

In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution.

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

Enter the Secret Police, watching everyone, hearing everything - and their most valuable agent just might be your next door neighbor.

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbors to spy on neighbors.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny

Total Information Awareness, long thought dead has continued to re-emerge in new and more powerful forms. Tracking tens of millions of international domestic phone calls, emails and financial transactions without any judicial oversight. Clear and obvious violations of the FISA Law, the Pen and Trap restrictions and the 4th Amendment. No checks, no balance - just more paranoia, more fear, and more consolidation of power and influence.

5. Harass citizens' groups

And who better to watch than those peace-loving anti-war Liberals. Clearly they represent the most clear and present danger to the state (of perpetual war).

the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organizations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists.

That's right you too could be on the Watchlist. But of course you still have freedom of speech, just watch what you say.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

Whether you are a professor Emeritus at Princeton, a U.S. Senator, a former Vice President of the United States, a humble folk singer who has converted to Islam or simply a window washer we are all now well aware that at anytime we could be arbitrarily detained, particularly while attempting to travel by air.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticized Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

And we've seen more mundane but violent incidents of arbitrary detention particularly at colleges. In addition to the tasing at last weeks Kerry event, we've had other students who were a less vocal and resistant Iranian Student was singled out, profiled and then tasered into submission for refusing to provide his ID unless other students in the area were similarly questioned at such "Liberal" schools as UCLA. Quicktime Video

An incident late Tuesday night in which a UCLA student was stunned at least four times with a Taser has left the UCLA community questioning whether the university police officers’ use of force was an appropriate response to the situation.

Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a UCLA student, was repeatedly stunned with a Taser and then taken into custody when he did not exit the CLICC Lab in Powell Library in a timely manner. Community Service Officers had asked Tabatabainejad to leave after he failed to produce his BruinCard during a random check at around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Mostafa demanded that he be afforded equal treatment and equal justice while being harassed by security without probable cause - for his impudence he was tased repeatedly, even after he has already been handcuffed.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

From the harassment of Ward Churchill for daring to state that the 9/11 hijackers might actually have a reasons for wanting to strike back at the World Trade Center, to the attacks to the Smearboating of John Kerry and John Murtha - those who speak out against the authoritarians have a target painted directly on their forehead. Disabling and neutralizing potential leaders stalls organization of larger movements and protests against the status quo.

Besides the Death Threat used against the Dixie Chicks for speaking out, there's the case of one elderly black minister, Rev Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus, who was pulled out of line, wrestled to the ground and dog piled by Capital Police (resulting in a fracture of his leg) in the Halls of the Capital Building for having the temerity for being "one peacenik too many" while trying to enter the hearing room where Gen Petreaus was scheduled to testify just last week.

<> Youtube Video

If you have any doubts that we are rushing head-long into becoming a fascist state - this video should correct that mis-presumption.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

As Dan Rather lawsuit has now revealed, CBS was completely manipulated by the Administration to stall the Killian Memo's story, they also attempted to block release of the Abu Ghraib story just as they had with the Secret CIA Prisons Story, the NSA Domestic Surveillance Story and the Financial Tracking Story.

In addition to pressuring the corporate media, the Administration has used sympathetic outlets such as Fox News to present uncritical stenography of their view of the world such as when Fox's Brit Hume allowed Gen Petreaus use his program to give an extended power point briefing on the Surge.

And lastly, they've actually used government agencies to generate literally fake news. Paying for favorable reporting from the likes of Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, Micheal McManus and Dave Smith - not to mention completely fake "journalists" such as Jeff Gannon/Guckert - and then used government facilities to release imitation local news reports that are then rebroadcast nationally as if actual reporters had generated them.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalize certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor".

It has been quite common for anyone who criticizes the tactics of the Bush Administration to be labeled as "Traitor" or "Aider and Abetter". I have documented this in detail here and here - noting that time and time again, whether it's Ann Coulter, Melanie Morgan, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Delay, Dennis Hastert, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney or George Bush himself - the language of "treason" is always not far from the tip of their tongue.

Naomi argues that this salty rhetoric is not just a reflex, not just a political pose, it's meant by quite literally those who invoke it. Eventually we will see an American Citizen tried for Treason simply because they said the "wrong thing" at the wrong time. (Arguably, it may have already occurred with one particular attorney of a terrorism client whose name I don't currently recall) But then again, maybe there won't even be a trial, maybe they'll simply be deemed an "Enemy Combatant" with no evidence, hearing or access to Habeaus Corpus and disappear into our modern day Gulags. And if it did happen, how would we even know?

10. Suspend the rule of law

Final stop, all aboard on this well paved road to hell.

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

This of course is in direct violation of the Posse Commitatus act which restricts the ability of the Federal Government to use Military forces against it's own citizens. In effect, Posse Commitatus has now been nullified, just as Habeaus Corpus and the War Crimes Act had been previously.

There is now literally nothing standing in the way of Martial Law other than the President making a determination that he will or will not invoke it.

He can do this any time he feels like. Congress granted him this power, just as they granted him the authority to invade Iraq and the eviscerate FISA. This happened on Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid's watch, not when the Republicans had control of Congress and considering how incredibly ineffective they've been so far at ending the War they helped start in Iraq, once we cross this rubicon the likelihood of our ever coming back remains extremely remote.

This has been like a bolder rolling down the hill toward our Constitution for the past 30 years, ever since Nixon resigned and many Presidential "powers" were severely curtained by oversight and laws intended to protect the public from the abuse of power by the government such as FISA.

Now it's at full speed - and we will not manage to stop it on a "dime". Even if we do manage to recognize the danger in time, even if we do manage to muster a million man human chain of activists, journalists (and a few genuinely brave politicians) to stand in the way of this behemoth and either slow it down or change it's inevitable course toward full-on fascism, we won't do so without taking casualties.

We aren't leaving this fight without putting some skin in the game. We will have setbacks, as we have this week with the failure of the Webb "Dwell Time" amendment, the collapse of Habeaus yet again, Reid-Feingold going down in flames only to have Levin-Reed bar-b-qued right beside it. Congress is simply not going to be able to end this war with a snap of their fingers or by attempting the disastrous strategy of cutting of the funding for the troops.

That ain't gonna happen, largely because we have yet to recognize exactly what it is we are truly fighting against. It's not just about the War, it's much, much more than that.

But we have to keep pushing, we have to keep fighting - as Naomi points out so clearly - we are headed directly down a incredibly dark and dangerous path. We can't say "It'll never happen here" - because even our own relatively recent history with McCarthyism proves this simply isn't true. I can happen, it has happened and now it's happening again. Back then it was just the ravings of one lone lunatic in the Senate, but today it's much worse. It's not just the President or the most extreme wingnuts in his party, it's the Democrats too - those who continue to cower and collapse when the pressure is applied, those who condemn MoveOn for simply saying the same type of thing that has been said about General Batiste, General Eaton and General Zinni when they dared to criticize the President's repeated failure after failure after failure. They are indeed "aiders and abettors" but not to al Qaeda, they have aided the rise of a New American Fascism. An America that is Patriotic as all get-out and rotten to the core.

Yes, it's happened before, it can happen to again - but only if we let it. Only if we're too busy with Brittany flashing her shaven poontang all over town or this nonsense of OJ stealing his own sh*t back to really Pay Attention, then stand and be counted as a personal defender of freedom. It's not just the job of the soldiers - it's our job as well and we have to take it back. Spread the word, spread the truth. It's won't be easy, it won't happen tomorrow, people won't listen, they won't believe, they won't respond - they'll ridicule us as being extremists and moonbats (heck, they already do) - it might take 20 or more years, but we have to do it and keep doing it.

The future of our Democracy really and truly is at stake.

Vyan

Authors Website: http://www.truth2powerproject.com

Authors Bio: Born and Bred in South Central LA. I spent 12 years working in the IT Dept. for federal contractor Northrop-Grumman on classified and high security projects such as the B2 Bomber. After Northrop I became an IT consultant with the state of California in Sacramento and worked on projects with the Dept of Consumer Affairs and CalTrans, as well as projects for Kaiser Permanente in Oakland. Now living in Los Angeles with my own independant web design company where I operate the Truth 2 Power Online Radio Station.

90 million Americans without health insurance in 2006-7

90 million Americans without health insurance in 2006-7
by Chris in Paris · 9/22/2007 02:42:00 AM ET

Having used the health care system both in France (WHO ranked #1 in the world) and the US (WHO #37) I know I would never want to go back to the high cost and miserable process in the US. The system in France is not perfect but for the bulk of the population it is easy to use and costs are less than in the US, for medical visits, out of pocket expenses and cost to working families. We have a combination of both national insurance as well as private insurance and between the two most costs are covered. National insurance in France does not mean everything is automatically covered, though costs are much more contained. In France I have more choices for medical care than I did with a lousy HMO in the US and again, my costs both in terms of out of pocket deductibles as well as taxes/monthly payments are considerably less.

So will the French system work in the US? Maybe, maybe not. Each country has different dynamics so there is no "one size fits all" solution. Could the US learn something from the WHO #1 health care system? Learning from success and failure in other countries seems like such a sensible idea and in my mind much could be learned though all too often in the US, we ignore what other countries have done whether it's health care, fighting terrorism, etc. but it would be a valuable lesson to study plans that work and that fail and examine how those successful ideas could be Americanized. As a country, America deserves better.

Giuliani: tax cuts + tax cuts = balance

Giuliani: tax cuts + tax cuts = balance

By: Steve Benen @ 6:31 PM - PDT

Once in a while, Rudy Giuliani appears so confused, one really has to wonder why he’s even running for president.

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani said Friday that the alternative minimum tax — which is expected to generate as much as $1 trillion over the next 10 years — could be eliminated over the long term by balancing it out with even more tax cuts.

Giuliani’s remarks prompted a bewildered response from his audience of technology executives. Both Republicans and Democrats said they assumed that the candidate must have misspoke as he responded to a question about the tax and its affect the middle class.

This reflects the sophistication of a small child who picked up a copy of the Weekly Standard, and hoped to make sense of what he didn’t understand. Eliminating the AMT would cost billions. Additional tax cuts would cost billions more. Trying to strike a “balance” this way is like trying to put out a fire with kerosene.

As Kevin Drum put it, we’re apparently dealing with a “buffoon.”

US govt collects data on Americans overseas: Washington Post

The US government is compiling electronic files on the travel habits of millions of Americans who take trips overseas, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

Citing documents obtained by a civil liberties group and statements by unnamed government officials, the newspaper said the retained data included travel companions, persons with whom Americans plan to stay abroad, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried.

The personal travel records are intended to be stored for as long as 15 years as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country, the report said.

Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country, The Post said.

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged, the report said.

The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been greatly expanded and automated since 2002, according to the paper.

Officials defended the retention of highly personal data on travelers not involved in or linked to any violations of the law, the report said.

But civil liberties advocates have alleged that the type of information preserved by the department raises alarms about the government's ability to intrude into the lives of ordinary people, The Post pointed out.

The millions of travelers whose records are kept by the government are generally unaware of what their records say, and the government has not created an effective mechanism for reviewing the data and correcting any errors, activists said, the paper said.

The activists alleged that the data collection effort, as carried out now, violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data related to Americans' exercise of their First Amendment rights, such as their choice of reading material or persons with whom to associate, according to the report.

MACLEAN'S: HOW George W. Bush became the new Saddam Hussein.

MACLEAN'S: HOW George W. Bush became the new Saddam Hussein.

Dan Rather: democracy cannot survive.

Dan Rather : 'Somebody's got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive... with government interference in news'

Mike Aivaz and Muriel Kane

Former CBS anchor Dan Rather recently filed a $70 million lawsuit against CBS, saying they made him a "scapegoat" when he was fired for a September 2004 story on 60 Minutes about President Bush's unsatisfactory service in the Texas Air National Guard. When Rather appeared on Larry King's program Thursday, King began by showing him a 2005 clip of himself saying, "I'm not a victim of anything except my own shortcomings." But he added, "Somebody, sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news." "I've learned a good deal since that time," said Rather. "It's reported that Sumner Redstone [president of Viacom] ... was described as being enraged that the news division, this story, had cost Viacom and CBS in Washington, and he wanted Dan Rather and everybody connected with it out." "They sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain, and in so doing, I think they undermined a lot at CBS News," he said. Rather said he still believes the 60 Minutes report was correct. "[CBS] sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain," he stated, "and in so doing I think they undermined a lot at CBS News." "Nobody to this day has shown that these documents were fraudulent," continued Rather, referring to the disputed memos featured in the 60 Minutes story. "Nobody has proved that they were fraudulent, much less a forgery. ... The truth of this story stands up to this day." Rather added that he believed somebody with subpoena power could get to the bottom of the matter pretty quickly. The following video is from CNN's Larry King Live, broadcast on September 20, 2007.

Iraqis Reject Blackwater Mercenary Thugs

Iraqis Reject Blackwater Mercenary Thugs
Private army thrown out of Iraq after years of unimpeded killing

Steve Watson Infowars.net Wednesday, Sept 19, 2007

After years of running riot in Iraq with impunity, the license of private contractor company Blackwater USA has been revoked by the Iraqi government, and the company has been banned from operating in the country all together according to reports, a move that will see the withdrawal of tens of thousands of armed mercenaries from Iraq.

CNN reports:

Iraq's Interior Ministry has revoked the license of Blackwater USA, an American security firm whose contractors are blamed for a Sunday gunbattle in Baghdad that left eight civilians dead. The U.S. State Department said it plans to investigate what it calls a "terrible incident."

In addition to the hundreds of thousands of US troops in Iraq, The Bush administration has deployed a shadow army of private contractors.

Earlier this summer it was reported that the number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, with more than 180,000 civilians -- including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis -- working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense Department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Blackwater USA, which has a 6,000 acre training facility as part of its headquarters in North Carolina, is one such company that currently has tens of thousands of heavily armed mercenaries stationed in Iraq who are accountable to no one and have hit the headlines on multiple occasions.

In March 2004, four Blackwater personnel died in a grisly attack in Iraq in Falluja, west of Baghdad. The Four, all of whom were military veterans, were ambushed, killed, mutilated and had their charred remains strung from a bridge overlooking the Euphrates River in an incident that sparked shock and outrage.

However, after Blackwater refused to share information about why and how they were killed, and callously told the families of the men that they would need to sue to get any information, a lawsuit was filed, marking the first time a company has been sued for deaths in the line of work. Blackwater has since attempted to reverse the situation and sue the families for $10 million to silence them and keep them out of court.

By the end of 2004 Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, was bragging to the press of "staggering" 600 percent growth. "This is a billion-dollar industry," Jackson said in October 2004. "And Blackwater has only scratched the surface of it.". This prompted outrage that security in Iraq is partly (and we now know mostly) in the hands of private companies who profit from the continuation of conflict and chaos.

In 2005 the LA Times reported that Private security contractors, including Blackwater, have been involved in scores of shootings in Iraq, but none have been prosecuted despite findings in at least one fatal case that the men had not followed proper procedures. Instead of facing any kind of accountability, contractors suspected of reckless behavior are simply sent home with the full knowledge of U.S. officials.

Last February one Blackwater employee got into an argument with an Iraqi security contractor working for the Vice President as a security guard. It is not cleared what transpired but the Blackwater employee emptied the entire magazine of his pistol into the Iraqi. Rather than being arrested and sent to prison for murder the contractor was simply returned to the US and dropped from the payroll.

Most recently, a Congressional Research Service report stated that a news article discussing an incident in which a Blackwater guard shot dead an Iraqi driver in May 2007 quoted an Iraqi official's statement that the Iraqi Interior Ministry had received four previous complaints of shootings involving Blackwater employees.

Everyday Iraqis have dubbed the mercenaries "Mossad" and many have gone on record to state that they have witnessed Blackwater contractors killing innocent people in the street without a care.

Blackwater USA does not hide the fact that it has hired fascist thugs—for instance, Chilean commandos, “many of who had trained under the military government of Augusto Pinochet,” according to Blackwater head honcho Gary Jackson. Other investigative journalists have alleged that Blackwater is engaged in recruiting U.S. trained former soldiers and police officers from Colombia as well as Filipino mercenaries.

According to Ken Silverstein of Harper's Magazine, Blackwater also has a "revolving door" with the CIA and the Pentagon and is engaged in "aggressively recruiting" top CIA officials. In 2006 Silverstein wrote:

"A number of senior CIA and Pentagon officials have taken top jobs at Blackwater, including firm vice chairman Cofer Black, who was the Bush Administration's top counterterrorism official at the time of the 9/11 attacks (and who famously said in 2002, 'There was before 9/11 and after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves came off'),"

The Nation's Jeremy Scahill has also pointed out the many ties that Blackwater has to the GOP:

Blackwater's success in procuring federal contracts could well be explained by major-league contributions and family connections to the GOP. According to election records, Blackwater's CEO and co-founder, billionaire Erik Prince, has given tens of thousands to Republicans, including more than $80,000 to the Republican National Committee the month before Bush's victory in 2000. This past June, he gave $2,100 to Senator Rick Santorum's re-election campaign. He has also given to House majority leader Tom DeLay and a slew of other Republican candidates, including Bush/Cheney in 2004. As a young man, Prince interned with President George H.W. Bush, though he complained at the time that he "saw a lot of things I didn't agree with--homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the Administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns."

Blackwater contractors were also used by the Department of Homeland Security in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They were authorized to carry loaded automatic assault weapons, make arrests and use lethal force if it was deemed necessary, a fact that had Constitutionalists up in arms:

"This vigilantism demonstrates the utter breakdown of the government," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "These private security forces have behaved brutally, with impunity, in Iraq. To have them now on the streets of New Orleans is frightening and possibly illegal."

For more information on Blackwater watch the short piece below from Jeremy Scahill, who has also authored a book titled Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Republicans pushed 'bogus' terror threat to expand FISA, lawmaker says

Republicans pushed 'bogus' terror threat to expand FISA, lawmaker says

Nick Juliano Republicans and the Bush administration used a 'bogus' terror threat that raised specific fears of an attack on the Capitol to scare lawmakers into adopting a dramatic temporary expansion of the government's spy powers last month, a former top intelligence committee Democrat said Wednesday. Congress agreed to give President Bush and the nation's intelligence agencies extra authority to spy on Americans just hours before lawmakers left for a month-long recess in August. In the legislative session's final week, news emerged of an impending plot by foreign terrorists to attack the US Capitol, and Republicans pointed to the reports as justification to expand the administration's powers. "That specific intelligence claim, it turned out, was bogus; the intelligence agencies knew that," Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) said at a forum on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act organized by the Center for American Progress in Washington. However, lawmakers did not learn of the claim's unreliability until "the day" they approved the FISA expansion, she said. Harman was among Congress's "Gang of Eight" in 2002 when she served as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. The gang was briefed in 2002 on President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program initiated after 9/11 before the New York Times revealed its existence in December 2005. The group comprises the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees plus each party's leader in both parties. Congress's ongoing debate over how to make permanent needed modifications to FISA without trampling Americans' civil liberties was the subject of Wednesday's forum. Later that afternoon, Bush toured the National Security Agency's headquarters outside Washington and urged lawmakers to expand his authority under FISA not restrict it. Harman, who now chairs the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, accused the Bush administration of pursuing a "Rovian strategy of using terrorism as a wedge issue" in seeking to expand the president's power rather than focusing on the needs of foreign surveillance. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill to push lawmakers not only to make permanent the provisions of the expansion, known as the Protect America Act, but to further limit redress against civil liberties violations by providing immunity to the telecommunications companies that facilitated the warrantless wiretapping program. Harman said the administration's "trust me theory" that would diminish oversight of intelligence activities was not acceptable. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, she said, are committed to ensuring the nation's spy agencies would be able to effectively gather intelligence from foreign suspects as long as they had assurances that Americans' rights are protected. "There is a deal to be made if this administration is serious," she said. "If it just wants this as a wedge issue, then I hope Congress will fight this with every breath that we have." Appearing alongside Harman at Wednesday's forum was Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official, who has emerged as a harsh critic of President Bush. Fein noted that FISA grew out of concerns over Nixon administration scandals and revelations that foreign intelligence resources were being abused. "Unchecked spying invariably leads to abuses in collection for political purposes, not national security purposes," Fein said. The danger inherent in giving Bush -- or any president -- authority to spy on Americans without oversight is that "it will be hijacked to advance a political agenda." Fein invoked the Founding Fathers' warnings against concentration of power in government, and he compared the president's arguments about how 9/11 "changed everything" to justify expanded authority to the government's decision to lock up Japanese Americans who had committed no crimes during World War II. The Bush administration is operating on the belief that it is "infallible," Fein said, and the public and Congress have a right to know which activities the administration authorized so it can avoid an unconstitutional power grab. "That's exactly what the Founding Fathers feared: hubris, a goal to dominate and manipulate," he said. Fein also argued that the authority the administration is requesting would give them power beyond simply intercepting foreign-based communications, which the administration has offered as the necessity to update the law. He argued the president could authorize warrantless searches of people's homes or mail if it was justified as part of the "war on terror." A third panelist, Greg Nojeim a senior counsel to the Center for Democracy and Technology, invoked home searches as a metaphor to explain abuses that could exist even as the administration has promised to "minimize" the use of data on Americans gathered by NSA spies. In his testimony Tuesday, McConnell acknowledged that NSA wiretaps on people abroad sometimes will pick up Americans conversatons when the foreign targets call into the US. The use of information intercepted in this way is a crux of the debate over FISA. To say the information is "minimized," is akin to police breaking into an individuals home to search it and remove evidence without a warrant but then say no civil liberties were violated "as long as when they got back to the police station they threw it out," Nojeim said. He noted that the NSA collects and analyzes information from domestic phone calls before deciding whether to pursue a warrant for further surveillance, and he noted reports that the data was sometimes shared with other agencies. So to say it has been "minimized" is not accurate. "Words don't have their normal meaning," he said. "Up is down, black is white ... John Ashcroft is a civil libertarian, this is the world of FISA."

Giuliani walks fine line on 9/11 in White House bid

By Michelle NicholsMon Sep 10, 5:47 PM ET

Rudy Giuliani rose to national fame in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, but experts say his moment as "America's mayor" is both the biggest asset and potential liability in his White House bid.

On the eve of the sixth anniversary of the World Trade Center attack, experts warned there was a fine line between Giuliani emphasizing his 9/11 leadership as mayor of New York and politicizing the al Qaeda strike that killed 2,750 people in the city.

"This is America's mayor trying to become America's president," Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, said of Giuliani, who is leading public opinion polls for the Republican 2008 presidential nomination.

"When he was first running it was largely a plus ... but if he is going to have front-runner status everything is under the microscope," Miringoff said. "Some people are finding his comments about everything he did as mayor as a bit of a reach."

Giuliani, known for his brash style and hot temper when he was mayor, is focusing on issues of national security and strong leadership as he woos voters across the country.

Critics say that while Giuliani was a reassuring presence on September 11, he made mistakes preparing the city for an emergency prior to the attacks.

They accuse him of ignoring advice of police and emergency management experts by putting the city's emergency command center in the World Trade Center complex, which had been bombed in 1993 and was a presumed target.

The command center had to be abandoned on September 11, 2001, after the attack and as a result, police and fire commanders could not coordinate search and rescue efforts. The National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded in a 2005 report that emergency responder lives likely were lost at the trade center because of the lack of communication.

While Giuliani has attended the previous September 11 memorial services, several groups representing some firefighters and families of victims do not want him to speak at Tuesday's commemoration.

"He's running for president of the United States on the back of my dead son," said Jim Riches, a deputy chief of the New York Fire Department whose firefighter son Jimmy, 29, died when the Twin Towers collapsed.

"His legacy from 9/11 should be all the sick and dying firefighters and first responders, construction workers and everybody else, because he was too busy running around giving speeches and making tens of millions of dollars," he said.

Thousands of rescue workers who combed through the debris of the collapsed World Trade Center have developed health problems from breathing the dust and fumes of the buildings.

Riches, who spent several weeks in a coma in 2005 after suffering respiratory failure that he says was a result of working at Ground Zero, vowed he and other 9/11 families would "get the word out about Rudy Giuliani and how he failed us."

Last month Giuliani formed a "first responders" support group to defend his record as mayor, but he told a Republican candidate debate last week that he is not "running on what I did on September 11."

"I'm running on the fact that I was mayor of the largest city in the country, the third-largest government in the country," he said.

Tony Carbonetti, a Giuliani aide, said in a statement on Monday the former mayor would never politicize 9/11.

Steven Cohen, a public administration professor at Columbia University in New York, said Giuliani was a good mayor, but that he also alienated a lot of people during his eight years at City Hall.

"The few days after 9/11 were really days where he was an exemplary leader. He helped build confidence in the city again and really helped people get back on their feet," Cohen said. "He was certainly not a consensus builder in this city and is probably exaggerating his claims of being a super mayor."

(Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner)

Housing Heading for a "Near Perfect Storm"

Housing Heading for a "Near Perfect Storm"

Are those the words of an alarmist, lefty blogger, calling for the sky to fall? No. They are the words of Washington Mutual's CEO in a conference call. I guess he now either hates America or is in fact a lefty blogger calling for the sky to fall.

WaMu (WM - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating) dropped 3% after CEO Kerry Killinger said at a Lehman Brothers conference in New York that the housing industry is headed for a "near perfect storm."

He said the lender, which has already boosted its provision for loan losses this year, may have to sock away an added $500 million as housing markets continue to weaken.

First, it's important to remember that Wamu is by far the biggest publicly traded S&L. It has a market capitalization of 30 billion. The next largest company by market cap is Sovereign Bancorp with a market cap of $8.4 billion. In other words, Washington Mutual is the big kid on the block by a fairly wide margin.

Secondly, CEOs are well aware of their status. They know their words can move markets. As such, they are very good at being perma-bulls. No matter what the news, they usually try and spin it in a positive way. That's one of the reasons this statement is news. The CEO of the largest S&L in the US is saying housing is in really bad shape.

To sum up where housing is, let's look at some basic numbers.

According to the National Association of Realtors the total inventory available for sale of existing homes was 4,592,000 in July. That is the largest absolute amount of homes ever on the market by a wide margin. At the same time, we are seeing home prices drop in a big way:

The annual returns of the U.S. National Home Price Index, the 10-City Composite, and the 20-City Composite shows all three still yielding negative returns as of June 2007. The quarterly S&P/Case-Shiller(R) U.S. National Home Price Index -- which covers all nine U.S. census divisions -- was down 0.9% from Q1 2007 and down 3.2% from Q2 2006.

"The pullback in the U.S. residential real estate market is showing no signs of slowing down," says Robert J. Shiller, Chief Economist at MacroMarkets LLC. "The year-over-year decline reported in the 2nd quarter of 2007 for the National Home Price Index is the lowest point in its reported history, which dates back to January 1987. On a regional level 17 of the 20 metro areas are showing declines in their annual growth rate from what was reported in May."

This is at a time when the credit markets are seizing up and lending standards are tightening. And to make matters that much worse, here is a chart of when mortgages reset.

Notice there are a ton of resets in the first half of next year.

So we have:

1.) The largest total amount of existing homes available for sale ever
2.) Declining home prices
3.) Tightening credit standards, and
3.) A huge wave of mortgage resets coming down the pike.

This translates into the following simple economic formula.

Massive supply (record existing home inventory) = declining prices
Shrinking demand (tighter credit) = declining prices

Maybe that's why the homebuilder stock index has been dropping for the last two years.

In short, the housing market is going to be ugly for a really long time.

The Next Quagmire

The Next Quagmire

By Chris Hedges —

By all indications, the United States is about to attack Iran. Expect a regional catastrophe to follow, propelled by impotent diplomacy and inane media.

Look out, here comes “The REAL Rudy”

Look out, here comes “The REAL Rudy”

By: Nicole Belle @ 3:06 PM - PDT

“The REAL McCain” seemed to have been pretty effective, so now we have “The REAL Rudy“…

In this first installment:

At a recent debate in Iowa, Rudy Giuliani was asked, “In 30 seconds, what is a defining mistake of your life and why?” He made a joke about how he couldn’t possibly list all his mistakes in 30 seconds. Ha!

So we gave it a try.

Countdown Special Comment: You have no remaining credibility about Iraq, sir.

Countdown Special Comment: You have no remaining credibility about Iraq, sir.

By: Logan Murphy @ 6:50 PM - PDT

Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment tonight is without a doubt, one of his hardest hitting and most emotional to date. Keith absolutely lays waste to President Bush’s lies and rhetoric about the surge. He contrasts his callous disregard for the truth and the troops between his six hour photo op in Iraq and the interview with Draper released this weekend.

This video is a must-see, hold on to your hats.

Download (2053) | Play (2452) Download (832) | Play (1424)

And there it is, sir. We’ve caught you.

Your goal is not to bring some troops home — maybe — if we let you have your way now;

Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal;

You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.

Transcripts below the fold:

(Read the rest of this story…)

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Merv Griffin’s Bodyguard of Lies

By Larry Gross —

The not-so-secret gay sex life of Merv Griffin has once again raised the specter of the obituary outing, not to mention the power of prejudice to intimidate even the rich and famous.

AP Photo / Mark Lennihan Questioning 9/11 … With Caution Robert Fisk — Since the terrorist attacks on the U.S., many prominent journalists have repeatedly been asked the same questions, as The Independent’s Robert Fisk describes in this piece: “Why, if you believe you’re a free journalist, don’t you report what you really know about 9/11? ... Why don’t you reveal the secrets behind 9/11?” Here, Fisk carefully poses some questions of his own—after addressing a familiar figure he calls the “raver.”

British General Blasts Bush On Iraq Failures

British General Blasts Bush On Iraq Failures

By: Logan Murphy @ 5:48 PM - PDT

From Meteor Blades at Daily Kos:

What? Yet another general has added his voice to the crew who have taken the Cheney-Bush regime to task for botching postwar operations in Iraq? Yep. This time, it’s not American generals like Wes Clark, Greg Newbold, Paul Eaton, John Riggs, Paul Van Riper, Charles Swannack or John Batiste doing the pounding. It’s “Macho Jacko,” General Sir Michael Jackson, who ran the British Army in March 2003 when Iraq was invaded. He retired last year and began writing an autobiography, Soldier, which is being serialized in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. (Hat tip to Magnifico.)

According to the Telegraph’s story:

His attack - the first time he has revealed the depth of his anger towards the US administration - highlights the deep-seated tension between the British command and the Pentagon during the build-up to and the aftermath of the Iraq campaign in 2003.

Sir Mike, who took command of the British Army one month before US-led forces invaded Iraq, said Mr Rumsfeld was “one of those most responsible for the current situation in Iraq”.

Crucially, the general writes, he refused to deploy enough troops to maintain law and order after the collapse of Saddam’s regime, and discarded detailed plans for the post-conflict administration of Iraq that had been drawn up by the US State Department.

In the book, Sir Mike says he believes the entire US approach to tackling global terrorism is “inadequate” because it relies too heavily on military power at the expense of nation-building and diplomacy. Read more…

Former Reagan aide: 'Brownshirt' Bush among top 'mass murderers of all time'

Former Reagan aide: 'Brownshirt' Bush among top 'mass murderers of all time'

President Bush's apparent plans for a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran will only add to the civilian death toll as a result of US intervention that has placed the president "high on the list of mass murders of all time," a former aide in President Ronald Reagan's administration known for strident anti-Bush rhetoric said Friday.

"Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening 'the security of nations everywhere' and of the Iraqi resistance for 'a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power,'" writes Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury. "Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration."

Roberts, who has emerged as a fierce critic of Bush's war policies, accused the president of ignoring habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions, justifying torture and demonizing critics as anti-American.

"Bush ... is responsible, according to Information Clearing House, for over one million deaths of Iraqi civilians, which puts Bush high on the list of mass murderers of all time," Roberts writes in a column published Friday on antiwar.com. "The vast majority of 'kills' by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan are civilians."

A report last month found that US and NATO troops killed more Afghan civilians in the first half of this year than the Taliban.

Roberts said the media is too concerned with stories like Sen. Larry Craig's (R-ID) arrest for allegedly soliciting sex, and Miss Teen South Carolina's inability to answer a question.

"The war criminal is in the living room, and no official notice is taken of the fact," Roberts writes. "Lacking US troops with which to invade Iran, the Bush administration has decided to bomb Iran 'back into the stone age.'"

Roberts cites a recent RAW STORY report that the US is preparing a "massive" military strike against Iran to support his assertions.

"Encouraged by the indifference of both the American media and Christian churches to the massive casualties inflicted on Iraqi civilians, the Bush administration will not be deterred by the prospect of its air attacks inflicting massive casualties on Iranian civilians. ... Clearly, turning the Muslim Middle East into a wasteland is the Bush policy," Roberts writes. "For Bush, civilian casualties are a non-issue. Hegemony uber alles."